Moby Dick

For at bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a profound
desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make
his people still happier than they were; and more than that,
still better than they were.  But, alas! the practices of whalemen
soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable
and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens.
Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors
did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent
their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.
Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians,
wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish.
Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.

By hints I asked him whether he did not propose going back,
and having a coronation; since he might now consider his father
dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts.
He answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity,
or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure
and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him.
But by and by, he said, he would return,--as soon as he felt
himself baptized again.  For the nonce, however, he proposed
to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans.
They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was
in lieu of a sceptre now.

I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his
future movements.  He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation.
Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed
him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most
promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from.
He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard
the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat,
the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both
my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.
To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now
felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such,
could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me,
was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well
acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen.

His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff,
Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine,
and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other,
this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.



CHAPTER 13

Wheelbarrow


Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head
to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill;
using, however, my comrade's money.  The grinning landlord,
as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden
friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg--
especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories about him
had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
whom I now companied with.

We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor
carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went down
to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf.
As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much--
for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,--
but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms.  But we heeded
them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg
now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs.
I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore,
and whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons.
To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was
true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own harpoon,
because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat,
and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales.  In short, like many
inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmer's meadows armed
with their own scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish them--
even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.

Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny
story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen.
It was in Sag Harbor.  The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent
him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house.
Not to seem ignorant about the thing--though in truth he was
entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage
the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast;
and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf.
"Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that,
one would think.  Didn't the people laugh?"

Upon this, he told me another story.  The people of his island
of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant
water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl;
and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on
the braided mat where the feast is held.  Now a certain grand merchant
ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts,
a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain--
this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister,