Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

But this fine young savage - this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the captain's cabin.

 

[Old Thunder]

They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him.

 

[Old Thunder]

But like Czar Peter* content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen.

*Peter the Great (1672 - 1725), Russian emperor; when young he traveled and worked abroad for experience.

 

[Old Thunder]

For at bottom - so he told me - he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were.

 

[Old Thunder]

But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens.

 

[Old Thunder]

Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.

 

[Old Thunder]

Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

 

[Old Thunder]

And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish.

 

[Old Thunder]

Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.

 

[Old Thunder]

By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts.