CHAPTER 96

  The Try-Works

  Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly

distinguished by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of

the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the

completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were

transported to her planks.

  The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the

most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar

strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of

brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height.

The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is

firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on

all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is

cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping,

battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots,

two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in use,

they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with

soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls.

During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them

and coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in

polishing them- one man in each pot, side by side- many confidential

communications are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place

also for profound mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand

try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round

me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in

geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for

example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time.

  Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare

masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths

of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted

with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented

from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir

extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a

tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with

water as fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they

open direct from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.

  It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works

were first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to

oversee the business.

  "All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the

works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting

his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it

said in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed

for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of

quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out,

the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still

contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters

feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a

self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own

fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own

smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must,

and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an

unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the

vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of

judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

  By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the

carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean

darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce

flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and

illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek

fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to

some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the

bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with

broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish

frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.

  The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide

hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of

the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers. With huge

pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding

pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted,

curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke

rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a

pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into

their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of

the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a

sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking

into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in

their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and

sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of

their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious

emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy

adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their

uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames

from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers

wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as

the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and

dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further

into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed

the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all

sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with

fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of

darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac

commander's soul.

  So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours

silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for

that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness,

the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the

fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these

at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to

yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me

at a midnight helm.

  But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since

inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing

sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The

jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was

the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought

my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the

lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But,

spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by;

though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by

the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but

a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness.

Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I

stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from

all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over

me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy

conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted.

My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I

had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship's stern, with my

back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just

in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very

probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this

unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of

being brought by the lee!

  Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with

thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the

first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire,

when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the

natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in

the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler,

relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp- all others

but liars!

  Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's

accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of

deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean,

which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of

this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than

sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true- not true, or

undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of

Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is

the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful

world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he

who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards,

and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young,

Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a

care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore

jolly;- not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break

the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

  But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of

understanding shall remain" (i.e. even while living) "in the

congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it

invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom

that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a

Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the

blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in

the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that

gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the

mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even

though they soar.