_ "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 be a 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 the success of the voyage, it
is right for a whaling captain to 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 into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering
that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of
danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is 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 enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing,
the joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little
of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes
of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and
giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat
actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt--above
all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same
boat's crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the
heads of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a
boat's crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on
that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own
touching all 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 concluded the customary
business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time after
this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of
making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one
of the spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden
skewers, which when the line is running out are pinned over the
groove in the bow: when all this was observed in him, and
particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of sheathing in
the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the pointed
pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in
exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes
called, the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the knee
against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how
often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the
semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter's
chisel gouged out a little here and 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
preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the
ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his
intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a
supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any
boat's crew being assigned to that boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the
unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating
outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer
castaway 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 step
down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create
any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it
were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah
remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly
world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced
himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as 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 was such a
creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see
in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now 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 in these modern days
still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal
generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct
recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came,
eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon
why they were created and to what end; when though, according to
Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the
devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours. _