He was a pure manipulator; his mind, if he had ever had one, will need to have early oozed alongside into the muscles of his fingers. Moreover: we are to contemplate, that from the presumed great longevity of whales, their in all probability attaining the age of a century and extra, therefore at anybody time period, several distinct grownup generations have to be contemporary. But from the same level, take mankind in mass, and for essentially the most half, they seem a mob of pointless duplicates, each contemporary and hereditary. So, if his superiors needed to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they needed to do was to open that a part of him, and the screw was quick: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they had been. Nor, on the time, had it didn’t enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was however the direct situation of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as essentially the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his sort as inevitably because the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with each felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like.
In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be once more flooded, just like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will nonetheless survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies. He was a stript summary; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; residing without premeditated reference to this world or the following. For not to talk of his readiness in peculiar duties:-repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the form of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails within the aspect planks, and other miscellaneous issues extra instantly pertaining to his particular enterprise; he was furthermore unhesitatingly knowledgeable in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, each useful and capricious. The precipitating method by which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to his personal particular person. But most humble although he was, and far from furnishing an instance of the excessive, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate; therefore, he now comes in individual on this stage. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;-yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a sure grizzled wittiness; reminiscent of may need served to cross the time in the course of the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark.
Was it that this outdated carpenter had been a life-lengthy wanderer, whose a lot rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is extra, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have initially pertained to him? And there appears no purpose to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for 1000’s of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all of the successive monarchs of the East-if they nonetheless survive there in nice numbers, way more might the great whale outlast all searching, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is exactly twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea mixed. A belaying pin is found too massive to be simply inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it into certainly one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway recordsdata it smaller. But, apart from the applying to him of the generic comment above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly environment friendly in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies regularly recurring in a large ship, upon a three or 4 years’ voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas.
And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him provided with all of the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful collection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff is likely to be secured. Captain Peleg’s bruited cause for this thing appeared under no circumstances enough; though, certainly, as touching all Ahab’s deeper half, each revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory mild. And, indeed, it appeared small matter for marvel, that for all his pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at instances give cautious heed to the situation of that lifeless bone upon which he partly stood. And when after gaining his personal deck, and his personal pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled spherical with an pressing command to the steersman (it was, as ever, one thing about his not steering inflexibly enough); then, the already shaken ivory obtained such a further twist and wrench, that although it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab didn’t deem it solely trustworthy.