4 
MOBY DICK; OR 
broiled ibis and roasted river-horse, that you see the mummies of those 
creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids. 
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, 
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal masthead. True, 
they rather order me about, and make me jump from spar to spar, like 
a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is 
unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honour, particularly if 
you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, 
or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to 
putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country 
schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transi- 
tion is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and re- 
quires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin 
and bear it. But even this wears off in time. 
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a 
broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount 
to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Who is not 
a slave ? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may 
order me about — however they may thump and punch me about, I have 
the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right: that everybody else is 
one way or other served in much the same way — either in a physical or 
metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is 
passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, 
and be content. 
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of 
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single 
penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves 
must pay: and there is all the difference in the world between paying 
and being paid. The urbane activity with which a man receives money 
is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to 
be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a moneyed man 
enter heaven. Ah ! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition ! 
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome ex- 
ercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head 
winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you 
never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the commo- 
dore on the quarterdeck gets his atmosphere at secondhand from the sail- 
