/biz/ - Business & Finance

CHAPTER 9

The Sermon


Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority
ordered the scattered people to condense. "Star board gangway,
there! side away to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard!
Midships! midships!"

There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches,
and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again,
and every eye on the preacher.

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his
large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes,
and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling
and praying at the bottom of the sea.

The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
And lift me deepening down to doom.

I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell--
Oh, I was plunging to despair.

In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints--
No more the whale did me confine.

With speed he flew to my relief,
As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God.

My song for ever shall record
That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power.


Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high
above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued;
the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible,
and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said:
"Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter
of Jonah--'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'"

CHAPTER 8

The Pulpit


I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew
back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all
the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old
man was the chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple,
so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favorite.
He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for
many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry.
At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter
of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into
a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles,
there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom--
the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February's snow.
No one having previously heard his history, could for the first time
behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest, because there
were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about him,
imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led.
When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella,
and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin
hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth
jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight
of the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and
overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up in a little
space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit,
he quietly approached the pulpit.

CHAPTER 7

The Chapel
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel,
and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean
or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot.
I am sure that I did not.

Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out
upon this special errand. The sky had changed from clear,
sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my
shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way
against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small scattered
congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A muffled
silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.
Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other,
as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.
The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands
of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets,
with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit.
Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not
pretend to quote:

SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
JOHN TALBOT,
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard
Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,
November 1st, 1836.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8DiDH4CHBA

CHAPTER 6

The Street


If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish
an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society
of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking
my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.

In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently
offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts.
Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will
sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown
to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees
have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street
and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors;
but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners;
savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.
It makes a stranger stare.

CHAPTER 4

The Counterpane


Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm
thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner.
You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was
of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles;
and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan
labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade--
owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun
and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times--
this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip
of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm
did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt,
they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense
of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.

My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was
a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;
whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.
The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other--
I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little
sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other,
was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,--
my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off
to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,
the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully.
But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room
in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to
kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.