Oh! he's a wonderful old man!"
"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account,"
said Flask. "If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be
a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee,
and good part of the other left, you know."
"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether,
considering the paramount importance of his life to the
success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain
to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase.
So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes,
whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into
the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect.
Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight
in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales
is always under great and extraordinary difficulties;
that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril;
under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter
a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners
of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think
little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless
vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene
of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab
to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular
headsman in the hunt--above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied
with five extra men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew
that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners
of the Pequod.
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