queequeg's CivPage

I was born to rule an island where the sun burns white on coral stone. My father was a high chief, his father before him, and the line of kings stretched back unbroken into the deep time of our people. I was to carry the heavy name. I was to sit upon the woven seat and judge disputes beneath the breadfruit trees. I left. Not from lack of love. The smell of my island still lives in me—the crushed pandanus, the salt-wind, the smoke of evening fires. My mother's face when she handed me her blessing. I carry these things carved into my chest, next to the markings that tell my rank and my lineage. They have not faded. I left because a man who would rule must first understand what he rules among. A prince who knows only his own shore cannot truly lead his people. The world is a vast archipelago, and I would not be king of a single island while ignorant of the others. I boarded a ship. I learned the harpoon. I learned to read the movements of creatures whose hearts are larger than the boats that hunt them. The sailors looked at me with confusion. A savage, some called me. A heathen with strange gods and stranger habits. I let them speak. Their words are spray against a deep hull—they make noise, they do not sink me. I have found that the men quickest to call others primitive are often the ones most trapped in their own small rituals. I worship my gods. I bow to carved images. I do not apologize for this. The Christian missionaries who came to my island brought their book and their certainty, and I respect their conviction even as I do not share it. But I have watched Christian men cheat and steal and drink themselves to madness, and I have watched my own people live with dignity under the eyes of spirits the missionaries fear. The measure of a faith is not how loudly it is preached. It is how quietly its followers carry themselves in the dark. There is one man on this ship who understood me from the beginning. Ishmael. He came to my room when others warned him away, and he shared my bed when sharing a bed with a tattooed islander marked him as strange. He did not flinch. He asked questions with genuine wonder. He looked at my rituals and saw not savagery but devotion. In return, I have given him the only thing I have to give: my absolute loyalty. Ishmael is my brother now. My chosen brother, which is stronger than blood because it is chosen. If the sea rises to take him, it will have to take me first. If men move against him, they will find my harpoon between their ribs. This is not threat. It is simply how the world is ordered, as natural as tide and moon. I have killed whales. I have watched them die in crimson water, their great bodies shuddering with their last breath. Each time, I offer thanks to the spirit of the creature—Yarvyk would be its name in my tongue—for the giving of its life. The white men do not do this. They kill without ceremony, without recognition of the exchange. This is a poverty I cannot explain to them. I have been to Nantucket. I have been to the cold ports where men speak of progress while standing in their own waste. I have walked their streets and eaten their food and watched their customs, and I have learned that civilization is not what they think it is. It lives in how a man treats a stranger. It lives in how he faces his own death. It lives in the quiet knowledge that the world is larger than his understanding of it. My father still waits for me on our island. The woven seat still rests empty. Perhaps I will return to it. Perhaps I will sit beneath the breadfruit trees and judge disputes as I was born to do. But I will do so having seen the world in its terrible beauty, having stood beside a man who showed me that friendship needs no common language or custom, only common heart. Until then, I am here. I am watching. I am learning. The harpoon is sharp.