97 The Lamp
CHAPTER 97
THE LAMP.
Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellorskings and counsellors: Melville used the phrase, from Job 3:14, again in his 1853 tale “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”. There they lay in their triangular oaken vaultstriangular oaken vaults: the whalemen sleep in the forecastle in berths, tightly bunked one atop another and irregularly shaped to fit the interior curvature of the ship’s bow., each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
In merchantmenmerchantmen: vessels carrying merchandise. , oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his palletpallet: uncomfortable makeshift bed., this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination.
See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps—often but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiatedunvitiated: pure; uncorrupted. state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astralsolar, lunar, or astral: names of contemporary oil lamps. contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game.