Plot Summary
Chapter 110 of Moby-Dick opens with the crew searching for the source of a leak in the Pequod's hold. In calm weather, they break out cask after cask from the deepest tiers of the ship, emptying the hull until it echoes hollow underfoot and rolls dangerously top-heavy. During this grueling labor, Queequeg—who as harpooneer must work in the damp, subterranean hold—catches a terrible chill that develops into a raging fever. Within days, the powerful tattooed harpooner has wasted away to almost nothing, his cheekbones growing sharper while his eyes grow strangely luminous, radiating what calls "that immortal health in him which could not die."
The Coffin Request
Convinced he is dying, Queequeg makes an unusual request. He recalls seeing dark wooden canoes used as coffins for dead whalemen in Nantucket, a practice that reminds him of his own people's custom of placing embalmed warriors in canoes and setting them adrift toward the "starry archipelagoes." The carpenter is ordered to build a coffin-canoe from dark Lackaday Island lumber aboard the ship. Once completed, Queequeg has his harpoon iron, a paddle, biscuits, fresh water, a bag of earth, and his small idol Yojo placed inside. He tests the coffin himself, lying in it with arms crossed, before pronouncing it satisfactory: "Rarmai"—it will do.
Pip's Lament
The scene between Queequeg and the mad cabin boy Pip provides one of the chapter's most emotionally powerful moments. Pip takes Queequeg's hand and delivers a rambling, heartbreaking speech, asking Queequeg to seek out the version of himself lost in the "sweet Antilles" and contrasting Queequeg's courageous dying (“Queequeg dies game!”) with his own perceived cowardice for jumping from a whale-boat. Starbuck, overhearing, interprets Pip's "strange sweetness of lunacy" as evidence of heavenly knowledge.
Recovery and Transformation
In a remarkable reversal, Queequeg suddenly rallies. He explains that he recalled "a little duty ashore" left undone and simply decided not to die—asserting that if a man makes up his mind to live, mere sickness cannot kill him. contrasts savage and civilized recovery, noting that while a sick civilized man convalesces for months, "a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day." Queequeg soon leaps to his feet, pronounces himself fit for a fight, and converts his coffin into a sea-chest, spending his spare hours carving its lid with hieroglyphic figures copied from the tattoos on his body—tattoos that contained "a complete theory of the heavens and the earth" inscribed by a departed prophet, mysteries that not even Queequeg himself could read.