Some chapters back Ishmael named Bulkington, the tall newlanded mariner met at the New Bedford inn; on the shivering winter night when the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into cold malicious waves, who should he see standing at her helm but Bulkington, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous voyage could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term while the land seemed scorching to his feet. Ishmael looks with sympathetic awe and fearfulness, calls wonderfullest things ever the unmentionable, and says this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington, deep memories yielding no epitaphs.
Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship miserably driving along the leeward land: the port would fain give succor, pity, safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that is kind to our mortalities, yet in that gale the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality, for one touch of land though it but graze the keel would make her shudder through and through, and with all her might she crowds all sail off shore, fights even the winds that fain would blow her homeward, and seeks the lashed sea's landlessness again, for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril, her only friend her bitterest foe.
Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth, that all deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous slavish shore; but as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless and indefinite as God, so better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee even if that were safety, than worm-like craven crawl to land.
Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington, bear thee grimly, demigod, up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing straight up leaps thy apotheosis, Ishmael cries, and the man who held the wheel is gone again as quickly as he appeared: when your own gale hits, will you crowd sail toward open sea or mistake the pitying port for the move that keeps you off the rocks?
Coming Up in Chapter 24
Landsmen call whaling disreputable, so Ishmael turns advocate for the trade. He answers every polite objection: butchers versus generals, lamps burning to whalemen's glory, seven hundred American vessels, Job and Alfred the Great on his side, and a whale-ship as his Yale and Harvard.
