 state is famous. Only some thirty arid
summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical
superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token
of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily
blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means
ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and
closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a
revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to
come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a
patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all
climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering
images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A
staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of
action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and
fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in
some cases seemed well-nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly
conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild
watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to
superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organisations
seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward
portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent
the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories of his
young Cape wife and child tend to bend him still more from the original
ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences
which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so
often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. »I
will have no man in my boat,« said Starbuck, »who is not afraid of a whale.« By
this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was
that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an
utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
    »Ay, ay,« said Stubb, the second mate, »Starbuck, there, is as careful a man
as you 'll find anywhere in this fishery.« But we shall ere long see what that
word careful
