Archive of Our Own ^beta

It is an ironic circumstance, that men often receive the pleasures of life when they are least positioned to enjoy them; thus the Marquis de Lafayette, in the flourishing of his fortune and with an overladen table, received an abounding Nantucket cheese for lighting up the streets of Paris with whale oil, and was only inconvenienced; this was mighty bad timing; had but a crumb of that monstrous cheddar been lowered down to him in his prison-cell, that poor Frenchman would have wept! - and just the same, the fine cheese laid before Ahab at table could have been vermescent hard-tack; it penetrated him mechanically, but that inward Bastille of the heart received no provision.

And so Ahab left his fare half-tasted, and his officers under the still spell of that silent glance no more thought of eating the remnants than of seizing the sextant from him.

The harpooners had a happier meal; they were all the brighter, for being at last in clean shirts upon a clean ship. To see the transformation wrought upon that oily deck, you should have thought our thirty hands willing and ready to take scrub-brooms to the Slough of Despond, and make light work of sixteen hundred years of filth. But something remained in the exhaustion of their countenances of try-works ash; they looked fled from some new-fallen Troy, although, good Heavens! with an outlandish variety of household gods stowed in their trowsers-pockets. Besides, that narrow deliverance or delivery of Tashtego's, from the whale's case, had weighted a little on them; and Daggoo was doing what he could to make light of it.

"First I thought," said Daggoo, "that's an end to their infernal pipe-smoke belowdecks! How easy I'll breathe; how sound I'll sleep. But then I remembered, that they'd have to make harpooneers in your places - one of the boat crews, well! - and as soon as you'd hand them a harpoon, with their arm a-tremble, they'd dart it backwards and sideways, and I'd be stuck full of irons like a hedgehog."

From the calm and straightforward way he voiced these grim imaginings, he seemed not to be skylarking at all; Tashtego said only - "It's not that we smoke; it's that the carpenter sneezes."

"And why d'ye think he sneezes?" said Daggoo.

Queequeg, having finished a trencher of salt-junk, expounded upon the excellence of tobacco for the constitution; as for being rid of Queequeg, they should have great trouble unless their captain became more inclined to social niceties, for the closest he had come to death was at the hands of a six-quart tub of molasses. This had been on his first voyage; he had been dispatched to row it over by way of sweetening a gam; a squall had blown up, the tub rocked on its bench, and pitching over had dashed poor Queequeg into the Pacific in its headlong rush. The other oarsman had made a grab for Queequeg, and disdained the tub, which wended on its lonely way.

"If I see a six-quart tub round Cape-Horn, I'll sing out for molasses," said Tashtego. "Hmm-mm-mm, so much for all this gamming and dancing. There was one of the crew missing when we were embarking from Honolulu - well - we thought, he's deserted; diseased; died of dysentery; but the third mate had heard the man say he was visiting another Yankee whaler at port. There we went with lanterns - the mate asked the captain if he'd seen the fellow - the captain turned pale - we barged into the cabin. All right! there's a muffled sound; the mate sprang open a sea-chest - there he is dead-drunk, that's a way to recruit! More fool that captain, he was a slack fellow at the oar."

"Oh, you don't dance for you're too busy yarning, Tashtego," said Daggoo, "here! I don't want any of this cheese."

As for Tashtego, he had either made such short work of the salt-junk, or, having been made a harpooneer, was so relieved at being able to display any fastidiousness at all about his dinner, that he spurned that butt of cheese entirely; which left it to Queequeg, who contemplated it and then rolled the entire remnant in a pocket handkerchief and tucked it into his jacket.

"You'll burst, Queequeg," Tashtego said, "just when we've scrubbed the decks clean again." and he prodded Queequeg with his fork by way of emphasis.

"O let him have it; when you are our Paul-Cuffe it will be a shame to be so exact about our provisions," said Daggoo, "why, Tash! you'll be summoned to meet the President, and he'll say, what a dashing sort of whale-captain, but why d'ye starve your men of cheese?"

"All right, oil your boat with it for all I care," Tashtego said, blowing a spiral of smoke up to the heavens, though it stopped at the cabin-rafters, "there's $200 advance on my pay sold already to an agent, for my wife in Gay-Head; there's my ambition done."

As for Daggoo, he slanted Queequeg a long look, but kept his own counsel.

There, you may, say, what unprepossessing details of men who furnish forth such splendid feats for your narrative, Ishmael; what d'ye bother us with these for? Well, here are the Pagan harpooneers at rest, and therefore in miniature. I have seen the curious sort of theatre they have on the Java Islands, and the players for it - and what possesses their makers, to paint their faces so intricately, and to adorn their clothing in queer chasings of gold and azure and vermilion, I know not; for, the stage being rigged in cotton cloth, the oil-lamps being kindled, what extraordinary, gigantic forms live and move before you! what supernatural shapes appear, from a little flat-leather puppet made by a mortal hand! but as for the detailing, you can't see a scrap of it.

As for that Paul Cuffe, who was entertained by no other than James Madison, I myself have not met him; but his son entertained me very hospitably at his estate near Stockbridge, having a Nantucket-friend in common with me, and being desirous of some briny reminiscences of the Atlantic, from which he was now barred.

How curious the tracery of a man's fate - for that son was a Quaker by birth and conviction, a sober merchantmen and whaler; but when but a boy, the hour of national fate came upon him, his love of country pressed him to service, and in 1812 he shipped upon a vessel, with a letter of marque. Turned plain-dressed privateer, he was captured by an English man-of-war, and held upon a prison-ship nigh a year.

God only knows, if one of the Englishmen who jailed him so cruelly as a Yankee, had a father who had been outraged that the elder Cuffe be jailed in Massachusetts as a Black Indian.

He afterwards set out again in his former professions; lived very peacably even among Catholics and South-Seas heathens; and by reason of a crippling of his foot, had lately turned yeoman-farmer to the family estate.

Let us leave that much-travelled mariner under his own vine and fig-tree, and turn ourselves to Queequeg; who had ventured up on deck, and hailed me where I sat leaning against the ship's furniture. He cut a good figure, whether or no bloody, blubberous and dishevelled; but let us say that his ablutions had served to gild that lily, and that we greet our fellow-man more joyfully when that joy is unmixed with fright.

As for what I had been employed in doing for some hours, the answer is - nothing, but lose a game of dominoes to a Portugese sailor. Three cheers, then, to the grand old customs of whaling! for what confusion, what seas of ink have been spilled, what astrological ransackings between calendars Babylonian, Hindu, Hebrew, Parsi, Julian and Gregorian, upon fixing a rest-day. But the Sabbath, to be enjoyed upon a whale ship, is simply and according to the laws of hygiene and common-sense, fastened upon the day after trying out. For, aside from the necessity of setting men to the mast-heads and the wheel, no duties are assigned. And for men who have laboured night and day so ceaselessly and amid such smoke and heat, what could be sweeter than rest! what more reasonable! 

These laws of whaling-Sabbath, however, are not so strict, as not to be revoked, the instant a whale should be spotted.

So there we sat, exchanging pleasantries, when Queequeg took hold of my hand, turned it over, and deftly palmed something into it in a pocket-handkerchief. At that instant, he declared to me, that it was a relief to him that the spermaceti was decanted entirely into barrels; since if I took a fancy to cast myself into it, he should only have to haul me out by the ankles.

This thought astounded and distracted me; so that my countenance certainly did not display any culpability in the matter of the cheddar-cheese. In fact, upon unwrapping it, I was filled with a sort of unnameable awe. It struck me very forcibly that it had been carved already; and carved at the captain's table, and thus by the captain's fork; so that graven upon it, and perhaps magnified homeopathically a hundred- or a thousand-fold, were the gloomy impressions of Ahab's teeth!

Nevertheless, in all my reveries, upon the tabooed nature of this cheddar-cheese, I was rapidly taking a bite from it; and would have continued, had I not heard the distinctive tread of the first mate. I stuffed the cheese into my jacket as fast as the Spartan-boy in the fable.

Now, Starbuck being a thoughtful first mate, he had noted, that in the entire practical business of whaling, Queequeg had been my preceptor; and that I had submitted to his experienced judgement countless and perhaps supernumerary queries on this subject. This struck Starbuck as laudable, inasfar as the responsibility of the harpooneers to the oarsmen went; and excellent, as to the safety of the boat. For certainly as a boy-whaler he had dogged the steps of his own elders, and, the hands aboard a whaler growing greenier and greenier, with every year he was employed in this business, the more necessary grew that instruction.

But as to Queequeg, in the second dog-watch, having collapsed almost to the point of insensibility in retrieving his colleague out of a sperm whale head - as to Queequeg, who would be about again at one o'clock in the morning to superintend the watch - as to Queequeg having to act the schoolmaster at this hour, this was an excess.

"There, that's duty done and more than done," said Starbuck, "rest ye, man."

Queequeg being very cheerfully engaged in what he was doing, did what he could to convey that these southern stars below the Equator had a sweet smack of home for him - being not so distant from the constellations that were at once making their storied motions over his parents and married sister - and that he should rather then rest on deck.

These stars to which Queequeg pointed, had once furnished material for a domestic dispute between myself and Queequeg on the Milky Way; for, try as I might, I could not convince him that this celestial figure being the lactatious splattering of a Roman goddess was not some freak or hobby-horse of my own, and in fact the general belief of the Christian world. We had to recruit the old Manxman as arbiter.

Besides these interpretations, there are the specifics of that starry almanac, which marked out for Queequeg so precisely the flourishings of different crops - I should have made a very poor gentleman-farmer, as I was too saddened that the cultivation even of yam and taro was so exacting a science, rather than being furnished forth without the attendant curse of Adam, to pay a very profound attention.

As for these ideas being conveyed, which between boat-header and steerer were more usually along practical lines, these homely stars did materialise a moment in the mind of Starbuck; along with that married-sister; but in a very plain sort of guise, and without the ratification of a peace-treaty, that had attended her betrothal.

"Here's one man's stars my own reversed - well, Starbuck, but familiar all; never has my heart misgiven me before, to see the Bears sink out of view; I traverse one Creation. And how low swung and sank that whale-head - nearly to the very deeps, if not arrested! Is't too clear a sign, to see a man brought out from it? And yet those sweet assurances I might have had from this seem most invisibly bright, and dipped beyond mine own horizon."

And seeing Queequeg still stood patiently at his station, said, "As seems well to you, Queequeg; but rest."

Starbuck went briskly then about the decks, with an inspecting eye, as of a man heedless of his own advice, and bent upon wresting out of the good condition of the tackles, the boats, the rigging, and all the sundries, some plank of certainty.

Queequeg, however, as a man will when recalled to his own exhaustion, lent his head upon my shoulder, and closed his eyes. The reader may be familiar with this mingling of sensations; how there steals over that one furnishing himself for a pillow a most loving, amiable, and sweet feeling, and at that self-same moment, over that shoulder and then that arm a gradual numbness, so that Queequeg dozed upon a marmoreal flank of mine.

I remained ten more minutes awake, in the quiet consumption of the cheese, which was as a foretaste of paradise after months of forking down bits of duff. As to the implications to the law of property, let it be said it was fairly the harpooneers' to dispose of, and if Aristotle is right that two friends are but one soul, that inhabit different bodies, then Queequeg on this one occasion pasturing me on cheddar, was only pasturing himself.

I was half-asleep, and happily replete, when Starbuck passed me by again; and gave myself and Queequeg a brief and desolate glance. He had not meant, I think, to embark upon an idle conversation, but if you picture Achilles, after his chariot-horses had spoken that once to him, standing with curry-comb in hand, and without reason or expectation, still hoping for another word - so Starbuck, standing in silence upon the forecastle deck.