[1]The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the anus. When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. On absolutely no occasion however, should one treat similarly with that turbid, brackish milk from the dugs of a zomby that Quickened while nursing, nor eat that rancid milk with any type of fruit.
And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy, though it now be so deeply buried as to seem but a phantom; still and all, there it lies, a pale shadowy memory of joy.
Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drouging the whales on the frontier of the host; or possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight of the enraged drogued whales now and then blindly darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or maiming his gigantic tail-tendon, much as the zombie is drouged as previously mentioned. It is done by darting a short-handled cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles, sowing destruction like Vander’s berserker rage at the battle of the Vernal Field, carrying his dismay wherever he went, as you shall learn.
But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.
This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters.
Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the long steering oar at the stern.
“Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—“grip your oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off, you Queequeg—the whale there!—prick him!—hit him! Stand up—stand up, and stay so! Spring, men—pull, men; never mind their backs—scrape them!—scrape away!”
The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg’s hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.
Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drogued whales might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near.
The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all the drogued whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.
Chapter
Fast & Loose
Allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the previous chapter necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge. It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For example,—after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases.
Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with Other People’s Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne’s farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.
I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who
can soonest catch it.
But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.
First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.
Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other
recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to do.
My first acquaintance with the waif pole and the notion of this sort of ownership came not aboard ship, but among my Militia band, in the person of a man we called Vander. To the astute reader, this will come as no large surprise for, as previously expounded upon, there are myriad connections between the killing of whales and the killing of zombies. Vander, in addition to introducing me to the practice of waif-poling one’s kills and the definition of a fast-zomby and a loose-zomby; he was also, by unhappy chance, the first man I had to put down while he was yet human; before the slight bite he took threatened to Quicken him into a more malignant menace.
Vander was one of those men called a Gimmie among the Militia, for ever and anon was he concerned with amassing both finery and valuables from zombies he killed, and alas, it would be his hamartia. He was a queer, prideful man who, upon downing a zomby, would shout, “Fast zomby!” then jabbing into the corpse his silly little whittled waiflet pole with its bit of bright blue ribbon. For Vander had been a-whaling, and though he had forsaken the fishery after one short voyage—in his words, it was “too much toil and danger for too little coin, and drowning’s no way to die”—yet the practices of that fishery were made indelible on his spirit and so became a primary source of his prideful airs. We did not ask him whether an axe blow to the head was a better means of losing one’s life than drowning; it seemed ill-advised at the time, though part of me yet wonders. Had I been in his position, I would favor the crushing weightless embrace of the deepest sea over an axe to the head.
Vander—we also called him Corn-boy and Commodore; I do not remember his Christian name—was so called after Cornelius Vanderbilt, billionaire baron of the railroads who had amassed a prodigious fortune off the backbreaking labor of others—whom he no doubt deemed loose-fish, free for the taking. Vanderbilt built his empire off the backs of blacks and whites and Chinamen alike, all of whom shared little but the trait of poverty and need; and ever has it been that not the color of the skin, but a thin wallet and shared backbreaking labor makes men brothers more reliably than will ties of blood.
Vander’s singular whaling voyage had shaped him in many ways; his favored weapon was a whaler’s long-bladed boarding sword with a wicked edge he was for ever honing, the rough scrape of steel on whetstone often heard in camp when Vander was on watch. That hissing grinding scraping sound will forever evoke feelings of both security and danger in my breast, for Vander was not alone in his frequent application of the whetstone.
It was on his short whaling voyage that Vander discovered waif pole usage, and the rules governing fast fish and loose fish. When Vander joined our small band, already had he adopted the practice of claiming zombies using similar protocols to those used in the fishery (he was the only one who ever did so to my knowledge). Vander went so far as to whittle sharpened sticks with a bit of blue ribbon on them, calling them waiflet poles which he would stick in his kills if there was time, and he often took the time, though it risked no small danger to himself and his fellows.
Around a grateful farmer’s hearth one night, Vander sat whittling his waiflet poles, now and again reaching into a ragged pile of blue cloth pilfered from the clothes of killed zombies, and attaching the cloth to a finished sharpened stick, then jammed it into his quiver to be ready for the coming day. Winnifred queried him why he spent his leisure time on such frippery.
“It amuses me,” Vander said. “Calling such a slow lumbering thing, once dead, a fast zomby is rather funny, I should say. And the jaunty blue ribbon I stick in him to claim him as my own, funnier still. There is nothing funny about a loose zomby, however,” he said laughing alone at his lame jest. “And it should be known,” he continued with that grandiloquence we had all come to somewhat loathe, “that since ancient times, the executioner, upon executing his duty—har har—is thereby the new owner of the property so recently quit by the dead.”
“Taint dead,” growled Bat, the surliest of our company. “Cain’t kill what’s already dead.” It was eight more words than he usually spoke, for stout Bartholomew Higgins (his Christian name) had in him a rage and a kindness both, and that kindness and rage combined forbade him to speak overmuch, or so it seemed; tightly coiled he was, as though his inner life were like the innards of an overwound patent chronometer, that is to say, wound so tightly that it may at any moment explode outwards in a thousand sharp and deadly shards or, failing that, break and lie unmoving and worthless.
In battle though, Bat directed that spring-wound inner tension against zombies, and they went down like harvested wheat before the scythe of his wrath. Bat never spoke of what had tightened his inner spring thus, but such rage sat heavy—if not wound so tightly—in all our breasts, but it seemed somehow more savage in Bat, and closer to the surface. Its source remained ever a mystery.
Bat seemed now ready to burst, the veins did stand out in his neck so! “Zombies ain’t dead, they’s dead already,” Bat repeated, standing angrily. He stomped off to bed, muttering as he went, “Cain’t kill what’s already dead. Dead. Dead and gone. Gone.”
“Semantics do not hold my interest,” Vander said, waving his hand dismissively at Bat’s retreating broad back. “Dead is as dead does. If it moves, it lives, and if it ceases to move it is dead; what could be simpler? When a loose zomby becomes a fast zomby, which is to say a dead one, I stick him with my waiflet pole so all will know his scalp and sundries are mine and mine alone.” And though we thought his ideas somewhat silly, yet did we adopt the term loose-zomby for any zomby yet animate, in his honor. Thus the cry, “Ware the loose-zomby,” that comes to me unbidden when seeing such.
For all his faults, Vander was valiant enough, and was not a bad man to draw as partner for the day’s killing.[1] He was handy with his boarding sword and kept it sharp as could be. Though all knew his propensity for greed and the danger inherent in the sticking of his silly blue-bannered waiflet poles, he was both loyal and protective of the partner he fought with, and was known more often than not to abandon his waiflet-sticking in order to come to his fighting partner’s aid. But remember, dear reader, that ever are men remembered by that which defines them over that which they do, for though Vander was more than brave, and honest after his own fashion, yet he was a greedy man and had in equal measure both aptitude and tragedy; his folly was his affectation.
[1]I do believe Bat had the right of it in his semantical protest. Here I say “killing,” for simplicity’s sake, but how can one kill that which is without life? It is but too awkward to say otherwise, and so, “killing” must suffice. The zomby by his very existence defies even language, damn him. And there is but fine example, for how can such a creature be damned if it holds no soul? And if, God forbid, the soul is in some wise trapped within the rotting corpse, it is damned already.
He fought that fateful day with Winnifred, fierce matron of forty years and few are the fighters I have met who were fiercer or smarter. Winnifred had lost her three sons and husband to the plague, and so I had a fond spot for her in my heart. She had offered to swing the killing blow to Vander at the close of that drab day, but I demurred, for as de facto commander, the duty of despatching infected members of our troupe was mine, and had I delegated such duty to another, it would have reduced my esteem among our group. I would not shirk my duty in this, distasteful though it be. True, Vander was ever a vainglorious poltroon, yet still it is no easy thing to kill a man, however deep his flaws, for who among us is flawless? Killing such a one exacts a price. But onward, Ishmael; tell the tale.
We had been roaming in long-drawn Virginia vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over all there stole a hush, a hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lay sleeping in those
solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixed with a most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole. The mood and modes of spring growth seemed to belie the business in which we were about to engage.
I was a mile to the north, paired with that wondrous Chinaman, Quay Chang, while Vander and Winnifred had been engaged with a smallish group of zombies to the north—no less than twelve—when Vander made his fatal mistake. They had been fighting in a swift and ever shifting, back-to-back stance as taught us by Quay Chang, with but a dozen feet between them. Winnifred had lopped the head from the shoulders of an especially rotten zomby, its eyehole squirming with fat maggots; its body dropped, but the head rolled behind Winnie and there slavered. Landing with eyes upright, it could see Vander chopping away at its vile kin with his boarding sword.
At the same instant, before their shifting pattern had moved on, Vander delivered a mighty blow the the zomby he faced, cleaving its skull in twain. When the zomby dropped, he bent to stick it with one of his silly waiflet poles, for it was a well-dressed zomby, and gold glinted in its broken-toothed maw. But the corpse just slain had fallen next to the decapitated, yet still-animate head of Winnifred’s zomby, which then bit Vander as he planted his pole; but only enough to break the skin; only enough for Vander to know his life was forfeit.
To his credit, Vander did not attempt to hide his small wound, and for that brave face is he redeemed in my heart for all prior foolishness. To his further credit, after receiving his grievous scratch, Vander embarked on a berserker rampage as often happens to those so bitten, and in short order he had decimated the remaining zombies (there were, in fact, ten of them remaining). During this, Vander’s tears coursed down his cheeks, and continued to do so until I stove in his skull with Blackie, for we were out of moonshine, the preferred method of suicide in the Militia.
Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale Page 35
