LASCAR sailor
By Brahma! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
Maltese sailor (Reclining and shaking his cap)
It’s the waves—the snow’s caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake their tassels soon. Now would all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with them evermore! There’s naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!— as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.
Sicilian sailor (Reclining)
Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet interlacings of the limbs— lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (Nudging.)
Tahitian sailor (Reclining on a mat)
Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee’s peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the villages?—The blast, the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (Leaps to his feet.)
Portuguese sailor
How the sea rolls swashing ‘gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell they’ll go lunging presently.
Danish sailor
Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
4th Nantucket sailor
He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol— fire your ship right into it!
English sailor
Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt him up his whale!
All
Aye! aye!
Old Manx sailor
How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in the sky lurid—like, ye see, all else pitch black.
Daggoo
What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me!
I’m quarried out of it!
Spanish sailor
(Aside.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes me touchy (Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish dark at that. No offence.
Daggoo (Grimly)
None.
St. Jago’s sailor
That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t be, or else in his one case our old Mogul’s fire-waters are somewhat long in working.
5th Nantucket sailor
What’s that I saw—lightning? Yes.
Spanish sailor
No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
Daggoo (Springing)
Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
Spanish sailor (Meeting him)
Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!
All
A row! a row! a row!
Tashtego (With a whiff)
A row a’low, and a row aloft—Gods and men—both brawlers! Humph!
Belfast sailor
A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row!
Plunge in with ye!
English sailor
Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife!
A ring, a ring!
Old Manx sailor
Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad’st thou the ring?
Mate’s voice from the quarter-deck
Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!
All
The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (They scatter.)
Pip (Shrinking under the windlass)
Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects to ’em; they’re on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet— they are your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale—shirr! shirr!—but spoken of once! and only this evening—it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine— that anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh! thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!
Chapter 41
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical,
