CHAPTER 27
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.
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A
short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who
somehow seemed to think that the great Leviathans had personally and
hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of honor with
him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost was he to all
sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic
ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of any possible danger
from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was
but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a
little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order
to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a
little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of
it; and a three years’
voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of
time.
As a carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so
mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask was one of the wrought
ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They called him King-Post on
board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could be well likened to the short,
square timber known by that name in Arctic whalers; and which by the
means of many radiating side timbers inserted into it, serves to brace the
ship against the icy concussions of those battering seas.
Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, were momentous
men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
Pequod’s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain
Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these
three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with their
long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even as the
harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the
former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and moreover,
as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy and
friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set down who the
Pequod’s harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of them belonged.
First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected
for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most
westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last
remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring
island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the
fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s
long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes—for
an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering
expression—all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the
unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great
New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of
the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the
woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea;
the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the
sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost
have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans and half-
believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air.
Tashtego was Stubb the second mate’s squire.
Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro-
savage, with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his
ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them ringbolts,
and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his youth
Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay
on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in
Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by the
whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in
the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they
shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe,
moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There
was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing
before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.
Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of
little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him. As for the residue of
the Pequod’s company, be it said, that at the present day not one in two of
the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale
fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein
it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army
and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in
the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say,
because in all these cases the native American literally provides the brains,
the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number
of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound
Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy
peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers
sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the
full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards, they drop
them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make
the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes
too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each
Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along
one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation
from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old
Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which
not very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip— he never did—
oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s
forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of
the eternal time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid
strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward
here, hailed a hero there!
