The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #134880 Message #3081852
Posted By: Rapparee
24-Jan-11 - 10:11 PM
Thread Name: Catspaw Home!!!!4 Feb 2011
Subject: RE: Catspaw -Working the Plan - UPDATE - 22 Jan 2011
...You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know; - squared-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots; nuclear submarines; log rafts; and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed bathtub look about her and hatch-covers stained with the blood shed in ancient floggings. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's camp-follower, who has alike fought in both peignoir and boudoir. Her venerable bows looked bearded, like a goat or a tree bedecked with Spanish moss, but it was but a fungus. Her masts - cut somewhere on the coast of Japan and made of bamboo, where her original ones were clumsily lost overboard in a gale or sold as lumber by the mate - her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, rotted through here and there, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peeleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired semen, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod, - this old Peeleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead or the figurehead of a garbage scow. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies and odors of old, foul and unspeakable evils. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, old and missing many teeth, with the long sharp teeth of the Sperm Whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory and dried whale pizzle. 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 back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw, his hand bitten and bleeding. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that, save of course my own self and my dear friend Queequeg.