Bull's Tail, the principal chief (the buffalo, be it remembered,—for this confounded name needs some apology,—carries aloft his tufted tail in combat, like a black flag!) Bull's Tail then, a gentlemanly and mild looking man, made a short and sensible reply....A favorite participle or verbal adjective of Melville's, tufted occurs 4x in Moby-Dick:
(July 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border);
and Scenes and Adventures in the Army
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement.
Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem's head. (Moby-Dick)
Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet.
The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs.
Moby-Dick (1851)
also 3x in Mardi (1849); 2x in Typee (1846); and 1x in Omoo (1847):
Whereupon, the fierce little bull with the tufted forehead flirted his long tail over his buttocks, kicked out with his hind feet, and shot forward a full length.
THE TUFT OF KELP
All dripping in tangles green,
Cast up by a lonely sea
If purer for that, O Weed,Bitterer, too, are ye?
