A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are
touched with that.
Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority,
in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I
saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent,
or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed
only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape,
some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber
black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of
the right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle
of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other,
and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres
waved to and fro like a top-knot on some old Pottowotamie Sachem's head.
A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so that
the insider commanded a complete view forward.
And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found
one who by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who,
it being noon, and the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying
respite from the burden of command. He was seated on an
old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving;
and the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing
of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.
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