Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah
"Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb; "if I had but oneleg you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop theplug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he's a wonderful old man!""I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account," saidFlask. "If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a differentthing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part ofthe 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 thevoyage, it is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life inthe active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane's soldiers often arguedwith tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought tobe carried into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Consideringthat with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of dancer;considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great andextraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, thencomprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimedman to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, thejoint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would thinklittle of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmlessvicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene ofaction and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have aboat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt-above all for Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that sameboat's crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never enteredthe heads of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had notsolicited a boat's crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted hisdesires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures ofhis own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco's publisheddiscovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when,after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded thecustomary business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when sometime after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself inthe matter of making thole-pins with his own hands for what wasthought to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously cuttingthe small wooden skewers, which when the line is running out arepinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was observed inhim, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat ofsheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstandthe pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety heevinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as itis sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's bow forbracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; whenit was observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitaryknee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and withthe carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and straightened ita little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interestand curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that thisparticular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view tothe ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed hisintention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such asupposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to anyboat's crew being assigned to that boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soonwaned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and thensuch unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from theunknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlawsof whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castawaycreatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; thatBeelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabinto chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduableexcitement in the forecastle.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while thesubordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, thoughstill as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbanedFedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in amannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soonevinced himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, sofar as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, butit might have been even authority over him; all this none knew, butone cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was sucha creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone onlysee in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom nowand then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especiallythe Oriental isles to the east of the continent- those insulated,immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern daysstill preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primalgenerations, when the memory of the first man was a distinctrecollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came,eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moonwhy they were created and to what end; when though, according toGenesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, thedevils also, add the uncanonical Robbins, indulged in mundane amours.
