Chapter 95.00: CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.

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CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
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It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew; an
event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly
merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy
of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.

Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some
few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work
the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing,
these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats’
crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous
wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was
so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by
abbreviation. Poor Pip! Ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his
tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.

In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in
one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and
torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom
very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his
tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer,
freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year’s calendar should
show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New
Year’s Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was
brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous
ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life’s
peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had
somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his
brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily
subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange
wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural
lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once
enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green; and at melodious
even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! Had turned the round horizon into one
star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended
against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful
glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its
most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then
lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out
those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond,
once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel
stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story.

It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb’s after-oarsman
chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and,
temporarily, Pip was put into his place.

The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but
happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing
him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to
the utmost, for he might often find it needful.

Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the
fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened,
in this instance, to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The involuntary
consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the
boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming against
his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become entangled in
it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant the stricken whale
started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto! Poor
Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged
there by the line, which had taken several turns around his chest and
neck.

Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated
Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended
its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, exclaimed
interrogatively, “Cut?” Meantime Pip’s blue, choked face plainly looked,
Do, for God’s sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a minute,
this entire thing happened.

“Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was
saved.

So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by
yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these irregular
cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still
half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially
gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat,
Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice
ever is. Now, in general, _Stick to the boat_, is your true motto in
whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when _Leap from the boat_, is still
better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give
undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a
margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and
concluded with a peremptory command, “Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the
Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford to lose
whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you
would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.”
Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow,
yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes
with his benevolence.

But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was
under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time
he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run,
Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas!
Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue
day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all
round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the
extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a
head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern.
Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In
three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb.
Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black
head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the
brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the
practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful
lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the
middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it? Mark, how
when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely
they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he
did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and
he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very
quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards
oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested
by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not
unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called,
is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies
and armies.

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying
whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat
was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that
Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest
chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little
negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The
sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his
soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous
depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and
fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his
hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities,
Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the
firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the
treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him
mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal
reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is
absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent
as his God.

For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that
fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what
like abandonment befell myself.