June 6, 2019 - Chapter Fifteen

In this short chapter, Ishmael and Queequeg go to another hotel to try the chowder and rent a room. The chowder is of two types – clam and cod – and both are delicious, apparently, despite the morose setting of the place. In fact, the setting is so creepy, Ishmael is forced to say, “It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?” It’s as if he finally comes to the same conclusion that the reader already has.

That sad, the chapter ends with a final reference to death, i.e., the hotel keeper’s telling of the story of how a young harpooner named Stiggs once died at the hotel, being killed by his own harpoon piercing his side. It’s unclear whether this was a suicide or not, although it’s heavily hinted by the fact that he has returned from a whaling voyage with very little in the way of oil. The scene speaks poorly of Queequeg’s future, and (SPOILER ALERT) Queequeg does die before the novel is through.