In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped
on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast.
And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket,
and the pagan harbors most frequented by the whalemen; and having
now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships
of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped;
Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe,
moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks.
There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man
standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.
Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the
Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him.
As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said,
that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand
men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery,
are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are.
Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the
American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering
forces employed in the construction of the American Canals
and Railroads.
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