Moby Dick by Herman Melville (readera ebook reader .txt) 📕

no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!

4th Nantucket sailor.

He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol⁠—fire your ship right into it!

English sailor.

Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt him up his whale!

All.

Aye! aye!

Old Manx sailor.

How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in the sky⁠—lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.

Daggoo.

What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me! I’m quarried out of it!

Spanish sailor.

Aside. He wants to bully, ah!⁠—the old grudge makes me touchy. Advancing. Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind⁠—devilish dark at that. No offence.

Daggoo grimly.

None.

St. Jago’s sailor.

That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t be, or else in his one case our old Mogul’s fire-waters are somewhat long in working.

5th Nantucket sailor.

What’s that I saw⁠—lightning? Yes.

Spanish sailor.

No; Daggoo showing his teeth.

Daggoo springing.

Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!

Spanish sailor meeting him.

Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!

All.

A row! a row! a row!

Tashtego with a whiff.

A row a’low, and a row aloft⁠—Gods and men⁠—both brawlers! Humph!

Belfast sailor.

A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge in with ye!

English sailor.

Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife! A ring, a ring!

Old Manx sailor.

Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad’st thou the ring?

Mate’s voice from the quarterdeck.

Hands by the halyards! in topgallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!

All.

The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! They scatter.

Pip shrinking under the windlass.

Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects to ’em; they’re on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet⁠—they are your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale⁠—shirr! shirr!⁠—but spoken of once! and only this evening⁠—it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine⁠—that anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!

XLI Moby Dick

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.

For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole worldwide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults⁠—not restricted to