Knights and Squires
Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of
Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was
called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither
craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with
an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most
imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and
collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year.
Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over
his whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter were
but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests.
He was as particular about the comfortable arrangements
of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is
about the snugness of his box. When close to
the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he
handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly,
as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum
over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with
the most exasperated monster. Long usage had,
for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an
easy chair. What he thought of death itself,
there is no telling. Whether he ever thought
of it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever
did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable
dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to
be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and
bestir themselves there, about something which he would
find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such
an easy-going, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging
off with the burden of life in a world full of grave
peddlers, all bowed to the ground with their packs;
what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor
of his; that thing must have been his pipe.
For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was
one of the regular features of his face. You
would almost as soon have expected him to turn out
of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe.
He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded,
stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and,
whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession,
lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter;
then loading them again to be in readiness anew.
For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting
his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his
mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause,
at least of his peculiar disposition; for every one
knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat,
is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of
the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it;
and as in time of the cholera, some people go about
with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so,
likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s
tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting
agent.
