And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any
as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall
ever deserve any real repute in that small but high
hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious
of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the
whole, a man might rather have done than to have left
undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly
my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk,
then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and
the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale
College and my Harvard.
Postscript
In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain
advance naught but substantiated facts. But
after embattling his facts, an advocate who should
wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which
might tell eloquently upon his cause—such
an advocate, would he not be blame-worthy?
It is well known that at the coronation of kings and
queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process
of seasoning them for their functions is gone through.
There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there
may be a caster of state. How they use the salt,
precisely—who knows? Certain I am,
however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled
at his coronation, even as a head of salad.
Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view
of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?
Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential
dignity of this regal process, because in common life
we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who
anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing.
In truth, a mature man who uses hairoil, unless medicinally,
that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.
As a general rule, he can’t amount to much in
his totality.
But the only thing to be considered here is this—what
kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly
it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor
oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver
oil. What then can it possibly be, but the sperm
oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest
of all oils?
Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply
your kings and queens with coronation stuff!
Knights and Squires
The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native
of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was
a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast,
seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh
being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported
to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like
bottled ale. He must have been born in some time
of general drought and famine, or upon one of those
fast days for which his state is famous. Only
some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers
had dried up all his physical superfluousness.
But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more
