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And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command.

A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship so that the insider commanded a complete view forward.

Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the topknot on some old Pottowattamie Sachem's* head. *Chief of a Native American...

It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.

It seemed only a temporary erection used in port.

Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast.

All noble things are touched with that.

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!

The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw.

Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.

Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory.

All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.

A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.

She was a thing of trophies.

She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory.

Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a...

But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.

Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett* bled. *Thomas à Becket (1118-1170), killed by Henry II's men over church policies.

Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne.* *In Cologne Cathedral; supposedly relics of the wise men who bore gifts to infant Jesus.

Her venerable bows looked bearded.