“Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the west and south. It is not down on any map; true places never are.”

And so Ishmael makes the poet’s timeless case that truth speaks louder through fiction than through other conventions.

Queequeg laboriously relates to Ishmael his ancestry; that he was the son of a heathen king that sought passage on a ship to Christian lands.

“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. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all of his father’s heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; 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.”

“By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful that Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him from ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan kings before him.”

Ishmael makes known his intention to ship out on a whaler from Nantucket and Queequeg makes a pact with him that they would, together in everything, “…boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.”