For instance Moby Dick by Herman Melville is available there and an excerpt from chapter 2 is as follows:
Stubb was the second mate. Hewas a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called aCape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as
they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminentcrisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joinerengaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over hiswhale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crewall invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement ofhis part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box.
When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled hisunpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the mostexasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws ofdeath into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is notelling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, ifhe ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, nodoubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch totumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would findout when he obeyed the order, and not sooner. What, perhaps, with otherthings, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging offwith the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to theground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impiousgood-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose,his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. Youwould almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without hisnose as without his pipe...
He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easyreach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out insuccession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; thenloading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, insteadof first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of hispeculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whetherashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of thenumberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera,some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so,likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might haveoperated as a sort of disinfecting agent. The third mate was Flask, a nativeof Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, verypugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the greatLeviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore itwas a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered.So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of theirmajestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehensionof any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, thewondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat,requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time andtrouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness ofhis made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed thesefish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only ajolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a carpenter's nails aredivided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided.
Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and lastlong. They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form,he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name inArctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbersinserted in it, served to brace the ship against the icy concussions of thosebattering seas. Now these three mates --Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were..
momentous men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three ofthe Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in whichCaptain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed withtheir long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; evenas the harpooneers were flingers of javelins. And since in this famousfishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is alwaysaccompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjuncturesprovides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted,or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists betweenthe two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that inthis place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to whatheadsman each of them belonged. first of all was queequeg, whom Starbuck, thechief mate, had selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known. Nextwas Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory ofMartha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village ofred men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket withmany of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by thegeneric name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his highcheek bones, and black rounding eyes --for an Indian, Oriental in theirlargeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression --all thissufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of thoseproud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, hadscoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longersnuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego nowhunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon ofthe son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at thetawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited thesuperstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wildIndian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubbthe second mate's squire. Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic,coal-black..
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread --an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended fromhis ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called themring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In hisyouth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonelybay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but inAfrica, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; andhaving now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships ofowners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; daggoo retainedall his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks inall the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humilityin looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flagcome to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro,Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-manbeside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that atthe present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mastemployed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though prettynearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whalefishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and theengineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals andRailroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native Americanliberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplyingthe muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores,where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment theircrews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, theGreenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the ShetlandIslands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passagehomewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, butIslanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders inthe Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the commoncontinent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of hisown. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! AnAnacharsis Clootz deputation from all the..
isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in thepequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very manyof them ever come back. Black Little Pip --he never did --oh, no! he wentbefore. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall erelong see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, whensent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in withangels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed ahero there!..
No comments:
Post a Comment