The same, I say, because in all these cases
the native American literally provides the brains, the rest
of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number
of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward
bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews
from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner,
the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at
the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew.
Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is,
there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen.
They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too,
I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men,
but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.
Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!
An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea,
and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in
the Pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from
which not very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip--
he never did--oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy!
On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere long see him,
beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for,
to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels,
and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here,
hailed a hero there!
CHAPTER 28
Ahab
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches
was seen of Captain Ahab.
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