myself to it several times, I never could master his
liturgies and XXXIX Articles— leaving Queequeg,
then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming
himself at his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied
out among the shipping. After much prolonged
sauntering, and many random inquiries, I learnt that
there were three ships up for three-years’ voyages—The
Devil-Dam the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. Devil-dam,
I do not know the origin of; Tit-bit is obvious; Pequod
you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated
tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the
ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about the
Devil-Dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and
finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around
her for a moment, and then decided that this was the
very ship for us.
You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day,
for aught I know;— square-toed luggers;
mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and
what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such
a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod.
She was a ship of the old school, rather small if
anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about
her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the
typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s
complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s,
who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her
venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut
somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original
ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts
stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old
kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn
and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone
in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But
to all these her old antiquities, were added new and
marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business
that for more than half a century she had followed.
Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before
he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a
retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of
the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term
of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original
grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness
both of material and device, unmatched by anything
except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved buckler or
bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric
Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of
polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies.
A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the
chased bones of her enemies. All round, her
unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one
continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm
whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old
hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran
not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled
over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile
wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller;
and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved
from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.
The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest,
felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery
steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but
somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are
touched with that.
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