.. < chapter xxvii 2  KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES >


     Stubb was the second mate.  He

was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a

Cape-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 imminent

crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner

engaged for the year.  Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his

whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew

all invited guests.  He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of

his 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 his

unpitying 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 most

exasperated monster.  Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of

death into an easy chair.  What he thought of death itself, there is no

telling.  Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if

he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no

doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to

tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find

out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.  What, perhaps, with other

things, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off

with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the

ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious

good-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.  You

would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his

nose as without his pipe.

.. <p 116 >

He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy

reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in

succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then

loading them again to be in readiness anew.  For, when Stubb dressed, instead

of 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 his

peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether

ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the

numberless 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 have

operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.  The third mate was Flask, a native

of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard.  A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very

pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great

Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it

was 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 their

majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension

of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the

wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat,

requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and

trouble in order to kill and boil.  This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of

his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these

fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a

jolly joke that lasted that length of time.  As a carpenter's nails are

divided 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 last

long.  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 in

Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers

inserted in it, served to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those

battering seas.  Now these three mates --Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were

.. <p 117 >

momentous men.  They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of

the Pequod's boats as headsmen.  In that grand order of battle in which

Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,

these three headsmen were as captains of companies.  Or, being armed with

their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even

as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.  And since in this famous

fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always

accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures

provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted,

or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between

the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in

this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what

headsman each of them belonged.  first of all was queequeg, whom Starbuck, the

chief mate, had selected for his squire.  But Queequeg is already known.  Next

was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of

Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of

red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with

many of her most daring harpooneers.  In the fishery, they usually go by the

generic name of Gay-Headers.  Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high

cheek bones, and black rounding eyes --for an Indian, Oriental in their

largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression --all this

sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those

proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had

scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main.  But no longer

snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now

hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of

the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires.  To look at the

tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the

superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild

Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air.  Tashtego was Stubb

the second mate's squire.  Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic,

coal-black

.. <p 118 >

negro-savage, with a lion-like tread --an Ahasuerus to behold.  Suspended from

his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them

ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them.  In his

youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely

bay on his native coast.  And never having been anywhere in the world but in

Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and

having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of

owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; daggoo retained

all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in

all the pomp of six feet five in his socks.  There was a corporeal humility

in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag

come 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-man

beside him.  As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at

the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast

employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty

nearly all the officers are.  Herein it is the same with the American whale

fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the

engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and

Railroads.  The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American

liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying

the muscles.  No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores,

where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their

crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores.  In like manner, the

Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland

Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew.  Upon the passage

homewards, they drop them there again.  How it is, there is no telling, but

Islanders seem to make the best whalemen.  They were nearly all Islanders in

the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common

continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his

own.  Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!  An

Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the

.. <p 119 >

isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the

pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many

of them ever come back.  Black Little Pip --he never did --oh, no!  he went

before.  Poor Alabama boy!  On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere

long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when

sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with

angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a

hero there!

.. <p 119 >

