7. CHAPTER VII.
THE CHAPEL.
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's
Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for
the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to
the spot. I am sure that I did not.
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out
upon this special errand. The sky had changed from clear,
sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my
shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way
against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small scattered
congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A muffled
silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the
storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart
from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.
The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these
silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several
marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on
either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the
following, but I do not pretend to quote:—
SACRED
To the Memory
OF
JOHN TALBOT,
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard,
Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,
November 1st, 1836.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY HIS SISTER.
SACRED
To the Memory
OF
ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY,
NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY,
AND SAMUEL GLEIG,
Forming one of the boats' crews
OF
THE SHIP ELIZA,
Who were towed out of sight by a Whale,
On the Off-shore Ground in the
PACIFIC,
December 31st, 1839.
THIS MARBLE
Is here placed by their surviving
Shipmates.
SACRED
To the Memory
OF
The late
CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY,
Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a
Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,
August 3d, 1833.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY
HIS WIDOW.
Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I
seated myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised
to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the
scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in
his countenance. This savage was the only person present who
seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one
who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid
inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the
seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation,
I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded
accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women
present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some
unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were
assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those
bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed
afresh.
Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who
standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved;
ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these.
What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover
no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions!
What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that
seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the
beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well
might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are
included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that
they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the
Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday
departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel
a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for
the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life
Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in
what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet
lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it
is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we
nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why
all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the
rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All
these things are not without their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even
from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of
a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the
murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the
whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same
fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again.
Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it
seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.
Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly
quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and
Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on
earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things
spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun
through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest
of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And
therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat
and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself
cannot.
