Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

I peered and pryed about the Devil-Dam; from her, hopped over to the ***-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.

 

[Old Thunder]

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod.

 

[Old Thunder]

She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her.

 

[Old Thunder]

Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia.

 

[Old Thunder]

Her venerable bows looked bearded.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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 quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's* carved buckler or bedstead.

*Figure in Icelandic legend; his exploits are carved on his bedstead.

 

[Old Thunder]

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