CHAPTER 96
The Try-Works
Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished
by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid
masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It is
as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.
The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most
roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,
fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar,
some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The foundation does not
penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by
ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the
timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered
by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the
great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels’ capacity. When
not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished
with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls.
During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and
coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them—
one man in each pot, side by side— many confidential communications are
carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound mathematical
meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone
diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the
remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my
soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same
time.
Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare
masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the
furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy
doors of iron.
The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the
deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire inclosed
surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept
replenished with water as fast as it evaporates. There are no external
chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a
moment.
It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were first
started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.
“All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works.”
This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings
into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling
voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood.
After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple
fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now
called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous
properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr,
or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own
fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke!
for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that,
but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo
odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells
like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the
carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean
darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames,
which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every
lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship
drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the
pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing
from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down
upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide
hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the
pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged
poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or
stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the
doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To
every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all
eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the
further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a
sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking
into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their
tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted
beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were
strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they
narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in
words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them,
like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the
harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers;
as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived,
and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of
the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth,
and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted
with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into
that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her
monomaniac commander’s soul.
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in
darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the
ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me,
capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in
my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which
ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing
occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly
conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side,
which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning
to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of
putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further
apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by;
though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the
steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet
gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was
the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so
much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark,
bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands
grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in
some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me?
thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting
the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I
faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind,
and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from
this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being
brought by the lee!
Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of
the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all
things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright;
those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far
other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true
lamp—all others but liars!
Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s
accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which
is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So,
therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that
mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With books the same.
The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is
Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is
vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s
wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing
graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young,
Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free
lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that
man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould
with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of
understanding shall remain” (i.e. even while living) “in the congregation of
the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee;
as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe
that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike
dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become
invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge,
that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the
mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though
they soar.
