CHAPTER 7
The Chapel
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few
are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific,
who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this
special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet
and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin,
I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small
scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows. A muffled
silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent
worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent
grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived;
and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing
several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either
side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not
pretend to quote:
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
JOHN TALBOT,
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard
Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,
November 1st, 1836.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY HIS SISTER.
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY,
NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY,
AND SAMUEL GLEIG,
Forming one of the boats’ crews
OF
THE SHIP ELIZA
Who were towed out of sight by a Whale,
On the Off-shore Ground in the
PACIFIC,
December 31st, 1839.
THIS MARBLE
Is here placed by their surviving
SHIPMATES.
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
The late
CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY,
Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a
Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,
August 3d, 1833.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY
HIS WIDOW.
Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself
near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me.
Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of
incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only person
present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one
who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions
on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names
appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many
are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several
women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing
grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose
unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the
old wounds to bleed afresh.
Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing
among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the
desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those
black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those
immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the
lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the
beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those
tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included;
why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales,
though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands! how it is that to
his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so
significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but
embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance
Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring
paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty
round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those
who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all
the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a
knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without
their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these
dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket
voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that
darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before
me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry
again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it
seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is
death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of
a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this
matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on
earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we
are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking
that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my
better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And
therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body
when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
