Moby Dick

Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship,
the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe;
they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful
as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,
for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned
full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.
Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born,
and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.
And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him
down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea;
though in after life he had long followed our austere
Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite
as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman,
fresh from the latitudes of buckhorn handled Bowie-knives. Yet
was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits;
and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed,
might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common
decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave's right;
thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile.
At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed
and made mad, and Steelkilt--but, gentlemen, you shall hear.

"It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow
for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again increasing,
but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day.
You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic,
for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole way
across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck
happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability would be that
he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of all
hands gently subsiding to the bottom.  Nor in the solitary and savage
seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual
for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even
for a voyage of considerable length! that is, if it lie along a tolerably
accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them.
It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part
of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins
to feel a little anxious.

"Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak
was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern
manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney the mate.
He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew,
and every way expanded to the breeze.  Now this Radney, I suppose,
was as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort
of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own person as any fearless,
unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently
imagine, gentlemen.  Therefore when he betrayed this imagine,
solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared
that it was only on account of his being a part owner in her.
So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on this
head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood
with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water;
clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen--that bubbling from the pumps
ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at
the lee scupper-holes.

"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this
conventional world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person
placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be
very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood,
straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike
and bitterness; and if he had a chance he will pull down and pulverize
that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.
Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all events
Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman,
and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your
last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart,
and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne,
had he been born son to Charlemagne's father.  But Radney, the mate,
was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious.
He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.

"Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump
with the rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed,
went on with his gay banterings.

"'Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin,
one of ye, and let's have a taste.  By the Lord, it's worth bottling!
I tell ye what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it!
he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home.
The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he's come
back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish,
and what not; and the whole posse of 'em are now hard at work
cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose.
If old Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump overboard and scatter 'em.
They're playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him.
But he's a simple old soul,--Rad, and a beauty too.  Boys, they say
the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder
if he'd give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.'

"'Damn your eyes! what's that pump stopping for?' roared Radney,
pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk.  'Thunder away at it!'

'Aye, aye, sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket.
'Lively, boys, lively, now!'  And with that the pump clanged
like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it,
and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard
which denotes the fullest tension of life's utmost energies.