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Table of Contents
Chapter 7
THE CHAPEL
In this same New Bedford
there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly
bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the
spot. I am sure that I did not. Returning from my first morning stroll, I
again sallied out upon this special errand. The sky had changed from clear, ..
2 sunny cold, to driving
sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called
bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a
small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A
muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.
Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if
each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet
arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly
eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on
either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I
do not pretend to quote: -- Sacred To the Memory of John Talbot, Who, at the
age of eighteen, was lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off
Patagonia, November 1st, . This Tablet Is erected to his Memory By his Sister.
Sacred To the Memory of Robert Long, Willis Ellery, Nathan Coleman, Walter
Canny, Seth Macy, and Samuel Gleig, Forming one of the boats' crews of the
Ship Eliza, Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in
the Pacific, December 31st, . This Marble Is here placed by their surviving
Shipmates. ..
3 Sacred To the Memory of
The late Captain Ezekiel Hardy, Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a
Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d, This Tablet Is erected to his
Memory by His Widow. Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket,
I seated myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see
Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a
wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was
the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the
only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid
inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose
names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many
are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women
present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief,
that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing
hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds
to bleed afresh. Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who
standing among flowers can say --here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the
desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those
black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable
inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that
seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have
placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the
cave of Elephanta as here. In what census of living creatures, the dead of
mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that ..
4 they tell no tales,
though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his
name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and
infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the
remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay
death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and
deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries
ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we
nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so
strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb
will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead
doubts she gathers her most vital hope. It needs scarcely to be told, with
what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble
tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of
the whalemen who had gone before me, Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine.
But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance
for promotion, it seems -- aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by
brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling --a speechlessly quick
chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have
hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my
shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things
spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water,
and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the
lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is
not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and
stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot. ..
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