Moby-Dick or, The Whale / Моби Дик, или Белый кит. Книга для чтения на английском языке

”

“Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where you stand?”

I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the Pequod was as good a ship as any – I thought the best – and all this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness to ship me.

“And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,” he added – “come along with ye.” And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.

Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship.

People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling-vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest.

Now Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker[44 - Quaker – квакер (представитель секты протестантов, возникшей в Англии в середине XVII века; секта получила это название потому, что члены ее во время религиозных обрядов доводили себя до судорог)], the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous.

For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.

So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names – a singularly common fashion on the island – and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical pagan Roman.