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Updated: May 7, 2025


The subject came up one day while we were crossing the Gulf Stream, and the sea all around us was pretty well covered with patches of yellow weed having much the look of mustard-plasters amidst which a bit of a barnacled spar bobbed along slowly near us, and not far off a new pine plank.

And everywhere leaped and swung the vines thick ropy vines; knotted vines, like knotted cables; slender filament vines; spraying gossamer vines, with gorgeous crimson, purple, and yellow blooms; and long streamers that dipped to trail in the waters. Below them were broad pads of lotus and water lilies; with alligators like barnacled logs, and cormorants swimming about, and bright-eyed waterfowl.

Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were years during which I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the Navy-yard without saying to myself, "The Wasp has come!" and almost thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands.

Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so good a one. In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs.

Then, and for the first time, as I floundered to my feet covered with slime, the blood running down my arms from a scrape against a barnacled stake, I knew that I was drunk. But what of it? Across the channel two strong sailormen lay unconscious in their bunks where I had drunk them. I WAS a man. I was still on my legs, if they were knee-deep in mud. I disdained to get back into the skiff.

Of equal weight and strength, the struggle resolved itself into a question of endurance, as the two men rolled over each other on the barnacled rocks in an effort to break the other's grip and strengthen his own. Unconscious of their surroundings, their heads locked close to their straining bodies, they grappled blindly, working closer to a deep crevice which lay across their path.

Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.

Here it is packed away behind these rotting covers, just the real thing, no respectable stodge; no mere parasitic stuff; not more than a dozen poets; scores of outcasts and vagabonds and the real thing in vagabonds is pretty rare in print, I can tell you. We're all, every one of us, sodden with facts, drugged with the second-hand, and barnacled with respectability until until the touch comes.

No news shall be spoken of, later than the drifting ashore, on the northern coast, of sonic stern-post or figure-head, a barnacled fragment of one of the great galleons of the Spanish Armada. What a tremor would pass through the antique group, if a damp newspaper should suddenly be spread to dry before the fire!

During their voyage through time the words of one's own language become barnacled over with associations so that we cannot see them in their naked purity as we see the words of a foreign tongue. I translated Pride of the Ocean into Vanto del Mare and offered it to Peppino; it seemed to me to gain, but he said I had knocked all the poetry out of it.

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