From his ship-shaped pulpit Mapple condenses the chapel like a deck crew: starboard gangway, larboard, midships, then kneels in the bows and prays as if at the bottom of the sea. A whale hymn swells over the howling storm outside; he opens Jonah at the great fish and announces a two-stranded lesson, one for sinful men, one for him as pilot of the living God.
The first strand follows Jonah skulking Joppa wharves for Tarshish, paying fare ere he sails while a captain who triples the price still smells a fugitive, then hiding in a berth where the lamp burns straight though the room lies crooked and conscience groans that its chambers are all awry. Jonah sleeps through the tempest while mariners cast lots, seize him, and heave him overboard; oily calm follows, the whale shuts its ivory bolts, and inside the belly repentance looks toward the temple without clamoring for easy pardon.
The second strand convicts the preacher: Jonah fled not only God but Nineveh, the duty to preach truth to the face of falsehood. Mapple's body becomes the storm, chest heaving, arms warring, thunders rolling from his brow until hearers fear him; he heaps woe on whoever pleases rather than appals, then lifts joy anyway, delight on the starboard hand of every woe for whoever will not trim the word. Both God's hands press on him more than on the pew, he confesses, and he would gladly come down from the mast-head to be read a lesson himself before he kneels alone after benediction.
The sermon ends with the room emptied and Ishmael still bound for sea beside a harpooner who will soon call him bosom friend. What truth will Ishmael preach, or flee, once the whale hunt he signed for becomes his Nineveh?
Coming Up in Chapter 10
Sermon over, Ishmael returns to the Spouter-Inn and finds Queequeg whittling his idol by the fire. A shared smoke thaws Ishmael's reserve, and before night falls the pagan harpooneer declares them bosom friends, married in his country's phrase.
