_ 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 ship-keepers, whose province it is
to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a
general thing, these ship-keepers 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 colour,
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, that fictitiously showed him off to
ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County
in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the
green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the
round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the
clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the
pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning
jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he
lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the
sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery
effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once
the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel
stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story.
It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman
chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed;
and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.
The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;
but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb
observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his
courageousness to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.
Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as
the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which
happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat. The
involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in
hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack
whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with
him, so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the
water. That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the
line swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up
to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line,
which had taken several turns around his chest and neck.
Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He
hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath,
he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,
exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?" Meantime Pip's blue, choked face
plainly looked, Do, for God's sake! All passed in a flash. In less
than half a minute, this entire thing happened.
"Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was
saved.
So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed
by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these
irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain,
business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially;
and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The
substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all the rest
was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general,
STICK TO THE BOAT, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will
sometimes happen when LEAP FROM THE BOAT, is still better. Moreover,
as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted
conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a
margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice,
and concluded with a peremptory command, "Stick to the boat, Pip, or
by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can't
afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for
thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and
don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that
though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which
propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It
was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but
this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale
started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried
traveller's trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It
was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and
cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like
gold-beater's skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and
down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No
boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb's
inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In
three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and
Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp,
curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the
loftiest and the brightest.
Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the
practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the
awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self
in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?
Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea--mark
how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.
But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate?
No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in
his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come
up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such
considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their own
timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar
instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost
invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the
same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.
But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly
spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and
Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent
upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him
miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him;
but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot;
such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his
finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned
entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths,
where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro
before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his
hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile
eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral
insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal
orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it;
and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is
heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at
last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and
frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as
his God.
For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in
that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be
seen what like abandonment befell myself. _