CHAPTER 27

  Knights and Squires

  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 whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter were but a

dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular about

the comfortable arrangements 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 fail of grave peddlers, 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 early 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 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 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 ringbolts, 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 the 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 literally 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!