.. < chapter vii 26  THE CHAPEL >

     In this same New Bedford there stands a
Whaleman's Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the
Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot.  I am
sure that I did not.  Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied
out upon this special errand.  The sky had changed from clear,
.. 

sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.  Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket
of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.
Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors'
wives and widows.  A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the
shrieks of the storm.  Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart
from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.  The
chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women
sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned
into the wall on either side the pulpit.  Three of them ran something like the
following, but I do not pretend to quote: -- Sacred To the Memory of John
Talbot, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard, Near the Isle of
Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st,
.  This Tablet Is erected to his
Memory By his Sister.  Sacred To the Memory of Robert Long, Willis Ellery,
Nathan Coleman, Walter Canny, Seth Macy, and Samuel Gleig, Forming one of the
boats' crews of the Ship Eliza, Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On
the Off-shore Ground in the Pacific, December 31st,
.  This Marble Is
here placed by their surviving Shipmates.
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Sacred To the Memory of The late Captain Ezekiel Hardy, Who in the bows of
his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d,
This Tablet Is erected to his Memory by His Widow.  Shaking off the sleet
from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and
turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me.  Affected by the
solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity
in his countenance.  This savage was the only person present who seemed to
notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and,
therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall.  Whether any
of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the
congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the
fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not
the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me
were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak
tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.  Oh!  ye whose
dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say
--here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms
like these.  What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no
ashes!  What despair in those immovable inscriptions!  What deadly voids and
unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and
refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a
grave.  As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it
is that a universal proverb says of them, that
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they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands;
how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we
prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if
he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life
Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal,
unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who
died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be
comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable
bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the
rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.  All these things
are not without their meanings.  But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the
tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.  It
needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket
voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that
darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me,
Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine.  But somehow I grew merry again.
Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems -- aye,
a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.  Yes, there is death in this
business of whaling --a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into
Eternity.  But what then?  Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of
Life and Death.  Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my
true substance.  Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much
like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick
water the thinnest of air.  Methinks my body is but the lees of my better
being.  In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.  And
therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body
when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
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