Moby Meridian

"She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, her neck heavy with pendents of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round her, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of a sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly traveled over sheaves of sea - ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm she sported there a tiller, and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow jaw of her hereditary foe... A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy." Moby Dick, description of the Pequod, Chapter 16
















James Kirker

"And they saw one day a pack of vicious looking humans... bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up in thews and armed with weapons of every description... and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and the bridals woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs...the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh." Blood Meridian, entry of the scalp hunters Chapter VI