from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a
light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides
he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs
from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I
had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in
the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff
prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.
For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg
smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be
full of such serene household joy then. I no
more felt unduly concerned for the landlord’s
policy of insurance. I was only alive to the
condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing
a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With
our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now
passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly
there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke,
illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled
the savage away to far distant scenes, I know not,
but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager
to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell
it. He gladly complied. Though at the time
I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet
subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar
with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present
the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton
I give.
Biographical
Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away
to the West and South. It is not down on any
map; true places never are.
When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native
woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling
goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then, in
Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire
to see something more of Christendom than a specimen
whaler or two. His father was a High Chief,
a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal
side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable
warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal
stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal
propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.
A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay,
and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands.
But the ship, having her full complement of seamen,
spurned his suit; and not all the King his father’s
influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a
vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a
distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through
when she quitted the island. On one side was
a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered
with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water.
Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets,
with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle
low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like
a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward
dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed
up the chains; and throwing himself at full length
upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore
not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
