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1(As told at the Golden Inn.) The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some noted
2four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travellers than in any other part. It was not very long after
3speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by
4Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the
5White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with
6the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to
7overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the
8secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret
9part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederate
10white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but
11the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he
12could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod
13who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter,
14that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. Interweaving in its
15proper place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now
16proceed to put on lasting record. *The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by
17whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin. For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once
18narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled
19piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms with
20me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time. "Some two years
21prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of
22Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn.
23She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it was
24observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But
25the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore
26being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not
27find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her
28cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and
29not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain,
30making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
31"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship
32would founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at them, those
33six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well
34nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in
35perfect safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of
36Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
37"'Lakeman!--Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?' said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of
38grass. "On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of
39all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large and stout as any that ever
40sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been
41nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their
42interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and
43Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed
44varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do;
45in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to
46our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by
47batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories;
48at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams;
49for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of
50kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported
51furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago
52villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech
53canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what
54shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its
55shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of
56an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket
57beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your
58contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the
59latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this
60Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common
61decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained
62harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt--but,
63gentlemen, you shall hear. "It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island
64haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps every
65day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of
66pumping their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck happen to forget his
67duty in that respect, the probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of
68all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen,
69is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of
70considerable length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is
71afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless
72latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
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