Ishmael and Queequeg make their way to the Try Pots inn on Nantucket, among a dreary collection of buildings littered with the relics of sailing ships, on an island apparently made waste by fishery bi-products, where even the milk cows eat fish, and the milk tastes like fish.

Ishmael goes on, in his horrific vein, to describe the inn’s exterior:

“Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old topmast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old topmast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over-sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at the gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whale-man’s chapel; and here a gallows! And a pair of prodigious black pots! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?”

The madam of the inn scolds a lay about man , then arranges for a room and meals for Queequeg and Ishmael, not permitting the heathen harpooner to sleep with his harpoon, as a previous patron—a veteran of a four-year voyage—had been found slain in his room with his own harpoon. Otherwise, the chapter focuses on the sumptuous meal served the two adventurers, giving this reader a sense of this stay being a premonition of a coming sacrifice.