Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

_Pequod_, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated
tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes. I
peered and pryed about the Devil-Dam; from her, hopped over to the
Tit-bit; and, finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for
a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I
know;—squared-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box
galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a
rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old
school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed
look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and
calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a
French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her
venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of
Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts
stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her
ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped
flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these