The Moss anchors late; Queequeg and Ishmael can manage only supper and a bed, and Peter Coffin has sent them to try pot-luck at Cousin Hosea Hussey's Try Pots, famous for chowders, by way of crooked directions about a yellow warehouse, a white church, and starboard versus larboard that leave them beating about in the dark until two enormous black pots swung from a sawed top-mast look not a little like a gallows, two horns remaining, one for Queequeg and one for Ishmael, after Coffin the innkeeper and chapel tombstones already set his neck in a crick. Are the prodigious black pots oblique hints touching Tophet? Mrs. Hussey under a dull red injured eye ends the omen spell with brisk scolding and a single demand: Clam or Cod?
Ishmael's cold-clam joke collides with her hurry; she hears only clam and bawls clam for two, yet warm savory steam belies the cheerless prospect until smoking chowder arrives, small juicy clams and ship biscuit and salted pork, surpassingly excellent after the frosty voyage, Queequeg dispatching his favourite fishing food with great expedition. Ishmael experiments, shouting cod at the kitchen door, and a fine cod-chowder follows while he wonders about chowder-headed people and live eels needing harpoons. Fishiest of all fishy places is the Try Pots: chowder for every meal, clam-shell pavement, cod vertebra necklace, shark-skin account books, milk tasting of the harbor because Hosea's cow marches the beach with each foot in a cod's decapitated head.
Supper done, Mrs. Hussey offers a lamp and bed directions, then blocks Queequeg on the stairs and demands his harpoon; ever since young Stiggs came home from an unfortunate four-and-a-half-year voyage with only three barrels of ile and was found dead in her first floor back with the iron in his side, she allows no such dangerous weapons upstairs. Ishmael protests that every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon; she keeps it till morning all the same, and asks clam or cod for breakfast. Both, says Ishmael, and a couple of smoked herring by way of variety.
Generous bowls and a confiscated tool came from the same hand shaped by one whale-town disaster. Tomorrow Ishmael must walk the docks to choose a ship: after Coffin, tombstones, and a mast that looked like a gallows, will the first vessel he boards feel like warning or like welcome?
Coming Up in Chapter 16
Fed and bedded on Nantucket, Ishmael must finally find a ship. Tomorrow he walks the docks to meet the Pequod and the men who will own his next three years at sea. Yojo orders Ishmael to choose the ship alone while Queequeg keeps a fasting day with his god in their room, tomahawk pipe and sacrificial shavings behind a shut door.
