than to
have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors,
find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the
honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my
Harvard.
 

                                  Chapter XXV

                                   Postscript

In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who should
wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his
cause - such an advocate, would he not be blameworthy?
    It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern
ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone
through. There is a salt-cellar of state, so called, and there may be a castor
of state. How they use the salt, precisely - who knows? Certain I am, however,
that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad.
Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run
well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the
essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but
meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of
that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally,
that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he
can't amount to much in his totality.
    But the only thing to be considered here, is this - what kind of oil is used
at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor
oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly
be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all
oils?
    Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens
with coronation stuff!
 

                                  Chapter XXVI

                              Knights and Squires

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker
by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed
well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked
biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled
ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon
one of those fast days for which his