Moby-Dick

he 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.
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.