THE WHITE WHALE 63 
pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews 
ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled through 
sheaves of sea-ivory. 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. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like 
the Tartar, when he holds hack his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. 
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy ! All noble things are 
touched with that. 
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 eould not well overlook a strange sort of 
tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a- little behind the mainmast. It 
seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical 
shape, some ten feet high ; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber 
black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the 
right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of 
these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at 
the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved 
to and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowattamie Sachem’s head. 
A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship so that the 
insider commanded a complete view forward. 
And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one 
who by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, 
and the ship’s work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the 
burden of command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, 
wriggling all over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was 
formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the 
wigwam was constructed. 
There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance 
of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old 
seamen, and heavily rolled up in pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; 
only there was a fine and almost microscopic network of the minutest 
wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his 
continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward ; 
— for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. 
Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl. 
