You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;⁠—square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and whatnot; 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 flagstone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the