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If , then , to meanest mariners , and renegades and castaways , I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities , though dark ; weave round them tragic graces ; if even the most mournful , perchance the most abased , among them all , shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts ; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light ; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun ; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it , thou just Spirit of Equality , which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind ! Bear me out in it , thou great democratic God ! who didst not refuse to the swart convict , Bunyan , the pale , poetic pearl ; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold , the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes ; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles ; who didst hurl him upon a war - horse ; who didst thunder him higher than a throne ! Thou who , in all Thy mighty , earthly marchings , ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons ; bear me out in it , O God ! CHAPTER 27 . Knights and Squires . Stubb was the second mate . He was a native of Cape Cod ; and hence , according to local usage , was called a Cape - Cod - man . A happy - go - lucky ; neither craven nor valiant ; taking perils as they came with an indifferent air ; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase , toiling away , calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year . Good - humored , easy , and careless , he presided over his whale - boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner , and his crew all invited guests . He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat , as an old stage - driver is about the snugness of his box . When close to the whale , in the very death - lock of the fight , he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off - handedly , as a whistling tinker his hammer . He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster . Long usage had , for this Stubb , converted the jaws of death into an easy chair . What he thought of death itself , there is no telling . Whether he ever thought of it at all , might be a question ; but , if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner , no doubt , like a good sailor , he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft , and bestir themselves there , about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order , and not sooner . What , perhaps , with other things , made Stubb such an easy - going , unfearing man , so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave pedlars , all bowed to the ground with their packs ; what helped to bring about that almost impious good - humor of his ; that thing must have been his pipe . For , like his nose , his short , black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face .
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