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Table of Contents
Chapter 12
BIOGRAPHICAL
Queequeg was a native of
Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map;
true places never are. When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native
woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a
green sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire
to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father
was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he
boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was
excellent blood in his veins --royal stuff; though ..
2 sadly vitiated, I fear,
by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth. A Sag Harbor
ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian
lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit;
and not all the King his father's influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed
a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew
the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a
coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets
that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these
thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand;
and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side;
with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the
chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ringbolt
there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces. In vain the
captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over his naked
wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his
desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain
at last relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine
young savage --this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the captain's cabin. They
put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar
Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained
no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of
enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom --so he told me --he was
actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby
to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still
better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him
that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so,
than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing
what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how
they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.
Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan. ..
3 and thus an old
idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes,
and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now
some time from home. By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going
back, and having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and
gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not
yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had
unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings
before him. But by and by, he said, he would return, --as soon as he felt
himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and
sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and
that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now. I asked him what might be his
immediate purpose, touching his future movements. He answered, to go to sea
again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own
design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being
the most promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once
resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into
the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my
every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both
worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt
for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to
be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the
mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to
merchant seamen. His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff,
Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the
light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were
sleeping. ..
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