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Updated: May 27, 2025
"Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers it takes the shark out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good.
But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started what that is none know but those who have tried it.
This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators? "Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."
I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves.
In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain's more inferior subalterns. Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this the first lives aft, the last forward.
But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed "I vum it's Sunday you won't see that harpooneer to-night; he's come to anchor somewhere come along then; do come; won't ye come?"
So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but as we have elsewhere seen mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see to their stowage.
I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.
As he spoke the whale rose about three miles to windward of them, not far from the boat that led the chase. The men in the boat were seen to bend to their oars, as Captain Samson said, "with a will." Another moment and the harpooneer stood up in the bow.
At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, &c., consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale fishery.
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