His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying
puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against
mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from
each other, this way and that, and very soon were
sleeping.
Wheelbarrow
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed
head to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and
comrade’s bill; using, however, my comrade’s
money. The grinning landlord, as well as the
boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship
which had sprung up between me and Queequeg—
especially as Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories
about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning
the very person whom I now companied with.
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things,
including my own poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s
canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to “the
Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored
at the wharf. As we were going along the people
stared; not at Queequeg so much— for they
were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,—
but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms.
But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the
barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping
to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I
asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with
him ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not
find their own harpoons. To this, in substance,
he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough,
yet he had a particular affection for his own harpoon,
because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many
a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts
of whales. In short, like many inland reapers
and mowers, who go into the farmer’s meadows
armed with their own scythes—though in
no wise obliged to furnish them— even so,
Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his
own harpoon.
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me
a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever
seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners
of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which
to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house.
Not to seem ignorant about the thing—though
in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise
way in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg
puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders
the barrow and marches up the wharf. “Why,”
said I, “Queequeg, you might have known better
than that, one would think. Didn’t the
people laugh?”
Upon this, he told me another story. The people
of his island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding
feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts
into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and
this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament
on the braided mat where the feast is held.
Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at
Rokovoko, and its commander—from all accounts,
a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for
