CHAPTER 50
Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah
"Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb;"if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat,unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe.Oh! he's a wonderful old man!"
"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account,"said Flask. "If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would bea different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee,and good part of the other left, you know."
"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether,considering the paramount importance of his life to thesuccess of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captainto jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase.So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes,whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried intothe thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect.Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wightin all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whalesis always under great and extraordinary difficulties;that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril;under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to entera whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-ownersof the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would thinklittle of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmlessvicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the sceneof action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahabto have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regularheadsman in the hunt--above all for Captain Ahab to be suppliedwith five extra men, as that same boat's crew, he well knewthat such generous conceits never entered the heads of the ownersof the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat's crewfrom them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touchingall that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery,the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when,after being a little while out of port, all hands had concludedthe customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service;when some time after this Ahab was now and then found bestirringhimself in the matter of making thole-pins with his own handsfor what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and evensolicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which whenthe line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow:when all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitudein having an extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat,as if to make it better withstand the pointed pressure of hisivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in exactly shapingthe thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called,the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the kneeagainst in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it wasobserved how often he stood up in that boat with his solitaryknee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat,and with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little hereand straightened it a little there; all these things, I say,had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time.But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparativeheedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimatechase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intentionto hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a suppositiondid by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat'screw being assigned to that boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soonwaned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and thensuch unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up fromthe unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floatingoutlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queercastaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks,bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks,and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and stepdown into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not createany unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinatephantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as itwere somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallahremained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerlyworld like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evincedhimself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so faras to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows,but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew.But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He wassuch a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zoneonly see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whomnow and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities,especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent--those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even inthese modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalnessof earth's primal generations, when the memory of the firstman was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and askedof the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end;when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted withthe daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Robbins,indulged in mundane amours.