Sso MOBY DICK; OR 
business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, 
with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out 
anything you please, in the way of a mariner’s fancy. 
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a 
man to that condition in which God placed him, i. e., what is called 
savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. 
I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the 
Cannibals ; and ready at any moment to rebel against him. 
How, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic 
hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian 
war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carv- 
ing, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. 
Lor, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that miracu- 
lous intricacy of wooden network has been achieved; and it has cost 
steady years of steady application. 
As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With 
the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, 
of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, 
not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, 
as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and 
suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Hutch savage, Albert Hiirer. 
Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs 
of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the fore- 
castles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much ac- 
curacy. 
At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales 
hung by the tail for knockers to the roadside door. When the porter is 
sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking 
whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some 
old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for 
weather-cocks ; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all in- 
tents and purposes so labelled with “Hands off!” you cannot examine 
them closely enough to decide upon their merit. 
In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken 
cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, 
you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Levia- 
