THE CARPENTER.
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of
the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate;
hence, he now comes in person on this stage.
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging
to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,
alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his
own; the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk
of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with
wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of
the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly
efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually
recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in
uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness
in ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming
the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck,
or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters
more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover
unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both
useful and capricious.
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its
hole: the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and
straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage
strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of
right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter
makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the
carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion
stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each
oar in his big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the
constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the
carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter
out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated
there; but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded
operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter
signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he
deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans.
But while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished, and
with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem
to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely
so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain
impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded
off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with
the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which
while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its
peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals.
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 certain grizzled wittiness; such as
might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the
bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old carpenter had
been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only
had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small
outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a
stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born
babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next.
You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him
involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did
not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because
he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even
or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal
process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had
one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He
was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, _multum in
parvo_, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little
swelled—of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of
various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls,
pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted
to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open
that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him
up by the legs, and there they were.
Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a
common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously
did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few
drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there
it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this
same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that
kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an
unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his
body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking
all the time to keep himself awake.