Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the.
Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years’ voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman’s career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.
Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade, sir.
I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.
I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.
I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
Then, if the hull go down, there’ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun!
Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh!
What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?
Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear?
Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he’s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he’s queer, says Stubb; he’s queer – queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time – queer, sir – queer, queer, very queer.
Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
Sperm, sperm’s the play!
I’ve part changed my flesh since that time, why not my mind?
CHAPTER 92 Ambergris Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject.
As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the tower serially disposed in order of their magnitude: gannets, black and speckled haglets, jays, sea hens, sperm-whale birds, gulls of all varieties – thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in senatorial array; while, sprinkled over all, like an ever-repeated fly in a great piece of broidery, the stormy petrel or Mother Cary’s chicken sounds his continual challenge and alarm.
My lord, it is easier for some men to be saints, than for others not to be sinners.
No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes.
Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth’s pills, and then running out of harm’s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.
In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.