الفصل الفصل 107 · The Carpenter.

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high

abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But

from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they

seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.

But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of

the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate;

hence, he now comes in person on this stage.

Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging

to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,

alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his

own; the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk

of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with

wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of

the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly

efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually

recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in

uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in

ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the

shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new

tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more

directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover

unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both

useful and capricious.

The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,

was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several

vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times

except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed

athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.

A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole:

the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and

straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage

strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of

right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter

makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the

carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars

to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his

big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the

constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the

carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out

pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there;

but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded

operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter

signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.

Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent

and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he

deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But

while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with

such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue

some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For

nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal

stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the

surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general

stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while

pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace,

and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was

this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an

all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an

old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked

now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have

served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded

forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a

life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had

gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small

outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a

stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born

babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next.

You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him

involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did

not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he

had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or

uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal

process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one,

must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was

like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, _multum in

parvo_, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little

swelled—of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of

various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls,

pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted

to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open

that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him

up by the legs, and there they were.

Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,

was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a

common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously

did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few

drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it

had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same

unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept

him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an

unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his

body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking

all the time to keep himself awake.