Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

She was a thing of trophies.

 

[Old Thunder]

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

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!

 

[Old Thunder]

All noble things are touched with that.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

It seemed only a temporary erection used in port.