The Carpenter

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe.

But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.

But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod ’s carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage.

Like all seagoing ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain offhanded, practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:⁠—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new treenails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.