Chapter: SKETCH SECOND. TWO SIDES TO A TORTOISE.

  "Most ugly shapes and horrible aspects,
  Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see,
  Or shame, that ever should so fowle defects
  From her most cunning hand escaped bee;
  All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee.
  No wonder if these do a man appall;
  For all that here at home we dreadfull hold
  Be but as bugs to fearen babes withall
  Compared to the creatures in these isles' entrall

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  "Fear naught, then said the palmer, well avized,
  For these same monsters are not there indeed,
  But are into these fearful shapes disguized.

         *       *       *       *       *

  "And lifting up his vertuous staffe on high,
  Then all that dreadful armie fast gan flye
  Into great Zethy's bosom, where they hidden lye."


In view of the description given, may one be gay upon the Encantadas?
Yes: that is, find one the gayety, and he will be gay. And, indeed,
sackcloth and ashes as they are, the isles are not perhaps unmitigated
gloom. For while no spectator can deny their claims to a most solemn and
superstitious consideration, no more than my firmest resolutions can
decline to behold the spectre-tortoise when emerging from its shadowy
recess; yet even the tortoise, dark and melancholy as it is upon the
back, still possesses a bright side; its calipee or breast-plate being
sometimes of a faint yellowish or golden tinge. Moreover, every one
knows that tortoises as well as turtle are of such a make, that if you
but put them on their backs you thereby expose their bright sides
without the possibility of their recovering themselves, and turning into
view the other. But after you have done this, and because you have done
this, you should not swear that the tortoise has no dark side. Enjoy the
bright, keep it turned up perpetually if you can, but be honest, and
don't deny the black. Neither should he, who cannot turn the tortoise
from its natural position so as to hide the darker and expose his
livelier aspect, like a great October pumpkin in the sun, for that cause
declare the creature to be one total inky blot. The tortoise is both
black and bright. But let us to particulars.

Some months before my first stepping ashore upon the group, my ship was
cruising in its close vicinity. One noon we found ourselves off the
South Head of Albemarle, and not very far from the land. Partly by way
of freak, and partly by way of spying out so strange a country, a boat's
crew was sent ashore, with orders to see all they could, and besides,
bring back whatever tortoises they could conveniently transport.

It was after sunset, when the adventurers returned. I looked down over
the ship's high side as if looking down over the curb of a well, and
dimly saw the damp boat, deep in the sea with some unwonted weight.
Ropes were dropt over, and presently three huge antediluvian-looking
tortoises, after much straining, were landed on deck. They seemed hardly
of the seed of earth. We had been broad upon the waters for five long
months, a period amply sufficient to make all things of the land wear a
fabulous hue to the dreamy mind. Had three Spanish custom-house officers
boarded us then, it is not unlikely that I should have curiously stared
at them, felt of them, and stroked them much as savages serve civilized
guests. But instead of three custom-house officers, behold these really
wondrous tortoises--none of your schoolboy mud-turtles--but black as
widower's weeds, heavy as chests of plate, with vast shells medallioned
and orbed like shields, and dented and blistered like shields that have
breasted a battle, shaggy, too, here and there, with dark green moss,
and slimy with the spray of the sea. These mystic creatures, suddenly
translated by night from unutterable solitudes to our peopled deck,
affected me in a manner not easy to unfold. They seemed newly crawled
forth from beneath the foundations of the world. Yea, they seemed the
identical tortoises whereon the Hindoo plants this total sphere. With a
lantern I inspected them more closely. Such worshipful venerableness of
aspect! Such furry greenness mantling the rude peelings and healing the
fissures of their shattered shells. I no more saw three tortoises. They
expanded--became transfigured. I seemed to see three Roman Coliseums in
magnificent decay.

Ye oldest inhabitants of this, or any other isle, said I, pray, give me
the freedom of your three-walled towns.

The great feeling inspired by these creatures was that of
age:--dateless, indefinite endurance. And in fact that any other
creature can live and breathe as long as the tortoise of the Encantadas,
I will not readily believe. Not to hint of their known capacity of
sustaining life, while going without food for an entire year, consider
that impregnable armor of their living mail. What other bodily being
possesses such a citadel wherein to resist the assaults of Time?

As, lantern in hand, I scraped among the moss and beheld the ancient
scars of bruises received in many a sullen fall among the marly
mountains of the isle--scars strangely widened, swollen, half
obliterate, and yet distorted like those sometimes found in the bark of
very hoary trees, I seemed an antiquary of a geologist, studying the
bird-tracks and ciphers upon the exhumed slates trod by incredible
creatures whose very ghosts are now defunct.

As I lay in my hammock that night, overhead I heard the slow weary
draggings of the three ponderous strangers along the encumbered deck.
Their stupidity or their resolution was so great, that they never went
aside for any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just
before the mid-watch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering-ram
against the immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth
and nail, to force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the
victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical
enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation
of hopeless toil which so often possesses them. I have known them in
their journeyings ram themselves heroically against rocks, and long
abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and
so hold on their inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudging
impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.

Meeting with no such hinderance as their companion did, the other
tortoises merely fell foul of small stumbling-blocks--buckets, blocks,
and coils of rigging--and at times in the act of crawling over them
would slip with an astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these
draggings and concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they
came; an isle full of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly
into the hearts of splintered mountains, and covered for many miles
with inextricable thickets. I then pictured these three straight-forward
monsters, century after century, writhing through the shades, grim as
blacksmiths; crawling so slowly and ponderously, that not only did
toad-stools and all fungus things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty
moss sprouted upon their backs. With them I lost myself in volcanic
mazes; brushed away endless boughs of rotting thickets; till finally in
a dream I found myself sitting crosslegged upon the foremost, a Brahmin
similarly mounted upon either side, forming a tripod of foreheads which
upheld the universal cope.

Such was the wild nightmare begot by my first impression of the
Encantadas tortoise. But next evening, strange to say, I sat down with
my shipmates, and made a merry repast from tortoise steaks, and tortoise
stews; and supper over, out knife, and helped convert the three mighty
concave shells into three fanciful soup-tureens, and polished the three
flat yellowish calipees into three gorgeous salvers.

       *       *       *       *       *

 Another Spenser quote, this one about a monster. Spenser writes about fairies, and The Enchanted Isles are a kind of blighted, evil faerie land. Is what Melville is getting at. Also, he just kind of likes burbling about fairy-lands. Anyway, Melville says that the Galapagos aren't all bad, and as proof points out that turtles are bright on their underbelly. Then he describes turning the turtles over so they can't get back up, which seems kind of mean and not cheerful at all. Then he talks about bringing the tortoises on board, and how they just keep walking and running into things. Which Melville finds depressing and eerie. But then he and his companions ate turtle steak, and that was cheerful. So some good with the bad.

