Whaling ship “Pequod”

Description

The famous whaling ship “Pequod” of Herman Melvilles novel “Moby Dick”.

“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, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. 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 Beckettbled. 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.
She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarkswere garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe…a noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”

– from “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville