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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" is a monumental work of American literature that intricately weaves existential philosophy, adventure, and the nautical life into a compelling narrative. Written in the mid-19th century, the novel employs a rich tapestry of literary styles, including allegory, symbolism, and intricate prose, articulating the obsessive quest of Captain Ahab. As he hunts the elusive white whale, Melville delves into themes of vengeance, fate, and the struggle of man against the incomprehensible forces of nature, reflecting the moral complexities that characterized the American Renaissance. Melville, born in 1819, was deeply influenced by his own experiences at sea, having sailed on whaling vessels during his youth. This firsthand knowledge of maritime life enriched the novel's authenticity and heightened its exploration of man's relationship with the natural world. Additionally, Melville was influenced by philosophical currents of the time, particularly Transcendentalism and Romanticism, which shaped his profound inquiries into the human condition, morality, and the sublime. "Moby-Dick" is essential reading for anyone intrigued by the depths of human obsession, the philosophical dimensions of existence, and the complexities of morality. Melville's masterpiece transcends mere adventure as it invites readers to ponder larger existential questions, making it a timeless exploration of humanity's struggles and aspirations. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Moby-Dick
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (Unabridged), presented through a series of chapters, with D. H. Lawrence’s critique of Moby-Dick. The pairing is designed to stage a sustained conversation between imaginative creation and critical response. The thematic through-line is an inquiry into human will, knowledge, and the confrontation with vastness. Melville’s narrative articulates the drama; Lawrence’s essay articulates a reflective counterpoint. The aim is to foreground how a major work generates, and is clarified by, serious commentary. Unlike standalone presentations of either text, the collection invites readers to perceive resonance and difference in real time, across narrative momentum and critical argument.
The sequence of chapters—1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, 91, 101, 111, 121, 131—draws attention to the novel’s long-range rhythms. By noting these numbered waypoints, the collection encourages an awareness of pattern, recurrence, and development across the span. This structural emphasis aligns with the aim to foreground form as well as idea, inviting a mode of reading attentive to echoes and pivots. Lawrence’s critique, positioned alongside, sharpens this attention by offering an interpretive cadence that can be tested against the narrative’s unfolding. Together, they highlight architecture and argument as mutually illuminating modes of literary experience.
Another aim is to provide a balanced vantage: immersion and reflection. Melville’s chapters supply the experiential sweep; Lawrence’s critique supplies a concentrated assessment of symbols and meanings. The two vantage points are not meant to cancel but to complicate, allowing readers to register complexity without presuming consensus. The collection emphasizes that great narratives are not self-enclosed; they generate interpretive energy that merits direct juxtaposition. By arranging narrative segments with a dedicated critical response, the design foregrounds interpretation as part of the experience rather than an external supplement, making interpretive awareness an intrinsic companion to the movement of the chapters.
This arrangement differs from single-work publications by making the conversation itself central. Instead of encountering narrative or critique in isolation, the reader meets them in tandem, with the chapter sequence underscoring scope and progression. The result is an arc that highlights both the imaginative labor of storytelling and the analytical labor of response. The curatorial purpose is to cultivate attentiveness to how meaning is built, tested, and revised as one moves between Melville’s chapters and Lawrence’s appraisal. The collection thus models a practice of reading that honors creation and interpretation as interdependent, without privileging one mode over the other.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Melville’s chapters and Lawrence’s critique speak across a dynamic divide between narrative enactment and critical evaluation. The numbered progression—1 through 131 at decadal intervals—suggests a long surge of motion; Lawrence’s voice answers with concentrated argument. Recurring concerns include the limits of human knowledge, the pull of desire, and the encounter with forces that exceed intention. Symbols accrue weight as they return; Lawrence, attentive to such recurrences, treats them as keys to the work’s coherence. Tone shifts—from meditative to urgent—find an echo in the critique’s shifts between praise and interrogation, enabling a dialogue about measure, meaning, and risk.
Contrasts in genre intensify the conversation. Melville’s work unfolds through chaptered narration, accumulating scenes, images, and meditations; Lawrence’s contribution condenses, argues, and selects. Where narrative disperses meaning across time, critique compresses it into theses. This alternation sets up an instructive oscillation between open-endedness and decisiveness. Moral dilemmas emerge as tensions between will and limit, agency and uncertainty. The chapter sequence helps these tensions register in waves, while the critique sharpens their contours by naming stakes and tracing connections. The result is a contrapuntal experience, in which story and commentary test, qualify, and extend one another’s claims and effects.
Recurring motifs knit the dialogue together without requiring explicit cross-reference. Ideas of pursuit and evasion, naming and ineffability, measure and immeasurable, surface and depth, recur in the narrative and are parsed in the critique. Melville’s chapters stage these oppositions through incident and reflection; Lawrence characterizes them conceptually, asking how symbols hold or fail under pressure. When the narrative leans into catalog, chant, or speculation, the critique addresses method and meaning. When the narrative concentrates, the critique asks what kind of concentration it is. Each thereby illuminates the other’s commitments, blind spots, and capacities for wonder, doubt, and judgment.
Influence flows in one principal direction within this volume: Lawrence reads Melville. Yet the arrangement also shows how reading can reshape the perceived lineaments of a narrative. Lawrence’s emphases give certain images and turns of thought renewed contour; those emphases, borne back to the chapters, can highlight patterns that may otherwise pass quickly. The numbered sequence, stretching from 1 to 131, supports this feedback loop by marking intervals at which reflection can crystallize. The interchange becomes less a verdict than a rehearsal of understanding, where an achieved insight is provisional, and the next chapter may complicate what seemed settled.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
This collection matters because it enacts the living process of reception rather than treating narrative and critique as separate silos. Melville’s Moby-Dick (Unabridged) appears here alongside D. H. Lawrence’s critique to show how interpretation arises from, and returns to, the text itself. The arrangement models a practice of reflective reading attuned to ambiguity, grandeur, and limit. Such a practice remains vital wherever readers confront complexity and seek orientation without simplification. By honoring the energies of story and the energies of thought, the collection demonstrates how a major work continues to teach, provoke, and sustain attentive, revisable understanding.
Across generations, Moby-Dick has been a touchstone for readers interested in the reach and responsibility of imagination. Lawrence’s critique shows how a later writer can crystallize and challenge that reach by articulating stakes in a distinctive voice. Placed together, the works illustrate an ongoing cycle in which narrative achievements prompt searching responses, which in turn frame subsequent approaches to the narrative. This reflexive arc explains why the novel and its critical afterlife remain objects of renewed attention. The present collection attends to that cycle by giving both primary articulation and secondary reflection equivalent presence and dignity in one encounter.
The cultural presence of Moby-Dick has grown through performances, adaptations, and invocations across media, while debates about its meanings continue in classrooms and public forums. Without cataloging that history, this collection registers the phenomenon by pairing the work itself with an influential critical meditation by D. H. Lawrence. The combination suggests how artistic and critical energies circulate: enactment invites interpretation; interpretation shapes subsequent enactment. Readers encounter not a monument sealed off from response, but a work in motion, accompanied by a voice that grapples with it openly. Such motion underwrites the book’s ongoing relevance and intellectual provocation.
Critical reception, at a general level, has long recognized Moby-Dick as a capacious, demanding achievement and welcomed Lawrence’s contribution as a bracing, personal encounter with it. This collection keeps that conversation active by granting readers direct access to both narrative and response. It neither domesticates the novel nor overrules the critique; rather, it demonstrates how serious attention thrives on plurality. The chapters marked in sequence offer a palpable sense of duration; the critique offers a framework for considering that duration. Their juxtaposition remains an instructive model for how literature is read, contested, cherished, and renewed across changing contexts.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Set amid the mid nineteenth century United States, the chapters from Moby-Dick arise from a republic accelerated by commerce, seaborne trade, and territorial expansion. Whaling linked New England ports to Atlantic and Pacific circuits, distributing capital, credit, and labor through a global network. Shipboard order mirrored ashore hierarchies of class, race, and gender; women were largely excluded from maritime labor, while multiethnic crews were disciplined within strict command structures. Religious revivals and inherited Puritan codes shaped public rhetoric, while slavery and its expansion inflamed national politics. Across the ocean, a constitutional monarchy presided over Britain, anchoring a transatlantic marketplace for American books.
The power structures that framed Melville’s writing were diffuse yet palpable. Private investors, insurers, and shipowners underwrote voyages, while maritime law authorized discipline that could be both paternal and punitive. The lay system of payment organized sailors into a precarious economy of risk, debt, and profit sharing. Urban seaports enforced moral regulation through churches, temperance societies, and charitable homes for mariners. Newspaper editors campaigned for respectability even as they chased sensational copy. Within this climate, the book’s meditations on command, consent, and solidarity drew energy from lived labor relations at sea, refracting national arguments over authority, reform, and freedom.
The era balanced prosperity with upheaval. The Mexican American War had just redrawn continental borders, and the revolutions of 1848 sent ideological shockwaves across the Atlantic. Expansionism, nativism, and abolitionism battled in newspapers and parlors, while ports integrated goods and people from the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific. Whalers touched island polities and colonial outposts, negotiating with chiefs, consuls, and missionaries within unequal regimes of exchange. Quarantines, customs inspections, and naval patrols shaped everyday movement. National militias drilled in town squares as Congress debated compromises whose consequences were felt in boardinghouses and forecastles alike, coloring the imaginative atmospheres of the chapters.
Publication pathways reflected contested sovereignty over cultural goods. American authors like Melville worked in a market without strong international copyright protection, encouraging unlicensed transatlantic reprints that depressed earnings and amplified British taste. Subscription libraries and family reading circles favored pious or improving narratives, and reviewers policed impropriety through scolding notice. Yet adventurous sea tales enjoyed popularity, which publishers leveraged to market ambitious works. Bookmaking benefitted from cheaper paper and stereotyping, but distribution still depended on coastal warehouses and stage lines. These conditions shaped expectations, positioning philosophical and technical digressions as risky experiments within a commercial system demanding momentum and clarity.
When D. H. Lawrence later wrote his critique, Britain and its dominions were reckoning with the brutal legacies of world war, labor unrest, and shifting imperial legitimacy. The monarchy remained, but parliamentary reforms and mass politics pressed against inherited class prerogatives. Censorship bodies patrolled sexuality and blasphemy, affecting publishers and critics alike. Industrial regions groaned under unemployment, while intellectual life sought new myths to replace older certainties. Lawrence’s transatlantic attention to Melville thus participated in renewed debates about national culture, masculinity, and spiritual vitality, while navigating legal and moral thresholds that constrained what could be said openly in print.
Class, gender, and race operated as structuring forces within the maritime world evoked by the chapters. Free Black communities in New England coexisted with fugitive slave renditions, while Indigenous and Pacific Islanders entered crews through coercion and contract alike. Masculine fraternal bonds were celebrated, yet strict exclusions shaped shore institutions and inheritance. Wage advances tied sailors to outfitters, and injuries jeopardized livelihoods without social insurance. Religious authorities urged repentance while employers demanded endurance. Such pressures formed the background against which inquiries into belonging, hospitality, and justice unfold, their language sharpened by the routines of a ship governed by hierarchy.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
The chapters inhabit a crossroads where Enlightenment empiricism meets Romantic idealism. Cataloging whales, measuring latitudes, and noting instruments signal confidence in observation, while rhapsodic language reaches toward the sublime and ineffable. Biblical cadence and typological thinking mingle with skeptical irony, composing a dialectic of faith and doubt. The age’s technologies—steam, rail, and telegraph—contracted distances ashore, even as a wind-driven vessel remained dependent on weather and seamanship. This tension between mechanism and mystery animates the book’s shifts between documentary detail and symbol, allowing taxonomy and metaphysics to interpenetrate without resolving the rival claims of data, intuition, and revelation.
Melville’s formal daring is central to the selected chapters. The writing moves among sermon, stage scene, treatise, and lyric, assembling a polyphonic structure that tests the boundaries of the novel. Lists, etymologies, and dialogues sit beside meditations that thicken into parable. Such hybridization participates in nineteenth century debates over realism versus higher symbolism, insisting that exacting description and visionary intensity need not be enemies. The oscillation serves ethical ends as well, inviting readers to compare the measurable and the immeasurable. This composite aesthetic remains striking for its refusal to subordinate inquiry to plot, or artistry to mere moral.
Scientific and technical discourses impart both authority and friction. Natural history had not yet settled the status of whales within mammalian classification, and scholarly confusion licenses the book’s satiric jousts with experts. Measurements of tonnage, tryworks, and rigging provide a practical counterweight to metaphysical flight, while also exposing the violence of extraction as an industrial process at sea. Sextants, chronometers, and charts register confidence in calculation, yet fog, current, and magnetic error complicate mastery. The chapters convert these uncertainties into aesthetic method, treating knowledge as provisional and perspectival, always susceptible to revision by fresh experience and disciplined attention.
Developments in the other arts formed a resonant backdrop. Marine painting dramatized ships against storm light, lending visual analogues to verbal grandeur. Popular theatre offered melodrama and spectacle, including nautical pantomimes and shipboard tableaux mirrored in the novel’s stagecraft. Hymns and revival music supplied cadences for exhortation, while sailors’ ballads contribute work rhythms and irony. Print culture’s expanding reach, aided by stereotyping and rail distribution, encouraged heftier volumes and bolder ambitions. Within this ecosystem, the chapters’ shifts of register read as experiments in orchestration, modulating from hush to thunder, from ledger to psalm, as if composing a maritime symphony.
D. H. Lawrence’s critique approaches the book as a living myth rather than a museum piece. Writing in a postwar environment wary of mechanism and system, he prizes elemental energy, bodily knowledge, and psychological intensity. His polemical sentences seek contact with danger and exaltation, framing Melville as a navigator of dark vitality rather than a mere moralist. The approach treats symbol as incarnate force, not allegorical code, and it resists academic tidiness. In doing so, the critique also broadcasts a modern impatience with inherited decorum, aligning criticism with creative performance and renewing the work’s aura of risk.
Competing ideals of national literature frame both the American chapters and the British critique. In the United States, calls for a distinct voice argued with lingering deference to London arbiters. Review pages debated whether fiction should uplift morals, codify manners, or grapple with abyssal experience. Lawrence’s intervention, written from another shore, counters utilitarian standards with an aesthetics of intensity, thereby validating Melville’s experiments as central rather than aberrant. The result is an international argument about what counts as major art, with the sea narrative serving as laboratory for clashes among realism, symbolism, prophecy, and skeptical comedy.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Reception histories entwine with political weather. Initial readers often sorted the book with maritime adventures, while balking at its philosophical density and structural audacity. Over decades, stormier global events created new appetites for unquiet art. Early twentieth century reassessments, strengthened by D. H. Lawrence’s vehement advocacy, repositioned the novel as a central monument of democratic literature and metaphysical inquiry. University classrooms, new academic presses, and readers’ clubs expanded its audience. This elevation did not neutralize controversy; rather, it preserved tension between devotional admiration and wary fascination, leaving room for subsequent generations to argue the work’s purpose and power.
Subsequent wars, economic shocks, and environmental anxieties repeatedly reframed the chapters’ resonances. Mechanized slaughter in global conflict altered how readers encountered images of collective labor and catastrophic risk. The growth of corporate bureaucracy provoked fresh interest in questions of responsibility and command. As petroleum replaced whale oil, the book’s account of energy extraction began to look like a prehistory of modern resource regimes. Late twentieth century readers, shaped by civil rights and feminist movements, pressed harder on depictions of race and gender, turning shipboard hierarchy into a test case for thinking about exclusion, solidarity, and uneasy intimacies.
Adaptation has kept the narrative in public circulation. The book inspired stage dramatizations, radio serials, films, and visual artworks that condensed or reimagined scenes, characters, and arguments. These versions helped canonize certain motifs, sometimes simplifying philosophy to foreground adventure, sometimes amplifying metaphysical dread. Popular success carried risks of caricature, yet it also invited new readers back to the original chapters. Classroom editions and performance scripts circulated in schools and community theaters, while museum exhibits paired maritime artifacts with quotations. Each translation across media refreshed debate about what, precisely, animates the work’s endurance: suspense, language, idea, or icon.
Preservation and scholarship have supplied new maps for readers. Careful comparison of American and British first editions clarified variants, while later critical apparatus documented sources, nautical terminology, and errata. As copyright terms elapsed, affordable reprints and digital archives multiplied access worldwide. Ecocritical and blue humanities approaches emphasized oceanic systems and nonhuman life, while labor historians traced the lay economy and injury. Gender and queer studies foregrounded intimacy and embodiment aboard ship. Debates continue over how to balance historical context with universalizing claims, and over whether the book consoles, indicts, or refuses judgment in the face of violence.
D. H. Lawrence’s essay remains a flashpoint within this evolving reception. Some prize its prophetic zeal and permission for passionate criticism; others interrogate its rhetoric and blind spots, especially regarding gender and race. Its lasting influence lies in modeling how criticism can risk metaphor and desire, not only catalog data. In classrooms and reading groups, pairing his declaration with the chapters provokes reflection on national identity, art’s uses, and the ethics of interpretation. The dialogue between the American text and the British response thus persists, renewed by each generation’s questions, crises, and shifting vocabularies of hope and fear.
Synopsis (Selection)
Moby-Dick: Origins and Departure (Chs. 1, 11, 21)
Ishmael seeks a whaling voyage and forges a close bond with Queequeg before the pair sign onto the Pequod. Their embarkation is tinged with foreboding hints about the ship and its captain.
Moby-Dick: Ahab’s Obsession Emerges (Chs. 31, 41)
Crewside dreams and murmurs hint at Captain Ahab’s unsettling grip and purpose. The lore of the white whale and Ahab’s past injury reveal a private vendetta that redirects the voyage.
Moby-Dick: Omens and First Hunts (Chs. 51, 61)
A mysterious night spout and strange phenomena amplify superstition as the Pequod presses on. Stubb leads an early successful kill, displaying whaling’s methods, risks, and shipboard hierarchy.
Moby-Dick: Encounters at Sea—Gams (Chs. 71, 81, 91)
Meetings with other ships deliver cautionary tales, rumors, and comic interludes that widen the seascape. Reports of the white whale’s power intermingle with rivalry and bungling, sharpening the voyage’s tension.
Moby-Dick: Reflections and Vastness (Chs. 101, 111)
Narrative asides digest news and knowledge gleaned from shipboard exchanges. The Pacific’s immensity and deceptive calm become subjects of meditation as the Pequod enters its waters.
Moby-Dick: Gathering Portents (Chs. 121, 131)
Midnight watches and whispered counsels deepen fatalistic unease among the crew. A later meeting with a battered vessel underscores the rising stakes of Ahab’s pursuit.
D. H. Lawrence’s critique of Moby-Dick
Lawrence presents the novel as a symbolic, near-biblical epic of American will, praising its elemental force and mythic scale. He reads Ahab’s monomania and the white whale as archetypal powers, with Ishmael as a tempering, ironic witness.
Moby-Dick (Unabridged) + D. H. Lawrence's critique of Moby-Dick
Chapter 1
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,— north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?— Water - there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick— grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bakehouses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the for-castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way— either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,— what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way— he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.” “Whaling voyage by one Ishmael.” “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces— though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
Chapter 2
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was on a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original— the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones—so goes the story— to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowspirit?
Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south—wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don’t be too particular.
With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The Crossed Harpoons”—but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the “Sword-Fish Inn,” there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,—rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don’t you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
Such dreary streets! Blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city,Gomorrah? But “The Crossed Harpoons,” and the “The Sword-Fish?”—this, then must needs be the sign of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—“The Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.”
Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I possess the only copy extant—”it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corncob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.
Chapter 3
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.— It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.— It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way— cut through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round—you enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass— the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens ofskrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full— not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.
“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be ready directly.”
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland— no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.
“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.”
“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”
“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t— he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes ’em rare.”
“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”
“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.
I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark complexioned” harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.
Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.”
A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth— the bar—when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island.
The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge favorite with them, they raised a cry of “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in pursuit of him.
It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight— how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?
“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.— I shan’t sleep with him. I’ll try the bench here.”
“Just as you please; I’m sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and it’s a plaguy rough board here”—feeling of the knots and notches. “But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got a carpenter’s plane there in the bar—wait, I say, and I’ll make ye snug enough.” So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s sake to quit—the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown study.
I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one— so there was no yoking them. I then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window, and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.
The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal a march on him—bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea but upon second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!
Still looking around me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I’ll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after all—there’s no telling.
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
“Landlord! said I, “what sort of a chap is he—does he always keep such late hours?” It was now hard upon twelve o’clock.
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered, “generally he’s an early bird—airley to bed and airley to rise—yea, he’s the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling, you see, and I don’t see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can’t sell his head.”
“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?”
“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell it here, the market’s overstocked.”
“With what?” shouted I.
“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.”
“May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther guess you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his head.”
“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s.
“It’s broke a’ready,” said he.
“Broke,” said I—“broke, do you mean?”
“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”
“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snowstorm—“landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow—a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly would thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”
“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of ‘balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin’ human heads about the streets when folks is goin’ to churches. He wanted to last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin’ out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions.”
