CHAPTER 50

  Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah

  "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 dancer;

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 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 Robbins, indulged in mundane amours.