The chief mate of the Pequod is Starbuck, a Nantucket Quaker dried to essentials like twice-baked biscuit, yet embalmed in inner health as if a revivified Egyptian; be it polar snow or torrid sun, his interior vitality runs like a patent chronometer, and looking into his eyes you catch the lingering images of thousand-fold perils calmly confronted, a staid man whose life is pantomime of action more than tame chapter of sounds.
Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, inclined to superstition that seems to spring from intelligence rather than ignorance, he is bent still further from dare-devil daring by far-away memories of a young Cape wife and child; I will have no man in my boat, he says, who is not afraid of a whale, meaning the most reliable courage arises from fair estimation of peril while an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward. Stubb calls him careful, and Ishmael will ere long show what careful means among whale hunters; Starbuck treats courage like beef and bread, will not lower after sun-down, will not persist when a fish fights too hard, for he is here to kill whales for his living and not be killed for theirs, remembering what doom was his father's and where in the bottomless deeps lie his brother's torn limbs.
Yet Ishmael warns that in reasonable nature these things must latently engender an element which, under suitable circumstances, would burn all his courage up; brave as he is against seas and whales, he cannot withstand those more terrific spiritual terrors from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man, and were the coming narrative to reveal the complete abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might Ishmael have heart to write it, for it is sorrowful to expose the fall of valour in the soul.
So he breaks into a plea for democratic dignity, not the dignity of kings and robes but that abounding dignity shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike, radiating from God through meanest mariners and castaways; if he shall weave tragic graces round renegades and touch a workman's arm with ethereal light, bear him out, thou just Spirit of Equality, thou democratic God who picked up Bunyan, Cervantes, Jackson from the pebbles. Knights and Squires has crowned its first knight: when Stubb and Flask take the deck in the next chapter, will their opposite nerves look like strength or like two ways of not seeing what Starbuck already fears?
Coming Up in Chapter 27
Stubb follows in Knights and Squires: happy-go-lucky Cape Cod mate, whistling at death and smoking pipe after pipe. Then Flask, the harpooneer squires Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo, and Ishmael maps who supplies brains and muscles aboard the Pequod.
