Moby Dick

Back Forward Menu

Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and
Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and
whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth,
or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other
like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little
ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material,
in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes
of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their
jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor,
they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner's
fancy.

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man
to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.
Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a
savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready