Stubb, the second mate, is a Cape-Cod-man happy-go-lucky, neither craven nor valiant, taking perils with an indifferent air; in the very death-lock of the fight he toils calm as a journeyman joiner, presiding over his whale-boat as if the encounter were but a dinner, handling his unpitying lance off-handedly as a whistling tinker his hammer, humming rigadig tunes flank and flank with the most exasperated monster until long usage has converted the jaws of death into an easy chair.
What made Stubb so cheerily trudging, Ishmael suspects, was his pipe: he puts it into his mouth before he puts his legs into his trousers, keeps a row of pipes ready loaded, and smokes them all out in succession, as if tobacco might disinfect mortal tribulations in the infected air; then comes Flask of Martha's Vineyard, short, stout, pugnacious, treating leviathans as magnified mice requiring only circumvention and time, a three years' voyage round Cape Horn a jolly joke, the crew calling him King-Post for his short square timber frame.
Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask command the Pequod's three boats as Gothic knights, each accompanied by his harpooneer squire who resupplies twisted lances in the assault: Queequeg already known to Starbuck, Tashtego the Gay-Header inheritor of forest hunters' blood paired with Stubb, Daggoo the gigantic Ahasuerus with golden ear-hoops towering as squire to chess-man Flask.
Yet Ishmael widens the lens: not one in two American whalemen are Americans born though officers are, native American liberally providing brains while the rest of the world supplies muscles, Azores and Shetlands feeding the fo'c'sle; he calls them Isolatoes, each on a separate continent of identity yet federated along one keel with Old Ahab toward a bar few return from, and ends not on an officer but on Black Little Pip beating his tambourine on the grim forecastle, called a coward here, hailed a hero there: when Captain Ahab finally steps above hatches, which of these paired nerves will feel his spiritual terror first?
Coming Up in Chapter 28
For days after leaving Nantucket, no one sees Captain Ahab above hatches. Ishmael keeps glancing aft, Elijah's prophecies returning, until one grey morning reality outruns apprehension and Ahab stands on the quarter-deck with lightning scar and ivory leg.
