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.
CHAPTER 8
The Pulpit
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain
venerable robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted
door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regardful
eyeing of him by all the congregation, sufficiently
attested that this fine old man was the chaplain.
Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by
the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favorite.
He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth,
but for many years past had dedicated his life to
the ministry. At the time I now write of, Father
Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age;
that sort of old age which seems merging into a second
flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his
wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly
developing bloom— the spring verdure peeping
forth even beneath February’s snow. No
one having previously heard his history, could for
the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost
interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical
peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous
maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed
that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not
come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down
with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket
seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight
of the water it had absorbed. However, hat and
coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung
up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when,
arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the
pulpit.
