บทที่ บทที่ 50 · Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.

“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg

you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole

with my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”

“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask.

“If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing.

That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other

left, you know.”

“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”

Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering

the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it

is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active

perils of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in

their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried

into the thickest of the fight.

But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that

with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;

considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and

extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then

comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed

man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the

joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.

Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of

his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of

the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving

his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually

apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for

Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s

crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads

of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s

crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.

Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all that

matter. Until Cabaco’s published discovery, the sailors had little

foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of

port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the

whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then

found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his

own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even

solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is

running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was

observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra

coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better

withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety

he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it

is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing

the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was

observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee

fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the

carpenter’s chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a

little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and

curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this

particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to

the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his

intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition

did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew

being assigned to that boat.

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned

away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such

unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown

nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of

whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway

creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,

oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that

Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin

to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable

excitement in the forecastle.

But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate

phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were

somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a

muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like

this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be

linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort

of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even

authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an

indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as

civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their

dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide

among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles

to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable

countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the

ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the memory

of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his

descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real

phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and

to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed

consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the

uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.