In bed they concoct tomorrow's plans, but Queequeg has been consulting Yojo, who insists three times over that Ishmael alone must pick their ship among the whaling fleet, infallibly lighting on the vessel Yojo already chose as if by chance, while Queequeg keeps a fasting day shut up with his tomahawk pipe and sacrificial shavings for the idol. Ishmael does not like going solo yet acquiesces with determined rushing energy, leaving his partner praying while he saunters the harbor and learns of three three-year ships: Devil-dam, Tit-bit, and Pequod, named for a Massachusetts Indian tribe extinct as the Medes; after peering at the first two he boards the Pequod and decides she is the very ship for them.
She is a rare old craft, weather-stained like a grenadier of four oceans, a cannibal of a ship tricking herself forth in chased bones: sperm-whale teeth pinning her bulwarks, a lower-jaw tiller, noble and melancholy. In a whalebone wigwam on deck sits Captain Peleg, not Ahab but co-owner and agent, crow's-footed and Quakerish, who damns merchant service, warns that Captain Ahab has only one leg devoured by the monstrousest parmacetty, tests whether Ishmael would jump down a live whale's throat after his harpoon, and sends him to the weather bow to report nothing but water, horizon, and a squall. Can't ye see the world where you stand? Peleg asks; Ishmael still wants whaling, and Peleg will ship him.
Below, Captain Bildad, fighting Quaker and incorrigible hunks, reads Scripture while Peleg mends pens; Bildad murmurs a seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay amid moth-and-rust verses, Peleg roars about widows and orphans and fiery pits, and Ishmael signs for the three hundredth, a long lay but not the fraction of a farthing Bildad seemed to offer. He asks to bring Queequeg tomorrow, a harpooner who has killed more whales than Ishmael can count; Peleg says fetch him along.
Turning back, Ishmael asks where Captain Ahab is; Peleg says he keeps close indoors, not sick yet not well, moody since the whale took his leg, grand, ungodly, god-like. Ishmael quotes wicked King Ahab from Scripture; Peleg startles him and forbids the name on board. Stricken, blasted if he be, Ahab has his humanities, wife and child, Peleg insists; Ishmael walks away signed, sympathetic, awed by something he cannot name, sure the Pequod is Yojo's ship yet dark Ahab slips his mind for now. He has bound himself for three years to a grand, ungodly captain he has still not seen: how long will Peleg's salesmanship keep the devoured leg from feeling like prophecy?
