"In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard--suspended a cutlass over his naked wrists: Queequeg was the son of a king, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage--this sea Prince of Whales--never saw the captain's cabin. They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But, like the Czar Peter content to toil in the ship-yards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might haply gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were, and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked, infinitely more so than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbour, and seeing what the sailors did there, and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians: I'll die a Pagan. "The strongest point of the book is its 'characters.' Ahab, indeed, is a melodramatic exaggeration, and Ishmael is little more than a mouthpiece; but the harpooners, the mates, and several of the seamen, are truthful portraitures of the sailor as modified by the whaling service. The persons ashore are equally good, though they are soon lost sight of. The two Quaker owners are the author's means for a hit at the religious hypocrisies. Captain Bildad, an old sea-dog, has got rid of every thing pertaining to the meeting-house save an occasional 'thou' and 'thee.' Captain Peleg, in American phrase, 'professes religion.' The following extract exhibits the two men when Ishmael is shipped: