CHAPTER 50
Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah
“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg
you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with
my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”
“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. “If his
leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would
disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you
know.”
“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right
for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase.
So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that
invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that
with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man
to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of the
Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of
his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the
chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in
person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a
regular headsman in the hunt—above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied
with five extra men, as that same boat’s crew, he well knew that such
generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod.
Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s crew from them, nor had he in any
way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private
measures of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco’s published
discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when, after
being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded the customary
business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time after this
Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of making
thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare
boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when
the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this
was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat
of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the
pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in
exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called,
the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the knee against in darting
or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in
that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the
cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel gouged out a little here and
straightened it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much
interest and curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this
particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the
ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to
hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means
involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew being assigned to that
boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers;
and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found
tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats,
canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself
might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the
captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the
forecastle.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms
soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow
distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled
mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what
sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab’s
peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence;
Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this
none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah.
He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone
only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and
then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the
Oriental isles to the east of the continent— those insulated, immemorial,
unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much
of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the
memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his
descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real
phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to
what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted
with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Robbins,
indulged in mundane amours.
