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Table of Contents
Chapter 27
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. ..
2 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 ..
3 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 ..
4 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 ..
5 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! ..
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