430 
MOBY DICK; OR 
And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him with- 
out delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him 
supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) 
which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a 
careful selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. 
This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg completed 
that night; and to provide all the fittings for it, independent of those 
pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover the ship’s forge was 
ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, 
to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at 
once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed. 
CHAPTER CVI 
THE CARPENTER 
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high 
abstracted man alone, and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. 
But from the same point take mankind in mass, and for the most 
part they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and 
hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnish- 
ing an example of the high, humane abstraction, the Pequod’s carpen- 
ter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage. 
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belong- 
ing to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical ex- 
tent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to 
his own; the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching 
trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do 
with wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to 
him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was 
singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies, 
continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ 
voyage, in uncivilised and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his 
readiness in ordinary duties: — repairing stove boats, sprung spars, re- 
forming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s-eyes in the 
deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous 
