Category : Various Text files
Archive   : MOBY.ZIP
Filename : MOBY.27

.. < chapter xxvii 2 KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES >

Stubb was the second mate. He
was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a
Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as

they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent
crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner
engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew
all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of
his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box.

When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his
unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.
He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most
exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of
death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no
telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if
he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no
doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to
tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find
out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner. What, perhaps, with other
things, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off
with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the
ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious
good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose,
his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You
would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
nose as without his pipe.
..

He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy
reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in
succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then
loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead
of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether
ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the
numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera,
some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so,
likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have
operated as a sort of disinfecting agent. The third mate was Flask, a native
of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very
pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great
Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it
was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered.
So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their
majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension
of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the
wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat,
requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and
trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of
his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these
fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a
jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are
divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided.

Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last
long. They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form,
he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in
Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted in it, served to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those
battering seas. Now these three mates --Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were
..

momentous men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of
the Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,
these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with
their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even
as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins. And since in this famous
fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always
accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures
provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted,
or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between
the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in
this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what
headsman each of them belonged. first of all was queequeg, whom Starbuck, the
chief mate, had selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known. Next
was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of
Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of
red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with
many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the
generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high
cheek bones, and black rounding eyes --for an Indian, Oriental in their
largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression --all this
sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those
proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had
scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer
snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now
hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of
the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the
tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the
superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild
Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb
the second mate's squire. Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic,
coal-black
..

negro-savage, with a lion-like tread --an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from
his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them
ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his
youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely
bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in
Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and
having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of
owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; daggoo retained
all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in
all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility
in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag
come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro,
Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man
beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at
the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast
employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty
nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale
fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the
engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and
Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American
liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying
the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores,
where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their
crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the
Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland
Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage
homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but
Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in
the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common
continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his
own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An
Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the
..

isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the
pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many
of them ever come back. Black Little Pip --he never did --oh, no! he went
before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere
long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when
sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with
angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a
hero there!
..