Chapter 29.00: CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.

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CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
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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 easy-going, unfearing
man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of
grave pedlars, 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. 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 into it, serves to brace the ship
against the icy concussions of those battering seas.

Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were 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
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 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!