Chapter
Ambergris
Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learnéd. In no small part confounded somewhat by the place in which Captain Joshua Coffin found his 362 ounces of ambergris, in the anus of a female sperm whale killed of the coast of Guinea, West Africa.
Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastilles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boatloads of Pennyroyal’s Purgative Pills, and then running out of harm’s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.
I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors’ trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing more than pieces of small squid beaks embalmed in that manner.
Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk.[1] Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.
[1]Paracelsus (Phillipus Andreaus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541), inventor of laudanum—his recipe included ambergris, opium, crushed pearls, musk, and amber—wrote that human excrement contained “all the noble essences,” and did say that, “decay is the midwife of very great things.” *
*Paracelsus did also believe a homunculus could be made from putrefied human semen and horse
manure, as he wrote in his De Natura Rerum.
I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman’s two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate?
I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course. The consequence is that upon breaking into the hold and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old city grave-yard for the foundations of a Lying-in-Hospital, or a battlefield littered with zomby corpses, just after the first purging fire is lit, for then you have the stench of the rotting zomby coupled with the fouler stink of its burning corpse on the wind.[1] In yet another parallel between the fishery and the Militia, this stench is a source of the disdain leveled unfairly against each necessary endeavor.
[1]While the opinion that all whales smell bad is simply false, however reasonable yet uninformed that conclusion may have been, it is as true as true can be that all zombies do smell quite horrible, and the older they get, the more their flesh begins to deliquesce, the worse the smell. In one sense, so to speak, this is wonderful providence, for the noisome nature of the rotting zomby forecasts his appearance, if only one has the good fortune to be upwind of him.
I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer, fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless.
Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town to do honour to Alexander the Great?
The truth is, living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised by any smell that a normal man may have which, it must be granted, can be rather unpleasant all on its own. Look to thine own stink, says Ishmael, and cast not thy nose skyward in disdain at another’s, most especially if only imagined, for all send up a stink of one sort or another, is it not so? Would that all such stinks had as their byproduct a thing so fine as ambergris!
Ahab’s Log: Chapter
Added Ballast
Ahab’s Log: November 7, 1851
Thine eyes roll round the room and find no refuge. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, seem all awry. Oh! so thy conscience hangs in thee! So it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!, like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him.
Screwed at its axis against the side, the swinging lamp slightly oscillates in the dim cabin; and the Pequod settles lower in the sea with the added ballast of the oil boiling above;—that oil, but a day ago delving through the deep as animate matter—even now it burns here, steady as thy purpose burns in thee; and as the flame, thou dost set all in dancing motion about thee, and yet both thou and the flame maintain a permanent obliquity with reference to that which surrounds; though, in truth, both be infallibly straight, both makest obvious the false, lying levels among which they hang. And as that flame consumes both wick and wax, so thy purpose and thy quest consumes thee.
Fate hast delivered a cruel and telling blow ‘gainst the Jeroboam, as Fedallah did predict upon quitting
her deck; and this from no special augury, for Ahab, too, saw the doom writ there in that long-togged scaramouch and incompetent Captain Mayhew. Today, not two weeks after the blasted words of Gabriel shook thee to thy core, we bespoke Captain Frost aboard the Hermes; they had come upon the Jeroboam, slack-sailed and wallowing in a following sea. As they passed, they saw naught but zombies upon her decks, and watched many of the vile fiends fall off and sink, nevermore to rise.
What wondrous abyssal depths did those zombies sink to, and in that crushing darkness—as dark and crushing as thy secrets—is even the Kraken safe from such monsters as these? Might not that zomby walk ashore in some distant Azore and spread the plague anew? Leave it, Ahab; thy unsleeping brain is battered and spins exhaustingly in ever wider circles.
At last amid this whirl of woe ye feel, a deep stupor steals over thee, as over the man who bleeds to death; for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings with thy quest, thy quill dips as does thy head, and thy prodigy of ponderous misery drags thee drowning down to nightmare sleep.
Chapter
The Castaway
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 to harpoon whales. 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 little Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine, so gloomy-jolly.
In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy, the ship’s steward, 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 very bright, with a pleasant, genial, jolly brightness. 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 showed him off to ten times the natural lustre; a lustre with which he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his glad 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 in the ambergris affair that Stubb’s after-oarsman chanced 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, poor little Pip was assailed by yells and execrations from the crew, and these he took to heart. 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 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 hundreds of times what you’ll make on this voyage, Pip. 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 practiced 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 poor little Pip 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 is marked with the same ruthless detestation first seen in the schoolyard, and grown to full flower
in 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 boy went about the deck a bit cracked, and in addition to the portents and augury that came from him, a notion took him—getting through one of those cracks, as it were—and the notion was that he, Pip, was a zomby.
Though they called him Shammy[1], I knew he was not, for with these hands was I forced to kill such a one after long observation and no few attempts to succour that afflicted wight. Pip, if he was at all afflicted with this sad malady, it was related only as a passing sneeze to a raging deadly fever.
[1]A “Sammy Ireland,”—named after the master forger previously mentioned—is also known as a “Shammy;” one who believes himself a zomby though he has no disease about him. Though without contagion, yet such a one acts accordingly, attacking and attempting to devour his fellow man. The bitter irony is that the afflicted wight threatens real danger to himself and others. A human with all the cunning therein, and that cunning directed by zombie impulses, this a fearsome creature indeed. I have seen one, and killed it. There is no cure I have heard of, save death. The Shammy was first described by professor Brooks in his fine treatise on that unfortunate subject.
Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale Page 37
