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Updated: May 13, 2025
"Ain't going aboard, then?" "Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?" "No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that," said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances. "Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing.
His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth. A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands.
But I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there. "Gracious! Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.
Glancing upwards, he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them.
In short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with their own scythes though in no wise obliged to furnish them even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon. Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor.
But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come.
Capting! yelled the bumpkin, running toward that officer; "Capting, Capting, here's the devil." "Hallo, you sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know you might have killed that chap?" "What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected. And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.
Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give. Biographical. Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he asked.
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