I peered and pryed about
the Devil-Dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally,
going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment,
and then decided that this was the very ship for us.
You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;--
square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots,
and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old
craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school,
rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look
about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms
of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French
grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable
bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan,
where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood
stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient
decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone
in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her
old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to
the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.
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