Loomings (Etymology, Extracts and Chapters 1–9)

Etymology

(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)

The pale Usher — threadbare in coat, heart, body and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

Whale, in some of the tongues he listed: Greek, ΚΗΤΟΣ. Latin, CETUS. Anglo-Saxon, WHÆL. English, WHALE. French, BALEINE. Spanish, BALLENA. Fegee, PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE. Erromangoan, PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE.

Extracts

(Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian)

A mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub has gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.

"And God created great whales." — Genesis.

"Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary." — Job.

"Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah." — Jonah.

"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State — (in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man." — Opening sentence of Hobbes's Leviathan.

1. Loomings

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. Look at the crowds of water-gazers on a Sunday afternoon in Manhattan, posted like silent sentinels all around the town, fixed in ocean reveries. Meditation and water are wedded for ever. Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who, because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

I never go to sea as a passenger, nor as a captain, but as a simple sailor, right before the mast. True, they rather order me about, and make me jump from spar to spar like a grasshopper; but who ain't a slave? And they pay me, whereas passengers pay. And why I chose this time to go on a whaling voyage, I cannot tell; it was a part of the grand programme of Providence drawn up a long time ago. Chief among my motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale. By reason of these things, the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

2. The Carpet-Bag

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Arriving in New Bedford on a Saturday night in December, I learned that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer till the following Monday. So I had two nights and a day to spend there, with very little money. I wandered the frozen, dark streets in search of a cheap lodging, and once stumbled into a church where a preacher was holding forth on the blackness of darkness, and backed out again.

3. The Spouter-Inn

At last I came to the Spouter-Inn, kept by one Peter Coffin, a name that did not much encourage me. Inside hung a great, smoky, boggy painting that, after much study, resolved itself into a half-foundered ship and an exasperated whale purposing to spring clean over the craft, in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads. The bar was a rude attempt at a right whale's head, its jaws so wide a coach might almost drive beneath them.

Coffin had no bed to spare, unless I would share one with a harpooneer. The harpooneer, he said, was out late, trying to sell his head. I took this for a joke. It was not. He had brought a lot of embalmed New Zealand heads from the South Seas, and had sold all but one. I went up to bed, uneasy, and lay awake.

At last he came in: a dark, purplish, yellow-skinned giant, tattooed all over in squares, with a bald head bearing one scalp-knot. He set up a little black idol in the fireplace, made it an offering, and then, with a tomahawk-pipe in his mouth, sprang into bed — and found me. I cried out: "Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!" Coffin came, grinning, and explained that Queequeg wouldn't harm a hair of my head. And looking at him by the light, I saw that for all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself — the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

4–6. The Counterpane; Breakfast; The Street

I woke to find Queequeg's tattooed arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner, as though I had been his wife; and for a while I could hardly tell his arm from the patchwork counterpane. At breakfast I found the room full of whalemen, who were bashful and silent, while Queequeg reached over the table with his harpoon and grappled the beefsteaks toward him.

New Bedford was a queer place. Cannibals and savages from the Pacific chatted at street corners; green country lads from Vermont came to gain glory in the fishery. And the finest houses and gardens of the town had all been harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.

7. The Chapel

In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I found it filled with sailors, and sailors' wives and widows, and among them, Queequeg. On the walls were marble tablets set in memory of men lost at sea — killed by whales, carried off by whales, lost overboard in a gale. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.

8. The Pulpit

Father Mapple, the famous preacher, had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth. His pulpit was entered not by a stair but by a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. He climbed it hand over hand, and then, to my amazement, drew the ladder up after him, leaving him impregnably alone in his little fortress. The pulpit itself was built in the likeness of a ship's bluff bow.

9. The Sermon

"Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah — 'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'"

He told the story as a sailor would. Jonah, commanded by God to preach against Nineveh, fled from His face and went down to Joppa to take ship for Tarshish, as far from God as men then sailed. The sailors eyed him; his guilt showed. He paid his fare — paid it before the ship sailed, three times the usual sum, for in this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. The storm came. The sailors cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. He confessed, and told them to throw him into the sea, and they did, and the sea was calm; and the great whale took him down into the midst of the seas, where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down. And there in the belly of the whale Jonah did not weep and wail for deliverance, but felt that his dreadful punishment was just; and that was his true repentance. And God spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto the dry land, and he went and preached the truth.

"And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head," said Father Mapple at the end, with his head bowed, "and sit on the hatches there where you sit. But I am a pilot of the living God. Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight. Delight is to him, who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges."