101 
THE WHITE WHALE 
on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, liis flesh 
being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live 
blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some 
time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for 
which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he 
seen ; those summers had dried up -all his physical superfluousness. 
But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting 
anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. 
It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill- 
looking ; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit ; 
and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and 
strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to 
endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it 
Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality 
was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you 
seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand fold perils 
he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man whose 
life for the most part was a telling pantomine of action, and not a tame 
chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there 
were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases 
seem well-nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious 
for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery 
loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition ; 
but to that sort of superstition, which in some organisations seems 
rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. 
Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at times 
these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far- 
away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend 
him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him 
still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted 
men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others 
in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. “I will have no man 
in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, 
he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage 
was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, 
but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a 
coward. 
