It may seem strange that of all men sailors should
be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but
there are no people in the world more fond of that
diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical
life that I had done the same thing. After the
ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion,
I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from
my heart. Besides, all the days I should now
live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived
after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain
of so many months or weeks as the case may be.
I survived myself; my death and burial were locked
up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly
and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience
sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the
sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected
dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch
the hindmost.
Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah
“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried
Stubb; “if I had but one leg you would not catch
me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with
my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old
man!”
“I don’t think it so strange, after all,
on that account,” said Flask. “If
his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different
thing. That would disable him; but he has one
knee, and good part of the other left, you know.”
“I don’t know that, my little man; I never
yet saw him kneel.”
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether,
considering the paramount importance of his life to
the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling
captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils
of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often
argued with tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable
life of his ought to be carried into the thickest
of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect.
Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling
wight in all times of danger; considering that the
pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary
difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed,
then comprises a peril; under these circumstances
is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat
in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners
of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would
think little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively
harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of
being near the scene of action and giving his orders
in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually
apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above
all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra
men, as that same boat’s crew, he well knew
that such generous conceits never entered the heads
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had
