Chương Chương 96 · The Try-Works.

Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly

distinguished by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the

most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the

completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were

transported to her planks.

The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most

roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,

fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and

mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The

foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly

secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all

sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased

with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened

hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in

number, and each of several barrels’ capacity. When not in use, they

are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone

and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the

night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil

themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them—one

man in each pot, side by side—many confidential communications are

carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound

mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod,

with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first

indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies

gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from

any point in precisely the same time.

Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare

masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of

the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted

with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented

from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir

extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel

inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as

fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct

from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.

It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were

first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee

the business.

“All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the

works.” This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting

his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said

that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed

for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of

quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out,

the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still

contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed

the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming

misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by

his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is

horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you

must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor

about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells

like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the

pit.

By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the

carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean

darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce

flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and

illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek

fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to

some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the

bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad

sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and

folded them in conflagrations.

The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide

hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of

the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge

pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding

pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted,

curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled

away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of

the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.

Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden

hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the

watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the

fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny

features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards,

and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were

strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they

narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror

told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards

out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their

front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged

forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the

ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further

and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully

champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on

all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden

with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of

darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s

soul.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently

guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that

interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the

madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend

shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at

last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to

that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a

midnight helm.

But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)

thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was

horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller

smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of

sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were

open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and

mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all

this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed

but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle

lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and

then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression,

that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to

any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered

feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the

tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in

some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me?

thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was

fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In

an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying

up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how

grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and

the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy

hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first

hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its

redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun,

the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking

flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the

glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s

accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of

deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean,

which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this

earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow

in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With

books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the

truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered

steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold

of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and

jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of

operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils

all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais

as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit

down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably

wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of

understanding shall remain” (_i.e._, even while living) “in the

congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it

invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom

that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a

Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest

gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny

spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is

in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle

is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.