Chapter 109.00: CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.

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CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
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Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the
high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate; hence,
he now comes in person on this stage.

Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to
whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent, alike
experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the
carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those
numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an
auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic
remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in
those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a
large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in uncivilized and
far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:—repairing
stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars,
inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks,
and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special
business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of
conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.

The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.

A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the
carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files
it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is
made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and
cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking
cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a
soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon the
blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood, the
carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy
to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears. Another has
the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his
bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow unmanageably winces
under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden
vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have
him draw the tooth.

Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and
without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed
but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now
upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness
of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon
vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man
more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were;
impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of
things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the
whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes,
still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig
foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him,
involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet
was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian,
wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled
wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight
watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old
carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro,
not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever
small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a
stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born
babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You
might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a
sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to
work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been
tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but
merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a
pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed
along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those
unreasoning but still highly useful, _multum in parvo_, Sheffield
contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little swelled—of
a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes,
but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers,
nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of
him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs,
and there they were.

Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was,
after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common
soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its
duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of
hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided
for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same
unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a
great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel,
which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box
and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep
himself awake.