Moby Dick

their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look
of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising
from the water alongside.  In the sea, under certain circumstances,
seals have more than once been mistaken for men.

But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning.
At sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore;
and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep
(for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it
was thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may,
he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard--a cry
and a rushing--and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air;
and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue
of the sea.

The life-buoy--a long slender cask--was dropped from the stern, where it
always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it,
and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it
slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled at its every pore;
and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom,
as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.

And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast
to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own
peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep.
But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time.  Indeed, in some sort,
they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent;
for they regarded it, not as a fore-shadowing of evil in
the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged.
They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild
shrieks they had heard the night before.  But again the old
Manxman said nay.

The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed
to see to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found,
and as in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis
of the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was
directly connected with its final end, whatever that might prove
to be; therefore, they were going to leave the ship's stern unprovided
with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg
hinted a hint concerning his coffin.

"A life-buoy of a coffin!" cried Starbuck, starting.

"Rather queer, that, I should say," said Stubb.

"It will make a good enough one," said Flask, "the carpenter here can
arrange it easily."

"Bring it up; there's nothing else for it," said Starbuck,
after a melancholy pause.  "Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so--
the coffin, I mean.  Dost thou hear me?  Rig it."

"And shall I nail down the lid, sir?" moving his hand as with a hammer.

"Aye."

"And shall I caulk the seams, sir?" moving his hand as
with a caulking-iron.

"Aye."

"And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?" moving his hand
as with a pitch-pot.

Away!  What possesses thee to this?  Make a life-buoy of the coffin,
and no more.--Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me."

"He goes off in a huff.  The whole he can endure; at the parts
he baulks.  Now I don't like this.  I make a leg for Captain Ahab,
and he wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg,
and he won't put his head into it.  Are all my pains to go for nothing
with that coffin?  And now I'm ordered to make a life-buoy of it.
It's like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on
the other side now.  I don't like this cobbling sort of business--
I don't like it at all; it's undignified; it's not my place.
Let tinkers' brats do tinkerings; we are their betters.  I like to take
in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs,
something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle
when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler's job,
that's at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end.
It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs.
Lord! what an affection all old women have for tinkers.  I know an old
woman of sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once.
And that's the reason I never would work for lonely widow old
women ashore when I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might
have taken it into their lonely old heads to run off with me.
But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let me see.
Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with pitch;
batten them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over
the ship's stern.  Were ever such things done before with a coffin?
Some superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging,
ere they would do the job.  But I'm made of knotty Aroostook hemlock;
I don't budge.  Cruppered with a coffin!  Sailing about with
a grave-yard tray!  But never mind.  We workers in woods make
bridal bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses.
We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask
the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling,
and then we stash it if we can.  Hem!  I'll do the job, now, tenderly.