CHAPTER 107

  The Carpenter

  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-hand, 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 landbird 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 oarsmen 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 kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He

was a pure manipulater; 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.