斯塔布是二副。他是科德角本地人；因此，按照当地习惯，被称为科德角人。他是个随遇而安的家伙；既不怯懦也不英勇；危难临头，总是一副漠然处之的神气；即便在追猎最千钧一发的关头，也像受雇一年的木工般沉着镇定地苦干。他脾气好、随和、漫不经心，主持自己的捕鲸艇，仿佛最致命的搏斗不过是一顿晚餐，而船员全是受邀的宾客。他对自己那部分艇内舒舒服服的布置，讲究得就像老驿车夫在意自己驾驶座的暖和。贴近鲸鱼、在生死相搏的锁缠中，他冷酷地、随手地挥舞无情的鱼叉，如同吹口哨的补锅匠摆弄铁锤。与最暴怒的巨兽舷靠舷时，他会哼起古老的里加迪格小调。长久的习惯，对这斯塔布而言，已将死神之口化作了安乐椅。他怎样想死亡本身，无从知晓。他究竟想没想过，也成疑问；但若饱餐一顿后偶尔心思飘向那边，无疑，如好水手般，他当那是值班的呼唤，叫人爬上桅顶，在那儿忙活点什么——奉命后自会知晓，绝早不了。
或许，加上别的因由，令斯塔布这般随和、无畏，在满是佝偻负包、严肃小贩的世间，还乐呵呵地扛着生活重担前行；是什么助长了他那近乎不敬的快活脾气；那东西必是他的烟斗。因为，如同他的鼻子，他那短黑小烟斗也是脸上固定特征之一。你几乎会同样料到他出铺没带鼻子，如同料到他没带烟斗。他铺边整排放着备好烟丝的烟斗，插在架上，手一伸就够着；每次钻铺，便依次抽个精光，一支接一支点到底；再装好，以备新用。因为，斯塔布穿衣，不先腿伸裤管，而是先嘴叼烟斗。
我说这不停抽烟至少是他特别脾性一因；因众所周知，这尘世空气，岸上或海上，惨遭无数吐气而亡凡人的无名苦痛严重污染；如霍乱时有人嘴掩樟脑手帕行走；同理，对一切凡人忧患，斯塔布的烟草烟或可作某种消毒之剂。
三副是弗拉斯克，玛莎葡萄园提斯伯里本地人。矮壮红润小伙，对鲸极好斗，似觉巨兽亲身且世袭地冒犯了他；故遇之必歼，成了他荣誉所在。他对巨兽威严体量、神秘行径的惊异感全无；对遭逢可能的危险也浑无觉察；在他可怜看来，奇鲸不过放大老鼠，或至少水鼠，只需略施迂回、费点时光力气，便能杀而煮之。这无知无觉的无畏，令他对鲸事略带戏谑；追鱼只为取乐；绕合恩角三年航程，不过逗趣玩笑，长那么久罢了。如木匠钉分锻钉与切钉；人亦可如此分。小弗拉斯克是锻钉类；打得紧、撑得久。船上唤他“主柱”，因形似北极捕鲸人称此名短方木；借插入的辐射侧木，抵住碎海冰撞。
这三位副手——斯塔巴克、斯塔布、弗拉斯克，皆是举足轻重之人。依通例，他们分掌裴廓德号三艇，为头领。在亚哈船长或排兵布阵、下扑鲸群的大序中，三头领如连长。或持长利鲸矛，如精选三枪骑；正如鱼叉手乃标枪投者。
且因这名渔事中，每位副手或头领，如古时哥特骑士，总伴艇舵手或鱼叉手，急时前矛扭坏或撞弯，便递新矛；加之二者常亲密友善；故此处当记裴廓德号鱼叉手是谁、各属何头领。
首推魁魁格，大副斯塔巴克选作侍从。但魁魁格已熟知。
次为塔什特戈，盖伊角纯血印第安人，玛莎葡萄园最西岬，那儿仍存红人村末裔，久供南塔基特邻岛以许多大胆鱼叉手。渔事里统称盖伊角人。塔什特戈长瘦黑发、高颧骨、圆黑眼——印第安人里，大而东方、闪而南极——足证承自豪迈猎祖未污之血，昔持弓扫新英格兰巨麋原林。今不嗅兽迹，塔什特戈追海巨鲸；子之无误叉，代父无误箭。看他黄褐柔蛇肢肌，你几乎信早清教徒迷信，半认这野印第安为空气权王子之子。塔什特戈是二副斯塔布侍从。
鱼叉手第三是达古，巨黑野人，狮步——观如亚哈随鲁。耳悬两金环，大得水手叫系缆栓，说系顶帆索。少时达古自愿上泊本土孤湾捕鲸船。除非洲、南塔基特、渔人常泊异港，世间未至；多年率勇渔生于慎选人之船主下；达古存蛮德，如长颈鹿挺立，甲板行六尺五袜中威。仰望他有肉谦；白人立前如白旗乞堡休。奇者，这帝黑奴亚哈随鲁·达古，是小弗拉斯克侍从，傍之弗如棋子。至裴廓德号余众，且说，今美渔前桅万男中本土生不半，官几尽本。美渔如美军、海军商船、开河筑路工力同。同者，本土美慷慨供脑，世余慷慨供肌。不少渔人属亚速尔，南塔基特出船常泊补硬岸农。格陵兰船出赫尔或伦敦，泊设得兰补员。归途复落。何故岛人最善渔，无从说。裴廓德号几尽岛人，亦孤洲者，我谓不认共陆、各居独洲。今同龙骨联，何等孤洲众！海诸岛、地诸端之克洛茨使团，伴老亚哈赴裴廓德号，向世界 grievance 之栏——多未归。黑小皮普——他未归——哦不！他先去。可怜阿拉巴马童！ grim 裴廓德号艏楼，汝将见击铃鼓；预永时，召至高巨舰，命与天使击鼓荣；此谓怯，彼谓雄！
Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his
crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about
the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very
death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and
off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his
old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated
monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death
into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no
telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question;
but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a
comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a
sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there,
about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and
not sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs;
what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that
thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black
little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would
almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready
loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever
he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from
the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in
readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his
legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air,
whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless
miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in
time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated
handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal
tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of
disinfecting agent.
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A
short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,
who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally
and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of
honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost
was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic
bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of
any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion,
the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least
water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small
application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This
ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in
the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a
three years’ voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted
that length of time. As a carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought
nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask
was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They
called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in
Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions
of those battering seas.
Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men.
They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
Pequod’s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the
whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being
armed with their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio
of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the
former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy
and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set
down who the Pequod’s harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of
them belonged.
First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected
for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last
remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the
neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring
harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of
Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones,
and black rounding eyes—for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but
Antarctic in their glittering expression—all this sufficiently
proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud
warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had
scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer
snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now
hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon
of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look
at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have
credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and
half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers
of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate’s squire.
Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended
from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called
them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to
them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been
anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors
most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold
life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what
manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues,
and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six
feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at
him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to
beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro,
Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a
chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod’s company, be it
said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men
before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans
born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same
with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military
and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the
construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say,
because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the
brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No
small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the
outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews
from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the
Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland
Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage
homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling,
but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all
Islanders in the Pequod, _Isolatoes_ too, I call such, not
acknowledging the common continent of men, but each _Isolato_ living on
a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel,
what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from
all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying
Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar
from which not very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip—he
never did—oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim
Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine;
prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck
on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in
glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!
