106 
MOBY DICK; OR 
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 
neighbouring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring har- 
pooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay- 
Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek hones, and 
black rounding eyes — for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, hut 
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, how in 
hand, the aboriginal forest 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. Tash- 
tego 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. Sus- 
pended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors 
called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the topsail 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 
harbours most frequented by whalemen ; and having now led for many 
years the bold life of the fishery in ships of owners uncommonly heed- 
ful of what manner of men they shipped ; Daggoo retained all his bar- 
baric 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 com- 
pany, 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 
