Act II
Scene 1
(The stage is split. On one side is the piazza of the Golden Inn. On the other are the men of the Town-Ho working sea-saw pumps. The men’s movements are like the movement of cylinders in an internal combustion engine. They pump in joyous, sweaty athleticism. They are softly singing/humming/chanting a sea chantey elaboration of the reggae song ‘Get-up, Stand-up.’ The words are not distinguishable. Standing out because of his height and his most active, most joyous, and most sweaty athleticism is Steelkilt.)
Jonah: Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her. But the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed they could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
Though no small passage was before him, yet, if the commonest chance favored, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at them, these six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakesman and desperado from Buffalo.
Don Sebastian (rising from his hammock): Lakesman!-Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakesman, and where is Buffalo?
Jonah: On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but-I crave your courtesy, you shall soon hear further of all that.
Now in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manila; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian free-booting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours-Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,-possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all around their banks; here and there are frowned upon with batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thundering of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew…
Duena Maria: (interrupts narrative) Your wild, and exotic geography is, of course, very interesting. But what are you seeking to tell us of this Steelkilt, from Buffalo.
Jonah: Thus, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. In the wild solitudes of these wild, inland seas Steelkilt found the solitude of the abyss that precedes the fallen God of this fallen world. In this knowing he lived in pure, inner freedom.
And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Vineyarder man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt-but, you shall hear.
It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie along a tolerable accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehension touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness slyly going on among them, as they stood with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain spring, that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes.
Now as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this fallen world of ours-watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy’s snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne’s father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
Steelkilt: (See’s Radney skulking near-by. He affects not to notice him) Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of ye, and let’s have a taste. (Steelkilt is handed a tin cup, pretends to drink deeply.) By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I tell ye what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home. (Other seamen abandon themselves to the mirth. They lag in the pumping.) The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he’s come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of ‘em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him to jump overboard and scatter ‘em. They’re playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he’s a simple old soul, Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d give a poor devil like me the model of his nose. (men crack up in mirthful laughter.)
Radney: (enraged-just barely in control) Damn your eyes! (Gets in the face of sailor closest to Steelkilt, says menacingly) You think I’m funny! What’s the pumps stopped for? Get thundering away at it, now!
Steelkilt: Aye, aye, sir. (Men resume strenuous, steady, joyous, mirthful pumpings.) Lively, boys, lively, now.
(Pumping becomes the percussive instrument of the dance of the human engine. They break out in clear, forceful song and word. They sing ‘Get Up, Stand-Up, sea chanty-like, but driven by the African drum-like percussion of the pumps.)
(They continue until all are gasping for breath. The men quit the pumps and sit together, panting.)
Jonah: Now what cozening fiend it was, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporally exasperated state I know not; but so it happened.
Radney: (Get’s in Steelkilt’s face.) See that pig shit (points to a place on the deck). Get a shovel! Then sweep the deck! Now!
(Radney and Steelkilt freeze into a tableau).
Jonah: Sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such is the inflexibility of sea usuages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their face. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men.
But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked in the mate’s malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any already ireful being-a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved-this nameless phantom feeling stole over Steelkilt.
Steelkilt: (Speaking softly, reasonably) Sweeping the deck is not my business, Mr. Radney I will not do it. (He points to three boys) It is their job. They will do it.
Radney: Damn You! You will do as I command! Get the shovel! Now! (he snatches a cooper’s hammer from the top of a cask and advances on the still seated Steelkilt. Steelkilt remains seated. Radney brandishes the hammer around him, but doesn’t touch him. Steelkilt slowly rises, and slowly retreats to the windlass. Radney follows. Steelkilt retreats around the windlass. Radney follows, brandishing the hammer close in but not touching Steelkilt.)
Steelkilt: I will not obey, Mr. Radney. (Draws back his fist. They do a full revolution of windlass like this. Then Steelkilt stops retreating.) Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself.
Radney: (Takes hammer and swings it to a couple of inches of Steelkilt’s teeth. Steelkilt doesn’t flinch.) You will do as I tell you. Who do you think you are – you bag of shit.
Steelkilt: (He slowly swings his right fist further behind him.) If the hammer but grazes my cheek – you are a dead man.
Radney: (Immediately touches the hammer to Steelkilt’s cheek.)
Steelkilt: (delivers a bloody, explosive, lightening strike of a punch. Radney goes down spouting gore. Steelkilt shakes one of the backstays leading far aloft. He does a tableau fleeing into the riggings. lights fade)
Jonah: The Lakesmen tried to join two of his comrades who were standing their mast heads. They were both Canallers.
Don Pedro: Pardon, Senor Jonah, Canallers? We have seen many whale-ships in our harbor, but have never heard of your Canallers.
Jonah: Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must have heard of it?
Don Pedro: Nay, Senor, hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy and hereditary land, we know but little of your vigorous North.
Jonah: Aye? Well then if I can get my cup refilled (Duena Catherina refills glass). Your chicha’s very fine, Maria.
I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such information may throw side-light upon my story.
For three hundred and sixty miles through the entire breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated fields, unrivaled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room; through the holy-of-holy’s of great forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snow white chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee; there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners most abound in holiest vicinities.
Don Pedro: (Looks downward into the crowded plazza with humorous concern.) Is that a friar passing?
Don Sebastian: (Laughing) Well for our northern friend, and well for us that Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wanes in Lima.
Proceed, Senor.
Another Don: A moment! Pardon! In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison.
Jonah: (bows, and feins surprise)
Another Don: Oh! do not bow and look surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast-“Corrupt as Lima.” It but bears out your saying too; churches more plentiful then billiard-tables, and for ever open – and “Corrupt as Lima.” So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark! –St. Dominic purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; (takes and refills Jonah’s cup from his cup, hands it back to Jonah) now, you pour out again.
Jonah: (Drinks, ponders a moment) Freely depicted in his own vocation the Canaller would make a fine dramatic character, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark Anthony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, what the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whalefishery contains so many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.
Don Pedro: (meditively)I see! I see! No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.-But the story.
Steelkilt: (lights back on Steelkilt fleeing into the riggings. His ascent is blocked by junior ship officers descending from the riggings. He jumps to the deck, is immediately surrounded by savage harpooners. The two Canallers slide down ropes and join Steelkilt on deck. It is a general melee. Ten men join up with Steelkilt and the two Canallers. Others remain neutral and watch. The 13 fight their way to the forecastle. The Captain ineffectually tries to get to Steelkilt, from the periphery of the melee armed with a pike, but is unable to penetrate the melee. Steelkilt and his men gain the forecastle. They make a barricade of casks aligned with the windlass.)
Captain of the Town-Ho: Come out of that, ye pirates! (draws two pistols). Come out of that, ye cut-throats!
Steelkilt: (leaps on the barricade) Bring it on! Go head, shoot! But know what you bring on, Captain. You kill me and all will rise.
Captain: Return to your duty, now!
Steelkilt: Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?
Captain: Turn to! turn to!-I make no promises;-to your duty! Do you want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to! (raises his pistols)
Steelkilt: Sink the ship? Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. (turns to men behind the barricade) What say ye, men? (men give a fierce rebel yell, Steelkilt walks the top of the barricade.) It’s not our fault. We didn’t want it. I told him to take his hammer away. It was boy’s business. He might have known me before this. I told him not to prick the buffalo. I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw. Ain’t those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men? Look to those handspikes, my hearties.
Captain, by God, look to yourself. Say the word. Don’t be a fool. Forget it all. We are ready to turn to. Treat us decently and we are your men.
But we won’t be flogged!
Captain: Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!
Steelkilt: Look ye now. (flings his arms towards the captain) There are a few of us here, and I am one of them, who have shipped for the cruise, d’ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don’t want a row; it’s not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we won’t be flogged!
Captain: Turn to!
Steelkilt: (Glances around) I tell you what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging us, we won’t do a hand’s turn of work.
Captain: Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there till you’re sick of it. Down ye go.
Steelkilt: (Turns to the men behind the barricades) Shall we?
(The two Canallers run up to Steelkilt.)
First Canaller: We can take the ship. Don’t be a fool. Don’t go down!
Steelkilt: I will not be hung for being a shabby rascal. Nothing of this world, especially this Town-Ho, this dirty, stinking, leaky grease factory is worth one man’s blood, one man’s life.
(Steelkilt descends into the forecastle. The men behind the barrier follow, growlingly disappearing like bears into a cave. As the last man descends, the captain and his four junior officers leap over the barricade, slam shut the hatch over the forecastle and padlock it.
Captain: (opens a slide, hissingly whispers something which is inaudible to the audience, but is meant to be heard by Steelkilt and his followers. lights fade)
Scene 1
(The stage is split. On one side is the piazza of the Golden Inn. On the other are the men of the Town-Ho working sea-saw pumps. The men’s movements are like the movement of cylinders in an internal combustion engine. They pump in joyous, sweaty athleticism. They are softly singing/humming/chanting a sea chantey elaboration of the reggae song ‘Get-up, Stand-up.’ The words are not distinguishable. Standing out because of his height and his most active, most joyous, and most sweaty athleticism is Steelkilt.)
Jonah: Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her. But the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed they could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
Though no small passage was before him, yet, if the commonest chance favored, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at them, these six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakesman and desperado from Buffalo.
Don Sebastian (rising from his hammock): Lakesman!-Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakesman, and where is Buffalo?
Jonah: On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but-I crave your courtesy, you shall soon hear further of all that.
Now in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manila; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian free-booting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours-Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,-possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all around their banks; here and there are frowned upon with batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thundering of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew…
Duena Maria: (interrupts narrative) Your wild, and exotic geography is, of course, very interesting. But what are you seeking to tell us of this Steelkilt, from Buffalo.
Jonah: Thus, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. In the wild solitudes of these wild, inland seas Steelkilt found the solitude of the abyss that precedes the fallen God of this fallen world. In this knowing he lived in pure, inner freedom.
And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Vineyarder man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt-but, you shall hear.
It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie along a tolerable accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehension touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness slyly going on among them, as they stood with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain spring, that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes.
Now as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this fallen world of ours-watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy’s snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne’s father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
Steelkilt: (See’s Radney skulking near-by. He affects not to notice him) Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of ye, and let’s have a taste. (Steelkilt is handed a tin cup, pretends to drink deeply.) By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I tell ye what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home. (Other seamen abandon themselves to the mirth. They lag in the pumping.) The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he’s come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of ‘em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him to jump overboard and scatter ‘em. They’re playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he’s a simple old soul, Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d give a poor devil like me the model of his nose. (men crack up in mirthful laughter.)
Radney: (enraged-just barely in control) Damn your eyes! (Gets in the face of sailor closest to Steelkilt, says menacingly) You think I’m funny! What’s the pumps stopped for? Get thundering away at it, now!
Steelkilt: Aye, aye, sir. (Men resume strenuous, steady, joyous, mirthful pumpings.) Lively, boys, lively, now.
(Pumping becomes the percussive instrument of the dance of the human engine. They break out in clear, forceful song and word. They sing ‘Get Up, Stand-Up, sea chanty-like, but driven by the African drum-like percussion of the pumps.)
Get Up, Stand Up, stand up for your right (3 times)
Get Up, Stand Up, Stand Up for your rights
Get Up, Stand Up, don't give up the fight
Preacher man don’t tell me heaven is under the earth
I know you don't know what life is really worth
Is not all that glitters in gold
and Half the story has never been told
So now you see the light, aay Stand up for your right.
Come on
Get Up, Stand Up, stand up for your right
Get Up, Stand Up, don't give up the fight
Some people think great God will come from the sky
Take away ev'rything, and make ev'rybody feel high
But if you know what life is worth
You’d look for yours’ right here on earth
And now you see the light
You stand up for your right, yeah!
Get Up, Stand Up, stand up for your right
Get Up, Stand Up, don't give up the fight
We're sick and tired of your ism and skism game
Die and go to heaven in Jesus' name, Lord
We know when we understand
Almighty God is a living man
You can fool some people sometimes
But you can't fool all the people all the time
So now we see the light
We gonna stand up for our right
So you'd better get up, stand up, stand up for your right
Get Up, Stand Up, don't give up the fight
heaven is under the earth
I know you don't know what life ike away ev'rything, and make ev'rybody feel high
But if you know what life is worth
You would look for yours on earth
(They continue until all are gasping for breath. The men quit the pumps and sit together, panting.)
Jonah: Now what cozening fiend it was, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporally exasperated state I know not; but so it happened.
Radney: (Get’s in Steelkilt’s face.) See that pig shit (points to a place on the deck). Get a shovel! Then sweep the deck! Now!
(Radney and Steelkilt freeze into a tableau).
Jonah: Sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such is the inflexibility of sea usuages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their face. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men.
But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked in the mate’s malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any already ireful being-a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved-this nameless phantom feeling stole over Steelkilt.
Steelkilt: (Speaking softly, reasonably) Sweeping the deck is not my business, Mr. Radney I will not do it. (He points to three boys) It is their job. They will do it.
Radney: Damn You! You will do as I command! Get the shovel! Now! (he snatches a cooper’s hammer from the top of a cask and advances on the still seated Steelkilt. Steelkilt remains seated. Radney brandishes the hammer around him, but doesn’t touch him. Steelkilt slowly rises, and slowly retreats to the windlass. Radney follows. Steelkilt retreats around the windlass. Radney follows, brandishing the hammer close in but not touching Steelkilt.)
Steelkilt: I will not obey, Mr. Radney. (Draws back his fist. They do a full revolution of windlass like this. Then Steelkilt stops retreating.) Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself.
Radney: (Takes hammer and swings it to a couple of inches of Steelkilt’s teeth. Steelkilt doesn’t flinch.) You will do as I tell you. Who do you think you are – you bag of shit.
Steelkilt: (He slowly swings his right fist further behind him.) If the hammer but grazes my cheek – you are a dead man.
Radney: (Immediately touches the hammer to Steelkilt’s cheek.)
Steelkilt: (delivers a bloody, explosive, lightening strike of a punch. Radney goes down spouting gore. Steelkilt shakes one of the backstays leading far aloft. He does a tableau fleeing into the riggings. lights fade)
Jonah: The Lakesmen tried to join two of his comrades who were standing their mast heads. They were both Canallers.
Don Pedro: Pardon, Senor Jonah, Canallers? We have seen many whale-ships in our harbor, but have never heard of your Canallers.
Jonah: Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must have heard of it?
Don Pedro: Nay, Senor, hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy and hereditary land, we know but little of your vigorous North.
Jonah: Aye? Well then if I can get my cup refilled (Duena Catherina refills glass). Your chicha’s very fine, Maria.
I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such information may throw side-light upon my story.
For three hundred and sixty miles through the entire breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated fields, unrivaled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room; through the holy-of-holy’s of great forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snow white chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee; there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners most abound in holiest vicinities.
Don Pedro: (Looks downward into the crowded plazza with humorous concern.) Is that a friar passing?
Don Sebastian: (Laughing) Well for our northern friend, and well for us that Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wanes in Lima.
Proceed, Senor.
Another Don: A moment! Pardon! In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison.
Jonah: (bows, and feins surprise)
Another Don: Oh! do not bow and look surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast-“Corrupt as Lima.” It but bears out your saying too; churches more plentiful then billiard-tables, and for ever open – and “Corrupt as Lima.” So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark! –St. Dominic purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; (takes and refills Jonah’s cup from his cup, hands it back to Jonah) now, you pour out again.
Jonah: (Drinks, ponders a moment) Freely depicted in his own vocation the Canaller would make a fine dramatic character, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark Anthony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, what the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whalefishery contains so many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.
Don Pedro: (meditively)I see! I see! No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.-But the story.
Steelkilt: (lights back on Steelkilt fleeing into the riggings. His ascent is blocked by junior ship officers descending from the riggings. He jumps to the deck, is immediately surrounded by savage harpooners. The two Canallers slide down ropes and join Steelkilt on deck. It is a general melee. Ten men join up with Steelkilt and the two Canallers. Others remain neutral and watch. The 13 fight their way to the forecastle. The Captain ineffectually tries to get to Steelkilt, from the periphery of the melee armed with a pike, but is unable to penetrate the melee. Steelkilt and his men gain the forecastle. They make a barricade of casks aligned with the windlass.)
Captain of the Town-Ho: Come out of that, ye pirates! (draws two pistols). Come out of that, ye cut-throats!
Steelkilt: (leaps on the barricade) Bring it on! Go head, shoot! But know what you bring on, Captain. You kill me and all will rise.
Captain: Return to your duty, now!
Steelkilt: Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?
Captain: Turn to! turn to!-I make no promises;-to your duty! Do you want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to! (raises his pistols)
Steelkilt: Sink the ship? Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. (turns to men behind the barricade) What say ye, men? (men give a fierce rebel yell, Steelkilt walks the top of the barricade.) It’s not our fault. We didn’t want it. I told him to take his hammer away. It was boy’s business. He might have known me before this. I told him not to prick the buffalo. I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw. Ain’t those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men? Look to those handspikes, my hearties.
Captain, by God, look to yourself. Say the word. Don’t be a fool. Forget it all. We are ready to turn to. Treat us decently and we are your men.
But we won’t be flogged!
Captain: Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!
Steelkilt: Look ye now. (flings his arms towards the captain) There are a few of us here, and I am one of them, who have shipped for the cruise, d’ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don’t want a row; it’s not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we won’t be flogged!
Captain: Turn to!
Steelkilt: (Glances around) I tell you what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging us, we won’t do a hand’s turn of work.
Captain: Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there till you’re sick of it. Down ye go.
Steelkilt: (Turns to the men behind the barricades) Shall we?
(The two Canallers run up to Steelkilt.)
First Canaller: We can take the ship. Don’t be a fool. Don’t go down!
Steelkilt: I will not be hung for being a shabby rascal. Nothing of this world, especially this Town-Ho, this dirty, stinking, leaky grease factory is worth one man’s blood, one man’s life.
(Steelkilt descends into the forecastle. The men behind the barrier follow, growlingly disappearing like bears into a cave. As the last man descends, the captain and his four junior officers leap over the barricade, slam shut the hatch over the forecastle and padlock it.
Captain: (opens a slide, hissingly whispers something which is inaudible to the audience, but is meant to be heard by Steelkilt and his followers. lights fade)
