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's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia.

Her venerable bows looked bearded.

Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--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 Becket bled.

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.
Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead.