Moby Dick

of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk.
Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor,
Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages,
is the worst.

I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal,
but cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made
against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already
biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated
by what has been said of the Frenchman's two whales.
Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved,
that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly,
untidy business.  But there is another thing to rebut.
They hint that all whales always smell bad.  Now how did this
odious stigma originate?

I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of
the Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago.
Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out
their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always done;
but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through
the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner;
the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and
violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course.
The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading
one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is
given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old
city graveyard, for the foundations of a Lying-in Hospital.

I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against
whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast
of Greenland, in former times, of a Dutch village called
Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used
by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells,
a text-book on that subject.  As its name imports (smeer, fat;
berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford
a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out,
without being taken home to Holland for that purpose.
It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds;
and when the works were in full operation certainly gave forth
no very pleasant savor.  But all this is quite different
from a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four
years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil,
does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out;
and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless.
The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated,
whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor;
nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle
ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose.
Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant,
when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health;
taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true,
seldom in the open air.  I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's
flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented
lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor.  What then shall I liken
the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude?
Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks,
and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town
to do honor to Alexander the Great?



CHAPTER 93

The Castaway


It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew;
an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes
madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying
prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.

Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats.
Some few hands are reserved called shipkeepers, whose province it
is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale.
As a general thing, these shipkeepers are as hardy fellows
as the men comprising the boats' crews.  But if there happen
to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship,
that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod
with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation.
Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine
on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.

In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony
and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar color,
driven in one eccentric span.  But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature
dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted,
was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness
peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays
and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race.
For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three hundred
and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days.  Nor smile so,
while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has
its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets.
But Pip loved life, and all life's peaceable securities; so that
the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably
become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere
long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him,
in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires,