CHAPTER 107
The Carpenter
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the
high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate; hence,
he now comes in person on this stage.
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging
to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-hand, practical extent, alike
experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the
carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those
numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an
auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark
above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those
thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large
ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas.
For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:— repairing stove boats,
sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s
eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other
miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he
was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes,
both useful and capricious.
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times except
when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed athwartships
against the rear of the Try-works.
A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the
carpenter claps it into one of his ever ready vices, and straightway files it
smaller. A lost landbird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a
captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of
sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An
oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb
longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar;
screwing each oar in his big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically
supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-
rings: the carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter
out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there;
but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation;
whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to
clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and
without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed
but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now
upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness
of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon
vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man
more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were;
impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things,
that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible
world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally
holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals.
Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an
all-ramifying heartlessness;— yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an
old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now
and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass
the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark.
Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much
rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had
rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally
pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral;
uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference
to this world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange
uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his
numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct,
or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all
these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous
literal process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one,
must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like
one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in parvo, Sheffield
contrivances, assuming the exterior— though a little swelled—of a
common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but
also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers,
countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-
driver, all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was
fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.
Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was,
after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common
soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its
duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of
hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for
now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable,
cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the
time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also
hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this
soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.
