Chapter 52.00: CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.

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CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
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“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg you
would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my
timber toe. Oh! He’s a wonderful old man!”

“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. “If
his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That
would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the 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 the voyage, it is right
for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the
chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes,
whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest
of the fight.

But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that
with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man
to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of
the Pequod must have plainly thought not.

Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his
entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the
chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his
orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned
to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for Captain Ahab
to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s crew, he well knew
that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the
Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s crew from them, nor had he
in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken
private measures of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco’s
published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure
when, after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded the
customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time
after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of
making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the
spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which
when the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when
all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an
extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he
evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is
sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the
knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how
often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the
semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel
gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these
things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But
almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in
Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he
had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person.
But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as
to any boat’s crew being assigned to that boat.

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away;
for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers;
and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found
tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats,
canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself
might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the
captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the
forecastle.

But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were
somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a
muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this,
by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked
with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a
half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority
over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air
concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people
in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but
the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic
communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those
insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern
days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal
generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection,
and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as
real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and
to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed
consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical
Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.