CHAPTER 93

  The Castaway

  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 shipkeepers, whose

province it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the

whale. As a general thing, these shipkeepers 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 color,

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 leeringly 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.