Monday morning Ishmael sells the embalmed head to a barber for a block, settles both inn bills with Queequeg's money, and borrows a wheelbarrow to roll carpet-bag, canvas sack, and hammock down to the Moss, the little Nantucket packet on the wharf. The grinning landlord and boarders are tickled: Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories had alarmed Ishmael about the very man he now companions with. Townsfolk stare less at Queequeg alone, cannibals being common in the streets, than at seeing him and Ishmael wheeling the barrow on such confidential terms; Queequeg heeds them not, adjusting the sheath on his own harpoon, assured stuff deeply intimate with the hearts of whales, like a mower who brings his own scythe though the farmer could supply one.
Shifting the barrow, he tells how at Sag Harbor he lashed his chest to a wheelbarrow and shouldered the whole contraption up the wharf; then how at his sister's wedding feast a stately sea captain, thinking himself above a mere island King, washed his hands in the sacred cocoanut punchbowl as if it were a finger-glass. "What you tink now? Didn't our people laugh?" Passage paid, the Moss glides down the Acushnet past terraces of ice-glittering streets and mountains of casks, whale ships moored while forges start the next endless cruise; Ishmael snuffs Tartar air and spurns turnpike earth, the sea magnanimous because it keeps no records, while passengers jeer that two fellow beings should be so companionable.
Queequeg catches a green bumpkin mimicking him, tosses him skyward in sport, and passes the tomahawk pipe to Ishmael; the captain roars about cannibals until Queequeg, through Ishmael, declares he does not kill-e small-e fish-e, only big whale. Then the weather-sheet parts and the boom flies like the lower jaw of an exasperated whale, sweeping the mimic overboard while the crew panics; Queequeg crawls under its path, lassos the spar to the bulwarks, dives into freezing foam, and rises dragging the lifeless greenhorn the boat restores. All hands vote him a noble trump; the captain begs pardon; Ishmael clove to him like a barnacle from that hour, while Queequeg asks only for fresh water, lights his pipe, and muses that cannibals must help Christians in a mutual joint-stock world.
Was there ever such unconsciousness about medals from Humane Societies? When the Moss makes Nantucket, will Ishmael find an island as lonely on the map as Queequeg's Rokovoko was true because uncharted?
