Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded
another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the
principal owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his
chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it,
all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by
anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead.
She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck
heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies.
A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones
of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished
like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale,
inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.
Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled
over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend
helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass,
curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.
The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like
the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw.
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