Moby Dick
Herman Melville's monumental novel of obsession, vengeance, and the sea follows Ishmael, a restless young man who ships aboard the whaling vessel Pequod under the command of the monomaniac Captain Ahab, who has sworn to hunt and kill Moby Dick — the great white sperm whale that took his leg. What begins as a commercial whaling voyage becomes a doomed metaphysical quest, as Ahab drags his crew across every ocean toward a confrontation with the whale he has made the embodiment of all the world's inscrutable malice.
Etymology and Extracts
Before the tale proper begins, Melville presents us with a pair of curious preludes, each contributed by some hapless minor clerk of human knowledge. The first is supplied by a pale, threadbare Usher to a grammar school — a man so intimately acquainted with his own mortality that he dusts his old lexicons with a queer handkerchief emblazoned with the flags of all the world's nations, as though he were simultaneously saluting and bidding farewell to every civilization that has ever named the creature he catalogues. He offers us the word "whale" traced across tongues and centuries: the Hebrew chet-vav, the Greek ketos, the Latin cetus, the Anglo-Saxon whœl, the Icelandic hvalur, the Dutch wal, the French baleine, the Spanish ballena, and, most remote and musical of all, the Fegeean Pekee-nuee-nuee. The root meaning, the dictionaries assure us, is something akin to rolling or vaulting — the whale, even in etymology, curves and heaves.
Then comes the Sub-Sub-Librarian, that still more wretched creature, whose life's work has been to rummage through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, gathering every random allusion to whales he could anywhere find. He is advised — affectionately but without illusion — to give up the effort, since all his painstaking accumulations will earn him not a farthing of gratitude. Yet the extracts he has assembled form a kind of scripture of the sea: God creating great whales in Genesis; Job's Leviathan making a path to shine after him; Jonah disappearing down the throat of the great fish prepared for the purpose; Milton's Leviathan stretched like a promontory sleeping or swimming; Hobbes pressing the whale into political metaphor; Thomas Jefferson memorializing the Sperm Whale to the French minister; Edmund Burke pronouncing Spain a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe; and voices of whalemen, naturalists, sea-captains, and poets across three centuries attesting to the creature's size, ferocity, and magnificent strangeness. All of them together form not a gospel but a glancing, oblique bird's-eye view — a mosaic more evocative than definitive — of Leviathan as mankind has imagined him from the earliest pages of civilization to its latest.
Chapter 1 — Loomings
Call me Ishmael. That is the whole of the introduction — three words, and in those three words the voice assumes its full authority, so that everything which follows is already implied in them. Some years ago, with little money in his purse and nothing on shore to hold him, Ishmael found himself growing grim about the mouth, felt a damp and drizzly November spreading through his soul, caught himself pausing before coffin warehouses, and falling in behind every funeral procession he encountered. He knew the signs. When his hypos — his spleen, his black bile — got such an upper hand that only a strong moral principle prevented him from stepping deliberately into the street and knocking people's hats off, he understood that it was high time to get to sea. Where a man of philosophical temperament like Cato throws himself upon his sword, Ishmael quietly takes to the ship. It is, he assures us, his substitute for pistol and ball, and he considers it a rather more elegant solution.
He invites us to consider Manhattan on a drowsy Sabbath afternoon, how every path leads waterward, how the streets of the city drain inevitably toward the Battery, how thousands of men — clerks, accountants, counter-jumpers, all who are tied during the week to desks and benches — stand along the wharves on their day of rest, fixed in ocean reveries, gazing seaward as though called by something they cannot name. This is not a peculiarity of New York; follow any path in the country and it leads you to water. Meditation and water are wedded forever. The painter who would make the dreamiest landscape employs water as his chief element; without it the picture lies dead. The ancient Persians held the sea holy; the Greeks gave it a god who was own brother to Jove. And Narcissus — poor Narcissus — could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, and plunged in and was drowned. Yet that same image, that ungraspable phantom of life, looks up at us from every river and ocean. It is the key to everything.
Ishmael goes to sea as a common sailor, right before the mast, not as a captain or commodore or cook. He is not unaware that taking orders from a weather-beaten sea-captain when one has previously lorded it as a country schoolmaster requires a considerable decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to endure — but the universal thump, he reflects, is passed round, and all hands rub each other's shoulder-blades, and there is a certain democracy in subordination. Besides, sailors are paid, whereas passengers must pay; and the difference between paying and being paid is, as he solemnly observes, the whole difference between paradise and perdition.
Why whaling in particular? The invisible police officer of the Fates, he suspects, had something to do with it. The grand programme of Providence had apparently scheduled between some contested presidential election and some bloody battle in Afghanistan a minor item: whaling voyage by one Ishmael. Chief among his own inducements was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself — that portentous, mysterious monster rolling his island bulk through wild and distant seas, trailing undeliverable, nameless perils in his wake. Ishmael is tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote; he loves to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts. So the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed him, there floated into his inmost soul endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
Chapter 2 — The Carpet-Bag
With a shirt or two stuffed into his old carpet-bag, Ishmael left Manhattan for Cape Horn and the Pacific, arriving in New Bedford on a Saturday night in December. He was disappointed to learn that the packet for Nantucket had already sailed and would not run again until Monday. He had set his heart on a Nantucket craft, for there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island — the great original of the whaling trade, the Tyre to New Bedford's Carthage, the place where the first dead American whale was stranded, where the aboriginal Red-Men first paddled out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan.
New Bedford in winter was dark and cheerless, the streets blocks of blackness, the cold biting and unrelenting. Ishmael sounded his pocket and found it contained only a few pieces of silver, which counseled against anything too expensive or jolly. He passed the inviting warmth of the Crossed Harpoons and the bright red windows of the Sword-Fish Inn, and moved on through dreary streets toward the water and cheaper lodgings. He stumbled into what proved to be a Black congregation in the middle of a sermon on the blackness of darkness — he backed out muttering about wretched entertainment at the sign of The Trap — before finally spying, not far from the docks, a swinging sign bearing a faintly painted jet of misty spray and the words: "The Spouter Inn: — Peter Coffin."
Coffin and Spouter both struck him as rather ominous names in that particular combination, but the dim light and poverty-stricken creak of the sign promised cheap lodgings, and Ishmael had long since made his peace with such accommodations.
Chapter 3 — The Spouter-Inn
The Spouter-Inn announced itself through its entry hall, which was hung on one side with a large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked and defaced that patient study was required before any meaning could be extracted from it at all. Masses of shadow resolved themselves only gradually into what appeared to be a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane, three dismantled masts barely visible above the waves, and an exasperated whale in the enormous act of impaling himself upon them — a boggy, squitchy picture, sufficiently nightmarish to drive a nervous man distracted, yet possessed of some indefinite, half-attained sublimity that held the eye. The opposite wall bristled with a heathenish array of clubs, spears, and rusty whaling lances and harpoons, each with its history, for this was a museum of violent industry.
The public room beyond was darker still, its low ponderous beams suggesting the cockpit of an old craft; the bar itself was fashioned in the likeness of a right whale's head, its proprietor — a little withered old Jonah — dispensing death and delirium from within those wide-arched jaws. The landlord, Peter Coffin, informed Ishmael that the house was full and the only bed available must be shared with a harpooneer.
Ishmael awaited this mysterious individual with growing unease, which deepened when the landlord casually mentioned that the harpooneer had gone out this Saturday night to peddle his head. This announcement produced prolonged confusion, resolved at last by the explanation that the man had brought back from the South Seas a collection of embalmed New Zealand heads, and was attempting to sell the last of them before the Sabbath made such commerce impossible. The question of what to think of a harpooneer who spent his Saturday nights selling the heads of dead idolators was left philosophically open.
When the harpooneer finally arrived — at something near midnight, candle in one hand and the ghastly New Zealand head in the other — Ishmael, watching from the bed he had finally decided to occupy, was confronted with a face of dark purplish yellow, large blackish squares tattooed across the cheeks and covering the body from head to foot, a bald and mildewed skull of a head with a small scalp-knot twisted on the forehead, and a tomahawk which the newcomer presently lit as a pipe. When this figure — having crammed the embalmed head into his bag, produced a small hunch-backed Congo idol, set it in the fireplace and offered it a sacrificial biscuit amid guttural chanting — finally sprang into the bed and discovered its occupant, there were moments of genuine mutual terror before the landlord arrived with a candle and introduced the parties properly.
The harpooneer was Queequeg, a South Sea Islander; Ishmael, having arrived at the calm philosophical conclusion that it was better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian, turned in, and, as he tells us with a certain satisfaction, never slept better in his life.
Chapter 4 — The Counterpane
Ishmael woke to find Queequeg's tattooed arm thrown over him in the most loving and affectionate manner, the elaborate Cretan labyrinth of its tattooing so perfectly matching the parti-colored patchwork counterpane that the arm and the quilt were nearly indistinguishable. The sensation recalled to him a childhood memory — half dream, half reality — of being sent to bed as punishment on the longest day of June, and waking in outer darkness to feel a supernatural hand placed in his: a nameless, unimaginable silent form seated at his bedside for what seemed ages, the horrid spell broken only by the gradual return of daylight. The strangeness of waking beside Queequeg echoed that old strangeness, though shorn of its terror.
Getting free of Queequeg's sleeping embrace required considerable effort — the man's clasp, even unconscious, was that of a devoted bridegroom — but once roused, Queequeg proved himself unexpectedly considerate, signaling by signs that he would dress first and leave Ishmael the room. His dressing was a spectacle: he began with the beaver hat and then — still trouserless — disappeared under the bed to put on his boots, a sequence of operations peculiarly his own, suspended between the savage and the civilized without fully belonging to either. He shaved with the head of his harpoon, having stropped it briefly on his boot. He emerged at last arrayed in his great pilot monkey jacket, harpoon carried like a marshal's baton, a figure magnificent in its own terms.
Chapter 5 — Breakfast
Ishmael descended to find the bar-room full of the previous night's boarders — nearly all whalemen, a brown and brawny company with bosky beards and monkey jackets worn as morning gowns. A practiced eye could read in the varying tones of their complexions exactly how long each had been ashore: the sun-toasted pear of the man three days off his Indian voyage, the faintly bleached tropic tan of one who had tarried whole weeks on land. None of them could show a cheek like Queequeg's, barred with every tint of every climate zone by zone.
What surprised Ishmael at breakfast was the profound silence these men maintained. Here were a set of sea-dogs who had boarded great whales on the open ocean — entire strangers to them — and dueled them dead without flinching, yet seated together at a social breakfast table they looked round sheepishly as a flock of lambs among the Green Mountains. Queequeg alone was perfectly at ease, sitting at the head of the table, using his harpoon to reach across and grapple his beefsteaks with a cool composure that, whatever it lacked in breeding, achieved a kind of austere gentility.
Chapter 6 — The Street
The astonishment Ishmael had felt at Queequeg circulating among polite New Bedford society was quickly dispersed by his first daylight stroll through the streets. For in those thoroughfares near the docks one encountered genuine cannibals standing at street corners chatting; wild specimens of the whaling craft reeling past; and alongside them scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, stalwart young fellows who had felled forests and now sought to exchange the axe for the whale-lance. They arrived with a magnificent ignorance of the sea, some in beaver hats and swallow-tailed coats girdled with sailor-belts and sheath-knives, some in sou'westers and bombazine cloaks, all of them destined to have their straps and buttons burst in the first howling gale.
Yet New Bedford was no mere roughneck port. It was perhaps the dearest place to live in all New England, its patrician houses and opulent gardens having been dragged up from the bottom of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans — harpooned out of the deep by the industry of its whalemen. Fathers gave whales for dowers to their daughters; every house had its reservoir of oil; in summer the town bloomed with maples and horse-chestnuts as though art had flung a garden over the barren rocks, and the women of New Bedford bloomed with it, their carnation perennial as sunlight.
Chapter 7 — The Chapel
In that same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few fishermen bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific fail to visit it on a Sunday. Ishmael did not fail. He arrived through driving sleet and mist to find a small, scattered congregation of sailors and sailors' wives and widows sitting purposely apart from one another, each wrapped in an insular and incommunicable grief, their eyes fixed on marble tablets masoned into the walls on either side the pulpit. The tablets recorded the dead: John Talbot, lost overboard near the Isle of Desolation off Patagonia at the age of eighteen; six men of the ship Eliza towed out of sight by a whale on the Off-shore Ground and never seen again; Captain Ezekiel Hardy, killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan. Memorial stones without bodies beneath them, commemorating deaths without graves.
Ishmael sat near Queequeg, who was the only person present not reading the inscriptions — being the only person present who could not read — and whose wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity was the sole acknowledgment of Ishmael's entrance. The women present wore the countenance of unceasing grief, and Ishmael felt certain that these black-bordered marbles had the power to open old wounds and make them bleed afresh. What bitter blanks were those tablets, covering no ashes, offering no body to the survivors' grief. How different to mourn a dead man who lies buried beneath the green grass, at a spot one can name and visit, from mourning one who has placelessly perished without a grave, swallowed by the indifferent sea.
Yet Ishmael grew merry again. Yes, there is death in the business of whaling, he reflected — a speechlessly quick, chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity — but what of it? He had hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. His body is but the lees of his better being; stave his soul, Jove himself cannot. Three cheers for Nantucket.
Chapter 8 — The Pulpit
Father Mapple entered in a rush of sleet and tarpaulin: his hat ran down with melting ice, his great pilot jacket dragged at him with the weight of the water it had absorbed. He was a man of venerable robustness, once a sailor and harpooneer in his youth, now a beloved chaplain, in whom the adventurous maritime life had left certain engrafted clerical peculiarities. Among the fissures of his wrinkles there gleamed the mild verdure of a second flowering, a spring appearing beneath the snow of age.
The pulpit itself was notable. Having been built without any staircase — for a conventional stair would consume too much of the chapel's small floor — it was accessed by a perpendicular side-ladder, such as one uses to mount a ship from a boat at sea, fitted with handsome red worsted man-ropes donated by a whaling captain's wife. Father Mapple, pausing at the foot, grasped the ornamental knobs and ascended hand over hand with the practiced dexterity of a sailor going aloft. Having reached the height, he then proceeded to haul the ladder up after him step by step, depositing it within, leaving himself impregnable in what Ishmael thought of as his little Quebec.
Ishmael pondered the symbolism of this. Father Mapple was a man of well-known sincerity, not given to theatrical tricks. This act of physical isolation must signify something: a spiritual withdrawal from all outward worldly ties, a self-containing stronghold from which to address — and be sealed off from — the world. The pulpit itself was fashioned in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, the Holy Bible resting on a projecting scroll work after a ship's fiddle-headed beak; and behind it hung a painting of a gallant ship battling a terrible storm off a black and rocky lee shore, while from a sunlit isle high above the clouds there beamed an angel's face. The world's a ship on its passage out, and the pulpit is its prow.
Chapter 9 — The Sermon
Father Mapple opened proceedings by ordering his scattered congregation into closer formation in the manner of a quarterdeck: "Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard — larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!" There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots, a slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and then all was quiet and every eye on the preacher. He kneeled in the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, closed his eyes, and offered a prayer of such deep devotion that he seemed to be kneeling at the bottom of the sea.
He then read, in tones like the continual tolling of a bell on a foundering ship, the hymn of Jonah — of the dismal gloom arched over by whale's ribs, of plunging despair and the opening maw of hell, of the cry to God heard even in that extremity, the radiant dolphin-borne deliverer, and the song of joy that will never cease to record that terrible, that joyful hour. Nearly all the congregation joined in, their voices swelling high above the howling of the storm outside.
His text was the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah: And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. What depths of the soul, he declared, does Jonah's deep sea-line sound. The lesson is two-stranded: a lesson to all sinful men, and a private lesson to himself as a pilot of the living God. To sinful men, Jonah teaches the wages of wilful disobedience. Jonah found God's command hard — but all things God would have us do are hard; he more often commands than persuades, and to obey God we must disobey ourselves.
Father Mapple unfolded Jonah's flight with the energy of a man who has sailed those same seas of the spirit. Jonah skulks along the wharves of Joppa, that most easterly port of the Mediterranean, seeking a ship for Tarshish — for Cadiz, more than two thousand miles to the westward, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar — as though distance alone could place him beyond the reach of God. He boards with the guilty eye and slouched hat of a fugitive; the sailors read his guilt in his every cringing gesture though they cannot name his crime; he pays the inflated passage money with an alacrity that confirms the Captain's suspicion while stilling his tongue. He finds his narrow stateroom with its ceiling nearly on his forehead, and in that contracted hole — already foreshadowing the whale's bowels — sinks into a hideous sleep, his conscience hanging straight and burning within him even as the ship heels crooked about him. The gale descends; boxes and bales go overboard; the sailors cast lots; and the lot is Jonah's. Cast into the sea, he carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind, and the whale's ivory teeth shut upon his prison like white bolts.
But then observe his prayer, Father Mapple urges: Jonah in the belly of the fish does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He does not bargain. He acknowledges that his punishment is just, leaves his deliverance entirely to God, and contents himself with this alone — that despite all his pains and pangs, he will still look toward the holy temple. Here is true repentance: not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. God hears even in that extremity beyond the reach of any plummet, and the whale breaches upward toward the warm and pleasant sun, and vomits Jonah upon dry land, and the word of the Lord comes a second time: go preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood.
This is the private lesson to Father Mapple himself — and the harder one. Woe to the pilot of the living God who slights his duty. Woe to him who courts the world's good opinion above the commands of heaven. Woe to him who would pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who would be saved by falsehood. And then — the storm outside still howling, the preacher himself seeming tossed upon it, his chest heaving with a ground-swell, his arms the warring elements — he lifted his face and cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm. On the starboard hand of every woe there is a sure delight, and higher the top of that delight than the bottom of the woe is deep. Delight — top-gallant delight — belongs to him who stands forth his own inexorable self against the proud gods and commodores of this earth; to him who gives no quarter in the truth; to him who is only a patriot to heaven. And eternal delight will be his who, coming at last to lay himself down, can say with his final breath: O Father, chiefly known to me by Thy rod — here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own.
He said no more. Slowly waving a benediction, he covered his face with his hands and remained kneeling there in his high and isolated prow until all the people had departed and he was left alone in the place.
Chapter 10 — A Bosom Friend
Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the chapel, Ishmael found Queequeg alone before the fire, whittling with quiet concentration at the nose of his little idol, then turning with grave deliberation to count the pages of a large book — pausing at every fiftieth page to emit a long, astonished whistle, as though the sheer multitude of leaves exceeded the arithmetic of his island. Ishmael sat watching him, and felt something loosen in himself. Through all the savage's hideous tattooings there shone what could not be disguised — traces of a simple and honest heart, a lofty self-possession that no uncouthness could entirely maim. The man had never cringed, never kept a creditor. There was something of General Washington in the architecture of that great bare skull. Queequeg was, as Ishmael put it, George Washington cannibalistically developed.
His very indifference spoke a nature innocent of civilized hypocrisies. The more Ishmael studied him, the more his own splintered heart softened. He drew his bench near and made friendly overtures; Queequeg, upon mention of the previous night's bedfellowship, looked quietly pleased. They turned pages together, jabbered about the town, and then Ishmael proposed a social smoke. The tomahawk pipe passed between them, and any remaining ice dissolved utterly. When the smoke was over, Queequeg pressed his forehead to Ishmael's, clasped him at the waist, and declared in his broken tongue that they were henceforth married — meaning, by the custom of his country, bosom friends, pledged to die for one another.
After supper Queequeg made Ishmael a present of his embalmed head, then divided his silver coin on the table into two equal halves and thrust one portion bodily into Ishmael's pockets without ceremony. He then performed his evening prayers before the little idol, and Ishmael, reasoning that the magnanimous God of all creation could hardly begrudge an insignificant bit of black wood its share of reverence, joined him — kindling the shavings, propping up the innocent idol, salaming before it, and kissing its nose. Thus at peace with their own consciences and all the world, they went to bed and lay there in their hearts' honeymoon, talking softly in the dark.
Chapter 11 — Nightgown
They lay talking and napping at short intervals, Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing a tattooed leg over Ishmael's and drawing it back, until at last all drowsiness departed and they found themselves wide awake and sitting up together against the headboard, four knees drawn up close, two noses bending over them like warming-pans, the room quite cold beyond the bed's small warmth. Here Ishmael paused to remark that the genuine pleasure of bodily comfort requires some element of contrast — the cold nose, the icy air just beyond the blanket — for nothing exists in itself; the spark of warmth is sweetest at the heart of an arctic crystal.
They lit the new lamp and passed Queequeg's tomahawk pipe between them, the smoke rising in a blue tester above them. Ishmael noted how elastic stiff prejudices become when once love bends them: the very smoking that had repelled him the night before now seemed the very condensation of household comfort. Under this undulating canopy of blue haze, Queequeg began to speak of his native island — and thus began a history that subsequent conversations would supply in fuller form.
Chapter 12 — Biographical
Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South — not to be found on any map, for true places never are. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; his aunts wives of unconquerable warriors. In him flowed royal blood, though in his untutored youth he had nourished certain cannibal propensities that some might consider a vitiation of its excellence.
A visiting ship from Sag Harbor inflamed in the young prince a powerful desire to see something of Christendom beyond a specimen whaler or two. When the ship's captain refused him passage, Queequeg vowed a vow. He paddled his canoe to a narrow strait the ship must pass, hid in the mangroves with the canoe's prow seaward, and when the vessel glided by he darted out, capsized and sank his canoe behind him, clawed up the chains, and threw himself flat on the deck grappling a ring-bolt, swearing not to let it go though hacked in pieces. The captain threatened him with a cutlass; Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, the captain relented and made a whaleman of him.
But like Czar Peter toiling incognito in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg endured every seeming ignominy in the cause of learning what might elevate his people. The Christians he encountered at Sag Harbor and Nantucket soon convinced him that even the most civilized men could be both wicked and miserable, infinitely more so than all his father's heathens. Thought he: it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan. And so he lived among Christians, wore their clothes, attempted their gibberish, yet remained at heart the old idolator — and proposed, for the present, to sail about and sow his wild oats in all four oceans, his barbed iron now standing in lieu of a sceptre. When Ishmael declared his own intention to sail out of Nantucket, Queequeg at once resolved to accompany him — same vessel, same watch, same mess — and to dip boldly with both their hands into the Potluck of both worlds.
Chapter 13 — Wheelbarrow
Next morning they settled accounts at the Spouter-Inn, borrowed a wheelbarrow for their luggage, and made their way to the wharf where the little packet schooner Moss was moored for Nantucket. Walking through the New Bedford streets, the townspeople stared not so much at the tattooed savage as at the remarkable spectacle of the two of them on such confidential terms. Queequeg, carrying his own harpoon — for he had, like an inland reaper attached to his own scythe, a particular affection for its well-proven iron — told Ishmael by way of explanation how he had first encountered a wheelbarrow in Sag Harbor and, knowing nothing of its mechanism, had simply shouldered it. He balanced this story with another, of a grandly punctilious sea captain who had attended a wedding feast on Rokovoko and, placed beside the ceremonial punchbowl, proceeded with bland self-importance to wash his hands in it, taking it for a finger-glass.
Hoisting sail, the Moss glided down the Acushnet River past wharves heaped with casks, past ships silent and safely moored and others noisy with the preparation of new cruises — the endlessness, Ishmael reflected, the sheer intolerableness of all earthly effort. Once in open water, the bracing breeze filled her bows and Ishmael's lungs alike, and he and Queequeg stood at the bowsprit exulting, indifferent to the jeering glances of the lubbers aboard. One bumpkin, mimicking Queequeg behind his back, was caught, tossed with miraculous dexterity high into the air, and set down on his feet, winded but intact, while Queequeg turned his back and passed the tomahawk pipe with perfect unconcern. The captain roared his displeasure — but at that moment a parted weather-sheet sent the boom sweeping the deck and the same bumpkin overboard. In the general panic Queequeg alone acted: dropping to his knees, he lassoed the flailing boom, secured it, then stripped to the waist, leaped from the side, swam in the freezing foam, dove, and surfaced dragging the unconscious man. The captain begged his pardon. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump. He asked only for fresh water to wash off the brine; then put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and seemed to be saying to himself: "It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians."
Chapter 14 — Nantucket
They arrived safely in Nantucket. Take out your map and look at it — a mere hillock, an elbow of sand, all beach and no background, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. So impoverished in the terrestrial sense is this island that gamesome storytellers claim the inhabitants must import Canada thistles because nothing will grow naturally, carry pieces of wood like relics of the true cross, and plant toadstools before their houses for shade. But these extravaganzas only prove that Nantucket is no Illinois.
There is a legend among the red-men: an eagle swooped upon the New England coast, snatched an infant from its parents, and bore it over the waters to this island, where the parents, following in canoes, found only an empty ivory casket — the poor child's skeleton. That is how the island was settled, and it is not surprising that men born on such a shore should take to the sea for everything. From crabs and clams they progressed to mackerel, from mackerel to cod, until at last they launched a navy of great ships and explored the entire watery world, declaring everlasting war on the mightiest animated mass that survived the flood. Like so many Alexanders these naked Nantucketers parcelled out the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans among themselves. The Nantucketer alone truly lives on the sea; it is his home, his plantation, his element. He hides among the waves as the chamois hunter climbs the Alps, and when at nightfall he furls his sails and lies him down, beneath his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
Chapter 15 — Chowder
Anchoring late in the evening, Queequeg and I went ashore to find the Try Pots, recommended by the Spouter-Inn's landlord as the best-kept hotel in Nantucket and famous for its chowders. The directions were crooked enough, but at last we could not mistake the place: two enormous black pots suspended from the cross-trees of an old top-mast planted before the door, the whole arrangement looking not unlike a gallows. A Coffin my innkeeper at New Bedford, tombstones in the chapel, and now a gallows with a pair of prodigious black pots — Ishmael could not shake the concatenation of ominous signs. The freckled Mrs. Hussey met them in the porch and ushered them in, and when asked what supper was to be had, answered only: "Clam or Cod?" The clam chowder that arrived presently was a revelation — small juicy clams, pounded ship biscuit, salt pork in little flakes, all enriched with butter and plentifully seasoned, the whole surpassingly excellent. They signaled for cod chowder next and dispatched that too with equal expedition.
The Try Pots was the fishiest of all fishy places: chowder for breakfast, chowder for dinner, chowder for supper; the courtyard paved with clamshells; Mrs. Hussey wearing a necklace of codfish vertebrae; her cow, out on the beach, feeding on fish remnants and marching with each foot in a cod's decapitated head. At bedtime Mrs. Hussey confiscated Queequeg's harpoon, citing the unhappy precedent of one young Stiggs, found dead in her first-floor back with his harpoon in his side after a voyage of four years and three barrels of oil. She would keep the iron till morning. Both men retired to bed on the whole well-pleased, having ordered clam and cod chowder both for breakfast.
Chapter 16 — The Ship
In bed Queequeg disclosed a complication: his god Yojo had told him, repeatedly and insistently, that the choice of ship must rest entirely with Ishmael. Yojo had already designated a vessel, and if Ishmael were left alone to wander the whaling fleet, he would infallibly light upon the right one by what might appear to be mere chance. Ishmael chafed at this arrangement — he had counted on Queequeg's sagacity — but Queequeg could not be moved. The next morning therefore, leaving his friend shut up with Yojo in a species of Ramadan, Ishmael sallied out among the shipping. Three ships were up for three-year voyages: the Devil-Dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. He peered at the first two and settled, by the operation of whatever Yojo had set in motion, upon the Pequod.
She was unlike any craft he had ever seen. Old, small, weather-stained dark as a French grenadier who has fought in Egypt and Siberia alike, her venerable bows bearded, her decks worn and wrinkled like the flagstone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled — and yet beyond all her antiquity she had been adorned by old Captain Peleg into something stranger still. Her bulwarks were garnished all round with the long sharp teeth of sperm whales for pins; her blocks were of sea-ivory; her tiller was carved from the lower jaw of her hereditary foe. She was appareled like a barbaric Ethiopian emperor heavy with pendants of polished ivory — a cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. A noble thing, and somehow a most melancholy; for all noble things are touched with that.
Ishmael found the owner Captain Peleg half-concealed in a wigwam of whale-jaw slabs on the quarter-deck. The ensuing interview was conducted in the blunt Quaker idiom: Peleg cross-examined Ishmael's credentials, dismissed his merchant-service experience with contempt, tested his nerve with talk of stove boats and harpoons down living whale throats, and then — satisfied enough — sent him to look over the weather bow at the unbroken ocean as the only world-tour on offer. Having signed the articles for the three-hundredth lay over the bitter objections of the pious, parsimonious Captain Bildad, who had proposed the seven-hundred-and-seventy-seventh, Ishmael turned to inquire about Captain Ahab.
Peleg warned him that Ahab had only one leg — the other devoured by the monstrous sperm whale. He was a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Peleg said; didn't speak much, but when he spoke a man might well listen. He had been in colleges as well as among cannibals, had fixed his fiery lance in stranger foes than whales, and bore a name that even an old squaw at Gayhead had predicted would prove prophetic. Peleg urged Ishmael not to wrong the man for his wicked name — his crazy widowed mother had given it him — and added, as if in reassurance, that Ahab had his humanities: a sweet young wife, a child born just before this last voyage from which he returned bereft of his leg and for a time bereft of more than that. Ishmael walked away full of a strange, undefinable awe — not quite dread, not quite admiration — and dark Ahab slipped by slow degrees from the foreground of his mind.
Chapter 17 — The Ramadan
Ishmael respected all religious observance, however comical it might appear — he could not find it in his heart to undervalue even ants worshipping a toadstool — and so left Queequeg undisturbed through the long day of his Ramadan. Toward nightfall, however, with no answer at the locked door and not a sound from within, alarm rose quickly to near-panic. The harpoon, which the landlady had confiscated the previous evening, was now unaccountably missing from the closet. Mrs. Hussey, summoned in a frenzy, concluded Queequeg had killed himself after the manner of the unfortunate Stiggs, and began dictating the wording of a new sign for the premises. Ishmael, overriding all protests about her doorposts, burst the door open with a running shoulder — and there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected, in the dead center of the room, squatting on his hams with Yojo balanced atop his head, like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life. He had been in precisely that position all day and half the night.
In the morning, at the first gleam of sun, he rose with stiff and grating joints and pressed his forehead cheerfully to Ishmael's: his Ramadan was over. Ishmael then delivered a long lecture on the physiological and theological evils of prolonged fasting — arguing that an undigested apple-dumpling was the true origin of hell, and that all dyspeptic religionists owed their melancholy notions about the hereafter to nutritional deficiency. Queequeg listened with a look of condescending concern, as though he pitied this sensible young man so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety. The lecture produced no perceptible effect. They went down to a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders of all sorts and sallied out, picking their teeth with halibut bones, to board the Pequod.
Chapter 18 — His Mark
Walking down the wharf, harpoon in hand, they were loudly hailed from the wigwam by Captain Peleg, who announced that he had not suspected Ishmael's friend was a cannibal and that no cannibals should come aboard without producing their papers — meaning, he must show himself converted. Captain Bildad, emerging from behind Peleg, demanded whether Queequeg was in communion with any Christian church. Ishmael replied, with an inventive confidence, that Queequeg was a member of the First Congregational Church. Bildad looked dubious; Peleg grew facetious. Pressed harder, Ishmael declared that he meant the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world — in that great belief, pagans and Presbyterians joined hands alike. Peleg was delighted and said it was a better sermon than Father Mapple could have preached. Come aboard, he cried, never mind the papers.
Queequeg was then invited to demonstrate his qualifications. He leaped into the bows of a hanging whale-boat, braced his knee, poised his harpoon, and drove it clean across the ship's deck into a glistening tar-spot the size of a whale's eye — barely over old Bildad's broad brim. "Spos-ee him whale-e eye," said Queequeg hauling in the line; "why, dad whale dead." Peleg insisted on his immediate enrollment at the ninetieth lay. In the cabin, Queequeg signed the articles in his own fashion: he copied onto the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a queer round figure tattooed upon his arm, so that through Peleg's persistent mispronunciation it read: Quohog, his X mark. Captain Bildad thereafter pressed upon the new hand a pamphlet entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose," and warned him solemnly to spurn the idol Bell and steer clear of the fiery pit. Peleg cut him off: pious harpooneers, he insisted, never made good voyagers — piety takes the shark out of them.
Chapter 19 — The Prophet
Just outside the ship they were accosted by a shabbily dressed stranger whose face had been entirely overrun by a confluent smallpox, leaving it ribbed and furrowed like the dry bed of a torrent. He aimed a massive forefinger at the Pequod and asked whether they had shipped in her. He knew their business before they confirmed it. Had they seen Old Thunder, he inquired — Captain Ahab? He hinted at obscure events in Ahab's past: a Cape Horn fit during which Ahab had lain like dead for three days; a deadly skirmish with a Spaniard before an altar in Santa; a silver calabash he had spat into; and above all the prophecy surrounding the loss of his leg. What was signed was signed, the stranger conceded at last — what was to be would be, and then again perhaps it wouldn't, after all; God pity the men who sailed with him. When asked his name, the stranger said simply: Elijah. He wished them morning several times and departed.
Walking away, they dismissed him as a humbug and a bugbear — but turning a corner, Ishmael looked back and found Elijah following them at a distance. When they crossed the street to test him, he passed on without seeming to notice. This relieved Ishmael only partly; the half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded talk had bred in him all kinds of vague wonderments, shadowy half-apprehensions attached to the Pequod, to Ahab, to the leg, and to the voyage that lay ahead.
Chapter 20 — All Astir
Over the next few days a great activity seized the Pequod. New sails, bolts of canvas, coils of rigging came aboard in a continuous stream; Peleg kept his vigil in the wigwam; Bildad purchased and provisioned at the stores; the men worked the rigging till long after nightfall. Chief among the provisioners was Bildad's sister, Aunt Charity — a lean, indefatigable, kindhearted lady who bustled hither and thither with jars of pickles, bunches of quills, rolls of flannel, and in the end, remarkably, a long whaling lance in one hand and an oil-ladle in the other. A ship being, in effect, a three-year household upon the wide ocean, everything that a house might need — and a great deal besides that a house never imagines — must be carried aboard in abundance, with spares of the spares, for every article peculiar to the fishery is liable to destruction and loss precisely when its need is most acute.
Queequeg and I visited daily and asked repeatedly after Captain Ahab, and were told repeatedly that he was getting better and would soon be aboard. If Ishmael had been downright honest with himself he would have acknowledged a vague unease at committing himself to so long a voyage without having laid eyes on the man who was to be its absolute dictator; but when a man is already involved in a thing he has ways of covering his suspicions even from himself, and Ishmael said nothing and tried to think nothing.
Chapter 21 — Going Aboard
On the morning of sailing Queequeg and Ishmael set out before dawn, arriving at the wharf in a grey, misty half-light. Before they reached the gangway they were accosted again by Elijah, who materialized at their shoulders in the dim twilight and peered from one face to the other with his most unaccountable glances. Had they seen any men moving toward the ship just now? Ishmael thought he had glimpsed four or five shadowy figures, though it was too dark to be certain. Elijah seemed satisfied by this, repeated his morning salutations several times, hinted at something he had been on the point of warning them against, and finally departed with a reference to the Grand Jury. They went aboard and found the ship in profound quiet — not a soul moving, the cabin locked, the hatches lumbered with coils of rigging. In the forecastle they found only an old rigger asleep across two chests. Queequeg, inquiring after suitable seating, lowered himself comfortably onto the sleeper's posterior — informing Ishmael that in his country the lower orders were routinely employed as furniture. They smoked their pipe over the recumbent man until the strong vapor woke him; and from him they learned that Captain Ahab had come aboard the previous night.
Chapter 22 — Merry Christmas
Toward noon on Christmas Day the riggers were dismissed, the Pequod hauled from the wharf, and Aunt Charity came off in a whale-boat with her last gifts — a nightcap for Stubb and a spare Bible for the steward. Then Peleg and Bildad emerged from the cabin and the anchor was got up to a chorus of profanity from Peleg and psalmody from Bildad, both proceeding with every appearance of being joint commanders at sea, though the actual Captain remained invisible below. Peleg roared and kicked along the windlass; Bildad sang hymns from the bow, though he had forbidden profane songs not three days earlier. The anchor came up, the sails were set, and off they glided into a short, cold Christmas, the long northern day merging quickly into night as they made their way onto the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased them in ice. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; vast curving icicles depended from the bows like the ivory tusks of some huge elephant.
When at last they had gained enough offing to discharge the pilots, old Bildad lingered on the departing sail-boat with a most affecting reluctance — pacing, running below to speak another farewell word, looking to windward and to leeward and aloft, coiling a rope mechanically as if unable to still his hands, until Peleg finally grasped him, and the lantern briefly illuminated Bildad's face as he stood gazing heroically at his old shipmate — as much as to say: "Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it." Peleg himself, the philosopher, had a tear twinkling in his eye when the lantern came too near. At last Peleg backed the main-yard and bade them goodbye with wishes for three years' worth of good luck and a hot supper waiting in old Nantucket. Bildad's farewell descended into an anxious inventory — beware the molasses tierce, don't whale it on Lord's days, keep the cheese out of the hold, careful with the butter at twenty cents the pound — until Peleg dragged him over the side.
Ship and boat diverged. The cold damp night breeze blew between them. A screaming gull flew overhead. Three heavy-hearted cheers were given, and the Pequod plunged, blind as fate, into the lone Atlantic.
Chapter 23 — The Lee Shore
Bulkington had been glimpsed but briefly at the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford — a tall, newlanded mariner, just returned from four years at sea — and yet when the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the wintry Atlantic, there he stood at the helm, unable to endure the land even for a night's rest. This six-inch chapter must serve as his only monument, his stoneless grave; for deep memories yield no epitaphs, and the truest things cannot be spoken at length.
Consider the ship in a gale, driven toward a lee shore. The port offers safety, warmth, hearthstone and supper and friends — all that is kind to our mortalities — yet in such a gale the port is the ship's direst jeopardy. One touch of land would shudder her through; she must crowd on every sail and fight directly against the very winds that would bring her home, rushing into peril for refuge's sake. So Bulkington fought. For in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, as shoreless and indefinite as God. Better to perish in that howling infinite than to be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if the lee were safety. Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing, straight up, leaps thy apotheosis.
Chapter 24 — The Advocate
As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in whaling, and as that business is regarded among landsmen as disreputable and unpoetical, I am all anxiety to disabuse ye of the injustice. They call us butchers — but butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all the martial commanders whom the world delights to honor. They call our decks foul — but what slippery decks are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battlefields from which soldiers return to ladies' plaudits? And for peril: many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery would recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail fanning the air over his head. Yet the world pays us homage unwittingly, for nearly all the tapers and lamps and candles that burn round the globe burn to our glory.
Weigh the matter further. Dutch admirals commanded whaling fleets; Louis XVI fitted out ships from Dunkirk; Britain paid her whalemen over a million pounds in bounties in forty years; America now sails seven hundred vessels manned by eighteen thousand men. More than this: the whale-ship was the pioneer into every remote sea, into every archipelago not yet charted, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. The whaleman broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown in the Pacific and so opened the way for the liberation of Peru, Chile, and Bolivia. Australia was given to the world by the whaleman; Polynesia was opened by the whaleman; Japan waits on the threshold of the whaleman's opening. If whaling has no famous authors, consider that the first account of Leviathan was written by mighty Job, the first whaling narrative composed by Alfred the Great himself, and our eulogy pronounced in Parliament by Edmund Burke. And as for blood — the grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was of the old Nantucket harpooneers' line. Whaling is imperial. A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
Chapter 25 — Postscript
One addendum in behalf of whaling's dignity: at the coronation of kings and queens they are solemnly oiled upon the head, as was decreed from ancient custom. The question is simply what oil is used for such a sacred function. It cannot be olive oil, nor macassar, nor castor, nor train oil, nor cod-liver. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its pure, unpolluted, sweetest state? Think of it, ye loyal Britons — whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff.
Chapter 26 — Knights and Squires
The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a Nantucketer, a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man of thirty arid summers, and those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness into a condensed, patent-chronometer vitality that seemed capable of enduring all climates and all ages unchanged. In his eyes you could still see the lingering images of the thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through his life. He was uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and his wild watery loneliness inclined him to a superstition that sprang from intelligence rather than ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And the far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child bent his nature further open, restraining in him that dare-devil recklessness which so many whalemen display. "I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale," he said, meaning that the most reliable courage is that which arises from a fair estimation of the peril. An utterly fearless man is a more dangerous comrade than a coward.
His courage was not sentiment but a practical instrument, no more to be foolishly wasted than the ship's beef and bread. He would not lower for whales after sundown, nor persist against a fish that too fiercely persisted in fighting back. His own father had been swallowed by the sea; his brother's torn limbs lay somewhere in the bottomless deep. Yet for all this, the courage that could still flourish in such a man must indeed have been extreme. It was, however, a courage that could withstand all ordinary irrational horrors of the world — seas, winds, whales — while remaining vulnerable to those more spiritual terrors that sometimes menace one from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.
Here let me invoke the Spirit of Equality that spreads one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind. The dignity I treat of is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding democratic dignity which radiates without end from God Himself — shining in the arm that wields a pick, in the hands of the meanest mariners and renegades and castaways, who may yet, upon the exalted mounts of their suffering, lift themselves into the tragic graces that literature owes them.
Chapter 27 — Knights and Squires
Stubb was the second mate, a Cape Cod man. Happy-go-lucky, neither craven nor valiant; he took perils as they came with an indifferent air, and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase he toiled away as calmly as a journeyman joiner at his bench. He presided over his whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, handling his unpitying lance as off-handedly as a whistling tinker his hammer, and humming his rigadig tunes flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What helped bring about this almost impious good humor was his pipe — a short, black little implement as regular a feature of his face as his nose. He slept with a rack of loaded pipes within easy reach, lighting one from the other through the night, and in the morning put his pipe into his mouth before his legs into his trousers.
Flask, the third mate, was from Tisbury in Martha's Vineyard — a short, stout, ruddy young fellow, pugnacious concerning whales, who seemed to think the great leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him and must be destroyed on principle. To him the whale was but a magnified mouse requiring only a little circumvention to boil, and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke. They called him King-Post on the Pequod, for his short square build braced the ship against all opposition as that timber braces the hull against Arctic ice.
These three mates commanded three of the Pequod's boats and were as captains of companies in Ahab's grand order of battle. Each, after the manner of a Gothic knight, was accompanied by his harpooneer — his squire and flingers of javelins. Queequeg served Starbuck. Tashtego — an unmixed Gay Head Indian, lean and sable-haired, inheritor of warrior blood — served Stubb, his unerring harpoon the fitting successor to the infallible arrow of his forest-hunting sires. Daggoo, a gigantic coal-black African savage, lion-treading and magnificent, with golden hoop-earrings so vast the sailors called them ring-bolts, served little Flask — standing beside him like a fortress beside a white flag come to beg truce. The crew itself was a world-federation of Isolatoes, each living on a separate continent of his own, yet federated along one keel — an Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, accompanying old Ahab to lay the world's grievances before a bar from which not very many of them would ever return.
Chapter 28 — Ahab
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab. The mates commanded vicariously, issuing sudden peremptory orders from the sacred seclusion of the cabin. Every time Ishmael mounted to the deck he gazed aft, his vague disquietude touching the unknown captain deepening into perturbation, with Elijah's diabolical incoherences recurring to him subtly and with more energy than he could have anticipated.
Then one morning, in pleasant transitional weather as the ship ran southward from the polar cold, Ishmael mounted to the deck and felt foreboding shivers run over him — for Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
He looked like a man cut away from the stake when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them — his whole high broad form seeming made of solid bronze, shaped in an unalterable mould like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way from among his grey hairs and continuing down one side of his tawny scorched face was a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish, resembling the seam left in the straight trunk of a great tree when the upper lightning tears down it and peels the bark from top to bottom without wrenching a single twig. Whether that mark was born with him or left by some desperate wound, no one could say — though an old Gay Head Indian swore it had come upon him in elemental strife at sea, in his fortieth year.
Upon each side of the quarter-deck was an auger hole bored into the plank; in one of these he had planted his ivory leg — fashioned from the polished bone of a sperm whale's jaw — and stood erect, one arm elevated, grasping a shroud, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was in that fixed forward glance an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness. Not a word he spoke, and his officers said nothing to him, though their minutest gestures showed the uneasy, painful consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that — moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face, in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
Chapter 29 — Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb
As the Pequod rolled through the bright tropical spring, Ahab grew gradually less reclusive, as if it were the wintry bleakness that had kept him below. Old age is always wakeful; old captains leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. And so almost every midnight, when the watches were set and the ship grown quiet, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle, and ere long the old man would emerge, gripping the iron banister, to pace heavily from taffrail to mainmast.
One such night, Stubb came up from below and with deprecating humorousness suggested that the ivory heel might be muffled with a globe of tow, to spare the sleeping mates its reverberating crack and din. Ahab turned on him with overbearing terrors. "Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb? Down, dog, and kennel!" Stubb descended, bewildered — half-minded to go back and strike the man, half-minded to pray for him. He muttered all the way to his hammock that Ahab was the queerest old man he had ever sailed with: eyes like powder-pans, sheets always rumpled and tumbled, a pillow frightful hot as though a baked brick had lain there. "I guess he's got what some folks call a conscience — a kind of Tic-Dolly-row, worse than a toothache. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth."
Chapter 30 — The Pipe
When Stubb had gone, Ahab sent a sailor below for his ivory stool and his pipe, lit it at the binnacle lamp, and sat on the quarter-deck in the dark. In old Norse times the thrones of Danish kings were fabricated from the tusks of narwhales; Ahab on his tripod of bones was a Khan of the plank, a king of the sea. But after a few minutes he held the pipe out and studied it. "This smoking no longer soothes. This thing meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs — not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more." He tossed the still-lighted pipe into the sea, and the fire hissed in the waves.
Chapter 31 — Queen Mab
Next morning Stubb recounted to Flask a dream in which Ahab had kicked him with the ivory leg. When he tried to kick back, his own leg flew off; and Ahab seemed a pyramid that he beat against in futile rage. A badger-haired old merman with marlinspikes bristling from his stern then appeared and counseled him: the kick was from an ivory leg, not a common pitch-pine leg, and therefore was an honor rather than an insult. The dream, Stubb said, had made a wise man of him — though when Ahab's voice carried down from the deck ordering the mast-heads to look sharp for whales, and specifically a white one, Stubb nudged Flask: "There's something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask. Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind."
Chapter 32 — Cetology
Before the Pequod is truly launched into leviathanic encounter, something must be settled about the whale in his broad genera — that fearful task of classifying a chaos. Authorities have despaired: Scoresby found cetology "much involved," Cuvier spoke of "impenetrable veils," and John Hunter confessed to "incomplete indications." Nevertheless I take up the architect's role, if not the builder's, and offer my own cetological system — imperfect and incomplete, as any human thing must be, but practicable.
First the definition: a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. This distinguishes him from walruses and separates all true cetaceans from all false claimants. By magnitude I divide them into three primary Books.
The Folio Whale is the largest order, comprising among its chapters: the Sperm Whale, sovereign of all leviathans and most formidable of encounters, the sole source of spermaceti, and as yet an unwritten life in any literature; the Right Whale, most venerable and earliest hunted, yielding whalebone and whale oil; the Fin-Back, solitary and unsociable as Cain, bearing that gnomon-like fin as his mark, gifted with such velocity as to defy all present pursuit; the Hump-backed, the most gamesome and light-hearted of whales; the Razor-Back, a retiring creature known only by name and glimpsed off Cape Horn; and the Sulphur Bottom, seldomest seen, prodigious beyond reckoning, never chased.
The Octavo Whale is the middle order, comprising the Grampus, often taken for a premonitory sign of sperm whales; the Black Fish or Hyena Whale, with his everlasting Mephistophelean grin; the Narwhale or Nostril Whale, whose ivory horn was presented to Queen Elizabeth by Frobisher and given mystical properties by all manner of old authors; the Killer, ferocious and never hunted; and the Thrasher, famous for his thrashing tail.
The Duodecimo order encompasses the smaller whales: the Huzza Porpoise, that hilarious and lucky creature who always comes from windward; the Algerine Porpoise, a pirate of the Pacific; and the Mealy-mouthed Porpoise, largest and most genteel of porpoises, marred only by his unsavory white mouth.
Beyond these stand a rabble of half-fabulous cetaceans known only by forecastle appellations — Bottle-Nose, Junk Whale, Pudding-Headed, Scragg, Coppered, Blue — which I list for future investigators to verify and incorporate. This system I leave deliberately unfinished, as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left with the crane still standing on the uncompleted tower: for small erections may be finished by their first architects, but grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, the draught of a draught.
Chapter 33 — The Specksnyder
On the whale-ship, rank and hierarchy carry their own peculiar shape. In the old Dutch fishery, command was divided between the captain, who managed the navigation, and the Specksnyder or Fat-Cutter — the Chief Harpooneer — who reigned supreme over the whale-hunting department. Though that office has since been diminished, the harpooneers retain a social position distinct from the common sailors, lodged in the after part of the ship and messing with the officers. For upon the harpooneer's conduct the voyage's success largely depends, and the grand political maxim of the sea requires that he live apart from the forecastle, professionally above the men, yet socially their equal.
There is a further matter to observe about Captain Ahab: though he disdained the shallowest theatrical assumptions of command and exacted only instant obedience — no one removed their shoes on his quarter-deck — yet behind those formal usages of the sea he sometimes masked a deeper design, using the externals of rank to make incarnate a sultanism of the brain that might otherwise have remained invisible. An intellectual superiority, however great, cannot assume practical supremacy over other men without the aid of external arts and entrenchments. These forms that lesser men rely on merely, Ahab wielded as instruments of something far grander and darker. What shall be grand in thee, Ahab, must needs be plucked from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air.
Chapter 34 — The Cabin-Table
The rituals of the cabin table reveal the Pequod's unspoken constitution. At noon the pale steward Dough-Boy announces dinner; Ahab descends without a word and takes his seat. After appropriate interval Starbuck descends, then Stubb, then Flask — each in order, each calibrated to depart in inverse sequence, for Flask as last to arrive must be first to leave, gaining at most three mouthfuls before the hierarchy requires his departure. He confided to a friend that since his promotion to officer he had never known what it was to be other than hungry.
Over his ivory-inlaid table Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion, surrounded by his warlike but deferential cubs. The officers ate in awful silence; none presumed to speak even of the weather. Starbuck received his meat as though receiving alms; Stubb was saved from choking only by a rat's sudden racket below; poor Flask dared not help himself to butter. When the mates withdrew, the harpooneers entered and made a servants' hall of the great cabin — dining like lords, filling their bellies like Indian ships loading spices, ostentatiously whetting their knives while the trembling Dough-Boy peered at them through the pantry blinds in continuous lip-quivering terror. Ahab himself in his inclement, howling old age was as inaccessible socially as the last grizzly bear in settled Missouri — his soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, feeding upon the sullen paws of its gloom.
Chapter 35 — The Mast-Head
In due rotation my first mast-head came round, and I mounted to my station — a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while the tranced ship indolently rolled and the drowsy trade winds blew and everything resolved me into languor. The mast-head stander is among the oldest of human occupations: the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, as the pyramids attest; Saint Stylites built himself a stone pillar in the desert and spent his latter years upon its summit; Napoleon stands atop the Vendome column; Nelson stares down from Trafalgar Square. None of them will answer a hail from below.
The mast-head in southern whaling is no crow's nest — no cozy, lidded, provisioned shelter like Captain Sleet's ingenious Greenland contraption with its case-bottle of warming spirits discreetly tucked inside. Here one stands upon two thin parallel sticks, tossed about by the sea, as cozy as one would be standing on a bull's horns. And let me frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I hold my obligations to sing out every time? Beware, ye ship-owners of Nantucket, of enlisting any lad with lean brow and hollow eye, given to unseasonable meditativeness, who brings Plato in his head instead of Bowditch. Such a sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. He will lose his identity at the mast-head: the mystic ocean becomes the visible image of that deep blue bottomless soul pervading mankind and nature; every dimly-discovered fin of some undiscernible form seems the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that people the soul by continually flitting through it. His spirit ebbs away until there is no life in him except that rocking life imparted by the gently rolling ship. Then — slip your hold — and with one half-throttled shriek you drop through the transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists.
Chapter 36 — The Quarter-Deck
One morning, not long after the affair of the pipe, Ahab's ivory stride was heard on the planks, more deliberate and freighted than usual, as if thought itself paced in him as he paced. His brow seemed even more deeply dented, his step leaving deeper marks. Stubb whispered to Flask: "The chick that's in him pecks the shell. 'Twill soon be out."
Near the close of day Ahab planted his bone leg in the auger-hole, grasped a shroud, and ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft — a command seldom or never given outside of some extraordinary case. The entire ship's company gathered, eyeing him with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces, as one eyes the weather horizon when a storm is building. Ahab resumed his heavy pacing, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men, until at last he stopped and cried:
"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"
"Sing out for him!" came the impulsive rejoinder.
"And what do ye next?"
"Lower away, and after him!"
"And what tune is it ye pull to?"
"A dead whale or a stove boat!"
More and more fiercely glad grew the old man at every shout. Then, half-revolving in his pivot-hole, one hand reaching high up a shroud and grasping it almost convulsively, he held up a broad bright coin — a Spanish gold ounce — to the sunlight, then slowly rubbed it against his jacket as if to heighten its lustre, humming to himself in a sound so strangely muffled it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality. He advanced toward the mainmast with the hammer uplifted and cried:
"Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw — whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke — he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"
The crew hailed the nailing of the doubloon to the mast with a huzza. Then the harpooneers, separately touched by recollection at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw, confirmed the beast: Tashtego recognized the fan-tailing, Daggoo the bushy spout, Queequeg the corkscrew tangle of old harpoons in his hide. "It is Moby Dick ye have seen!" Ahab shouted. "Death and devils! — Moby Dick — Moby Dick!"
Starbuck stepped forward: he had heard of Moby Dick — but was it Moby Dick that took off the captain's leg? "Aye, Starbuck; aye," Ahab answered, with a terrible animal sob like that of a heart-stricken moose. "It was that accursed white whale that razeed me, made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day! And I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up! What say ye, men — will ye splice the hand on it?"
The harpooneers and seamen rushed forward crying, "A sharp lance for Moby Dick!" Starbuck alone objected: he had come to hunt whales, not his commander's vengeance. How many barrels would vengeance yield in the Nantucket market? Ahab replied with flashing eyes that the accountants could gird the globe with guineas, but his vengeance would fetch a great premium in his chest — and he smote it. Starbuck called it blasphemy to be enraged at a dumb brute that struck from blindest instinct.
"Hark ye yet again — the little lower layer," said Ahab. "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. In each event, in the living act, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate. Be the white whale agent or be he principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."
Starbuck's will, overpowered, sank downward; the crew was already his. Ahab ordered grog drawn, and when the pewter came round he called the harpooneers to produce their irons. He gripped the three crossed lances of his mates, twitching them as though to shock his own electric life into them; the mates quailed before his sustained and mystic aspect. Then the mates served the harpooneers as cupbearers, filling the barbed sockets of the detached harpoon-irons with spirits, and the harpooneers drank from their murderous chalices to shouts and maledictions against the white whale. "Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" The pewter went round among the frantic crew once more; then they dispersed, and Ahab retired to his cabin.
Chapter 37 — Sunset
Alone in his cabin by the stern windows, Ahab gazes out at the blushing waves and soliloquizes. The diver sun goes down; his soul mounts up, wearied with its endless hill. He wears the Iron Crown of Lombardy, jagged and split, its edge galling his brain. Lovely light lights not him; all loveliness is anguish, since he can never enjoy it — gifted with the high perception, lacking the low enjoying power, damned most subtly in the midst of Paradise. Yet it was not so hard a task to fix the crew to his purpose: his cogged circle fits into all their various wheels and they revolve. He has willed what he has dared, and he will do what he has willed. They think him mad — Starbuck does — but he is demoniac, madness maddened! The prophecy said he should be dismembered; he lost the leg. Now he prophecies that he will dismember his dismemberer. The path to his fixed purpose is laid with iron rails on which his soul is grooved to run — over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, unerringly he rushes; naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way.
Chapter 38 — Dusk
By the mainmast, Starbuck leans and soliloquizes in his turn. His soul is more than matched — overmanned by a madman! He thinks he sees Ahab's impious end and yet feels that he must help him to it. Some ineffable thing has tied him to Ahab with a cable he has no knife to cut. And yet: the hated whale has the round watery world to swim in; time and tide flow wide; God may yet wedge Ahab's purpose aside. But Starbuck's whole clock is run down, his heart the all-controlling weight with no key to lift again. From the forecastle come the sounds of infernal revelry — the heathen crew drinking to the mad quest — while aft reigns the unfaltering silence of Ahab brooding over the dead water of the wake.
Chapter 39 — First Night-Watch
Stubb aloft on the fore-top, mending a brace, laughs to himself: a laugh is the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer. He has glimpsed Starbuck's distress and understood it; the old Mogul has fixed the mate as he has fixed all of them. But the predestination of the thing removes its sting for Stubb. Whatever comes, he'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles. He is not troubled: that's the spirit — think not, and sleep when you can.
Chapter 40 — Midnight, Forecastle
Below in the forecastle, the watch sings and dances — sailors of a dozen nations, French and Dutch and Azorean and Maltese and Tahitian and Icelandic and Lascar — making a mad, vivid chorus in the night. Little Pip beats his tambourine among them. The dancing grows wilder; the wind rises; the sky darkens and a squall builds overhead. A fight breaks out between Daggoo and a Spanish sailor — the racial sparks that always lurk among this desperate, international company — before the mate's voice from the quarter-deck calls all hands to shorten sail. The squall scatters everyone; and little Pip, shrinking under the windlass, murmurs his terrified prayer to the big white God aloft in the darkness, begging preservation from all men who have no bowels to feel fear.
Chapter 41 — Moby Dick
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest, my oath welded with theirs, and I shouted all the louder for the dread in my soul. With greedy ears I now learned the full history of that murderous monster.
For some years past, the White Whale had haunted the remotest sperm-whale grounds, his legend spreading fitfully and unevenly through the disorderly scatter of the world-wide whaling fleet — ships spread across solitary latitudes, sometimes not encountering a single news-telling sail for a whole twelvemonth. Thus many captains who had fought a whale of uncommon magnitude and malice attributed the terror to the general dangers of the fishery, not to any individual cause, and so Moby Dick's particular infamy was slow to coalesce. But when the stories did accumulate and spread, fabulous rumors naturally grew upon them, as fungi upon a smitten tree, until the White Whale was invested with attributes of ubiquity and immortality — said to have appeared simultaneously in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant, said to be impossible to slay, said to spout thick blood as mere ghastly deception while his unsullied jet rose again hundreds of leagues away. Some would still have been willing to chase him regardless; others, having heard the particular calamities he had inflicted, declined.
Even stripped of supernatural surmisings, there was enough in his earthly character to strike the imagination with unwonted power. He was not distinguished merely by bulk, but by a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead and a high pyramidical white hump — the tokens by which even at vast distances, even in the limitless uncharted seas, his identity was revealed to those who knew him. His body was streaked and spotted and marbled with that same shrouded hue, so that gliding at high noon through a dark-blue sea he left a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings. Nor was it his hue alone that invested him with natural terror, but that unexampled, intelligent malignity which he had evinced over and over in his assaults — swimming before his pursuers with every symptom of alarm, then turning round suddenly and bearing down upon them, staving their boats to splinters or driving them back in consternation. He seemed to act not as an unintelligent brute but as something that deliberated.
Several fatalities had already attended his chase. And then there was Ahab — who in darting at the whale with a knife in hand, in the last extremity of the fight, had felt the sickle-shaped lower jaw sweep beneath him and reap away his leg as a mower reaps a blade of grass. It was in the long homeward voyage afterward — rounding the howling Patagonian Cape in mid-winter, his torn body and gashed soul bleeding into one another through months of hammock-confined delirium, the mates sometimes forced to lace him fast as he raved — that the final monomania seized him. His lunacy did not flee as the tropics returned and he bore a calm collected front again; it merely contracted, like the unabated Hudson flowing narrowly through the Highland gorge, narrowing without diminishing — a furious trope of madness that had stormed his general sanity and carried it, turned all its concentrated cannon upon its own mad mark, so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab now possessed a thousandfold more potency toward that one end than he had ever sanely brought to bear on any reasonable object.
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all malicious agencies — all that intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; which the ancient Ophites reverenced in their statue devil; which the modern world distributes between God and his adversary. Ahab did not fall down and worship it. He transferred it entire to the abhorred white whale and pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments, all that stirs up the lees of things, all truth with malice in it, all the subtle demonisms of life and thought — all evil, to crazy Ahab, was visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down, and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
His means were sane, his object mad — and in his own heart Ahab dimly knew this. Yet he could not kill or change or shun the fact. He dissembled well enough that Nantucket thought him only naturally grieved; his delirium was attributed to the accident, and his brooding moodiness taken for natural character. Some of the calculating people of that prudent isle may even have judged that such a man was all the better qualified for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. So, with the mad secret of his unabated revenge bolted up and keyed within him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the Pequod with the one all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale — captaining a crew of mongrel renegades and castaways and cannibals, officered by a man of invulnerable conscience, a man of invulnerable jollity, and a man of pervading mediocrity — as if by some infernal fatality specially picked and packed to help him to his monomaniac revenge.
Chapter 42 — The Whiteness of the Whale
What the white whale was to Ahab has been hinted. What, at times, he was to me as yet remains unsaid.
There was, over and above the obvious considerations touching Moby Dick's magnitude and malice, another thought — or rather vague, nameless horror — concerning him, which at times by its intensity overpowered all the rest; so mystical and well-nigh ineffable that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.
In many natural objects whiteness enhances beauty: in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; in the white elephant sacred to old kings of Pegu; in the snow-white charger on the Hanoverian flag; in the imperial white of the Austrian Empire; in the ermine of the Judge; in the robes of the redeemed in St. John's vision. Among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day. Whiteness is the innocence of brides and the benignity of age; the White Dog sacrificed to the Great Spirit by the noble Iroquois was the purest envoy they could send; the alb or tunic worn beneath the cassock by Christian priests derives its name from the Latin word for white. Yet lurking in the innermost idea of this hue, beneath all its accumulated associations of sweetness and honor and sublimity, is an elusive quality that strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality heightens terror in anything already terrible. Consider the white bear of the poles and the white shark of the tropics: what but their smooth flaky whiteness makes them transcendent horrors? The tiger in his heraldic coat cannot so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark. The albatross in its wondrous bodily whiteness casts a spell that Coleridge did not originate but merely perceived: God's great unflattering laureate, Nature, cast it first. The white steed of the prairies — magnificent, milk-white, large-eyed, with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his overscorning carriage — inspired trembling reverence and awe in the bravest Indians, for his spiritual whiteness clothed him with divineness that commanded worship and enforced at the same time a nameless terror.
Where this whiteness loses its glory and shows only dread, the phenomenon is more instructive. The Albino man, as well made as other men yet loathed by his own kith and kin for his all-pervading whiteness — what explains that horror? The white squall, named for the snowy aspect of what brings sudden destruction. The pallor of the dead, from which we borrow the hue of the shroud; and ghosts rising always in a milk-white fog; and the pale horse upon which the king of terrors rides in the Revelation of St. John. The mariner sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness — not fearing the rocks, but feeling a silent, superstitious dread of that shrouded phantom whiteness itself, though the lead tells him he is still off soundings. Lima, strangest and saddest of cities, veiled in perpetual white — a whiteness that keeps her ruins forever new, admitting not the cheerful greenness of complete decay, spreading over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
Consider even the Vermont colt, far removed from all beasts of prey, who on the sunniest day will start and snort and paw the ground in phrensies of affright if only a fresh buffalo robe is shaken behind him — not near enough even to be seen, only smelled. There is in him no remembrance of any gorings of wild creatures; yet the instinct of the knowledge of demonism in the world operates through him as through all creatures. In that dumb brute lies a clue to the deepest mystery: the muffled rollings of a milky sea, the bleak rustlings of festooned frosts of mountains, the desolate shiftings of windrowed prairie snows — these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt. Somewhere those nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints must exist.
And the profoundest horror has not yet been reached. Is it that by its indefiniteness whiteness shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it that whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour — and at the same time the concrete of all colours — so that there is in a wide landscape of snows a dumb blankness, full of meaning, that amounts to a colourless all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And consider further: all the sweet tinges of sunset skies, the gilded velvets of butterflies, the blushes of young girls — all these are but subtle deceits, not inherent in substances but laid on from without, as Nature paints like the harlot whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within. The great principle of light that produces every hue forever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter would touch all objects — even tulips and roses — with its own blank tinge. Ponder this, and the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland who refuse to wear colored glasses, the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.
And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
Chapter 43 — Hark!
It was the middle-watch, a fair night of moonlight, and the men of the Pequod stood in a human chain passing buckets from the fresh-water butts toward the stern, careful on the hallowed quarter-deck to move in deep silence broken only by the occasional flap of a sail. Among that cordon stood Archy, a young seaman, who whispered urgently to his neighbor Cabaco that he had heard sounds beneath the hatches — a cough, or perhaps two or three sleepers turning in a small space. Cabaco dismissed it as biscuits moving in a man's belly, and told him to mind the bucket. But Archy was not satisfied. He had sharp ears, he said, and was convinced that there was somebody concealed in the after-hold who had not yet been seen on deck, and that their old Mogul, Ahab himself, knew something of it. Cabaco snorted, and the chain moved on in silence; but Archy's suspicion, once planted, would not easily be rooted out.
Chapter 44 — The Chart
Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin on the night after that wild ratification of his purpose before the crew, you would have found him bent over a large wrinkled roll of sea-charts spread upon his screwed-down table, tracing with a slow and steady pencil additional courses over blank spaces, consulting beside him piles of old log-books in which the seasons and places of sperm whale sightings had been recorded across decades of voyaging. The swinging lamp above him threw shifting shadows of lines across his wrinkled brow, so that while he himself marked out courses upon the charts, some invisible pencil seemed simultaneously to be marking courses upon the deeply furrowed chart of his forehead.
This was no single night's labor but an almost nightly ritual, those charts brought out again and again, pencil marks effaced and new ones substituted as Ahab threaded a maze of currents and eddies through all four oceans. To those unfamiliar with the leviathan's ways it might have seemed a mad and hopeless undertaking — to seek out one solitary creature in the boundless sea. But Ahab knew the sets of tides and currents, knew how the sperm whale's food drifted with them, knew the whale's periodic seasonal migrations as well as any naturalist knows the routes of swallows or herring-shoals. The great sperm whale, it is well established among whalemen, travels in precise veins across the open ocean with an exactitude no ship's chart has ever equaled, appearing at certain feeding grounds during certain months with a clockwork reliability. Lieutenant Maury of the National Observatory had set himself the very task of charting these migrations, and his circular confirmed what practical whalemen had long known from their logs.
Knowing these things, Ahab could calculate, with something approaching certainty, the likeliest time and place to seek the White Whale. That time and place had a single technical name among whalemen: the Season-on-the-Line. For there, upon the equatorial Pacific, Moby Dick had for several consecutive years been periodically descried, lingering in those waters as the sun lingers in any sign of the Zodiac during its annual round. It was there, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the White Whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there Ahab had lost his leg and found his motive for revenge. Yet Ahab, in the terrible comprehensiveness of his purpose, would not permit himself to wait idly for the Season-on-the-Line. The Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of that season, too early to round Cape Horn in time to reach the equatorial Pacific before Moby Dick would have departed those waters. A year, therefore, must intervene — a year Ahab intended to spend in a wide miscellaneous hunt, the better to intercept the White Whale wherever chance might fling him across the world's oceans.
But even supposing the White Whale encountered, could so solitary a creature be recognized at sea, in the vast anonymity of the deep? Ahab answered himself without hesitation: yes. The peculiar snow-white brow and snow-white hump of Moby Dick were unmistakable; moreover, Ahab had tallied him — the whale's broad fins were bored and scalloped like a lost sheep's ear. His mad mind would race on thus until weariness overtook him, and he would seek the open deck to recover himself. For he slept with clenched hands and woke with his own bloody nails in his palms.
Often, driven from his hammock by dreams of preternatural violence, Ahab would burst from his stateroom as if the bed itself were on fire. Here the narrator pauses over the philosophical mystery of it: in those moments of deranged eruption it was as if the eternal living soul within Ahab, dissociated during sleep from the monomaniac purpose that had enslaved his waking self, spontaneously fled in horror from the scorching contiguity of that burning obsession which had taken on, by sheer inveteracy of will, an existence of its own — a creature his own thought had created, as Prometheus creates his vulture.
Chapter 45 — The Affidavit
Lest the whole story of the White Whale seem to credulous landsmen a monstrous fable, or worse, an intolerable allegory, the narrator here pauses to set down, in the manner of an affidavit, plain facts from his own experience as a whaleman and from reliable historical record. He has himself known three instances where a whale escaped a first harpoon and was struck again years later by the same hand, the irons bearing the same private cypher being taken from the body to confirm the identity — in one case after the harpooner had spent two years wandering in the African interior, during which time the whale itself must have thrice circumnavigated the globe. Certain famous individual whales have attained wide ocean-renown by their ferocity — Timor Tom, New Zealand Jack, Don Miguel the Chilean leviathan marked like a tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics; these were as well-known to the cetacean student as Marius or Sulla to the classical scholar, and two of them were eventually hunted down by captains who set out with that express purpose.
As for the power of the sperm whale to stave a ship with deliberate malice: the Essex, Captain Pollard, was in 1820 rammed and sunk in the Pacific by a whale that bore down twice upon her hull with calculated purpose; the vessel sank in ten minutes. The Union, also of Nantucket, was lost off the Azores by a similar onset in 1807. A Commodore of the American navy who had publicly scoffed at such stories soon afterward found his impregnable sloop-of-war so severely thumped by a portly sperm whale that he made for the nearest port with all pumps going. Langsdorff's account of the Russian discovery expedition records a whale that raised a full ship three feet from the water. And Procopius, the trustworthy Byzantine historian, records a sea-monster fifty years terrorizing the Propontis — almost certainly, upon reflection, a sperm whale. These, says the narrator, are not fables but sworn testimony; the sperm whale has done it, and will stand no nonsense.
Chapter 46 — Surmises
Though consumed with his monomaniac purpose, Ahab remained far too shrewd a strategist to pursue it in a way that would undone him before the great confrontation arrived. He understood that men are the least reliable of tools, most apt to fail in prolonged service to an abstract and distant object. Starbuck's body and coerced will were Ahab's for now, but the chief mate's soul abhorred the quest and might, given a long interval of fruitless waiting, break into open rebellion. The crew, for all their savage exaltation on that first moonlit night of the oath, were capricious as the weather; enthusiasm unrelieved by action would drain away. Ahab therefore saw clearly that he must pursue the ordinary business of the whale fishery, kill other whales, fill barrels, keep his officers and men engaged with the concrete work of hunting — not from any moderation of his purpose, but to preserve the instruments without which that purpose could not be accomplished. Cash, he told himself; they may scorn cash now, but let months pass with no prospect of it and cash will cashier Ahab. He must keep the hunt real and immediate even while the White Whale waited at its appointed season. So his voice was soon often heard hailing the mast-heads, admonishing the lookouts to keep bright eyes open and to report even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.
Chapter 47 — The Mat-Maker
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon, the seamen lounging about the decks or gazing vacantly at the lead-colored sea, when Ishmael and Queequeg were occupied weaving a sword-mat to serve as additional lashing for their boat. Queequeg stood sideways feeding the heavy oaken sword between the long warp threads while Ishmael passed the shuttle of marline, and in the strange dreaminess of that afternoon the whole ship and sea seemed to resolve into a reverie. Watching his own hand ply the shuttle, Ishmael found himself suddenly perceiving the whole as a cosmic allegory: the fixed threads of the warp were necessity, unchanging, admitting of no deflection; his own free hand at the shuttle was free will, still free to weave between the given threads; and Queequeg's impulsive sword, which sometimes struck the woof crookedly, sometimes firmly, sometimes slantingly, each variation producing its own change in the completed fabric — this was chance, which though bounded by necessity and directed by free will, yet by turns rules either and delivers the last fashioning blow to events.
He stood still in this reverie until from aloft came a sound so strange, long-drawn, musically wild and unearthly that the ball of free will dropped from his hand. High in the crosstrees, the Gay-Header Tashtego hung with arm outstretched toward the horizon like a prophet beholding the shadows of Fate. "There she blows! there! there! there! she blows!" The ship came instantly alive with ordered commotion — line tubs fixed, cranes thrust out, three boats swinging over the sea. It was at this critical instant that every eye was drawn from the whale to dark Ahab on the deck below, where five dusky phantoms seemed to materialize out of the air beside him.
Chapter 48 — The First Lowering
Those phantoms were casting loose the tackles of a boat that had always been accounted one of the spare boats — now revealed as Ahab's own secret craft. At its bow stood a tall, swart figure, one white tooth evilly protruding from steel-like lips, a black cotton jacket of funereal cut giving way above to a glistening white plaited turban wound about his head from his own living hair. His companions were of vivid tiger-yellow complexion, known among whalemen as Manillamen, supposed by superstitious sailors to be secret agents of the devil. This was Fedallah, Ahab's own phantom harpooneer, and the four others were his crew — stowaways hidden in the after-hold since Nantucket, confirmed now by Archy's earlier whispers. "All ready there, Fedallah?" called Ahab. "Ready," came the half-hissed reply.
Four boats dropped into the sea. As the three mates spread their crews wide in pursuit, Ahab's boat pulled round from the windward side, its five Manilla oarsmen working like trip-hammers, the boat shooting forward like a horizontal burst boiler from a Mississippi steamer. Stubb, maintaining his characteristic drawling composure, assured his own nervous oarsmen that the yellow boys were merely five more hands come to help — never mind from where — and preached his idiosyncratic sermon of rowing, threatening the most terrific things in a tone so compounded of fun and fury that no man could hear it without pulling for dear life. Flask, mounted on the gigantic shoulders of Daggoo for want of higher elevation, stamped and raved like a crazed colt. Only Starbuck was silent — urging his crew in the lowest possible whisper, his eyes fixed ahead like needles in a binnacle compass.
When Tashtego caught the whales on the surface again, the four boats tore on through a sea churned into white confusion. In Starbuck's boat Queequeg rose in the bow, harpoon in hand, as the mate drove straight into a wall of mist against every rational counsel, a squall bearing down on them from one quarter and the whale breaching white water from another. "That's his hump — give it to him!" hissed Starbuck, and Queequeg's iron darted. Then all was lost at once — an invisible push from astern, the sail collapsing and exploding, a gush of scalding vapor, the whole crew tumbling helter-skelter into the white cream of the squall. Whale, harpoon, and squall had all blended together; the whale, merely grazed, escaped.
They spent the night swamped and waterlogged, the storm roaring around them like white fire upon the prairie, Queequeg holding up the lone lantern on a waif pole as the standard-bearer of a forlorn hope — a man without faith hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair. At dawn, half-drowned, they heard the creak of the Pequod bearing down upon them through the lifting mist, and barely escaped being ground under her hull; they swam for the abandoned boat, were dashed against it, and were at last hauled safely aboard.
Chapter 49 — The Hyena
Back on deck, shivering and salt-soaked, Ishmael found himself in the grip of that particular philosophy which the perils of whaling are uniquely suited to breed: a free and easy desperado resignation in which the whole universe reveals itself as a vast practical joke, and all its knobby catastrophes and nearnesses of death seem only sly, good-natured punches in the side from the unseen joker. He made inquiry of Queequeg as to whether such things often happened; Queequeg, soaked as he was, replied without much emotion that yes, they did. He consulted Stubb, calmly smoking his pipe in the rain: had he ever lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn? Certainly, said Stubb. He asked Flask whether it was the unalterable law of the fishery to row backward into the jaws of death. Flask confirmed it was. With this threefold corroboration Ishmael descended below and drew up his will, appointing Queequeg lawyer, executor, and legatee. When the ceremony was complete he felt strangely lightened — all his days henceforth would be as the days of Lazarus after the resurrection, a clean bonus of time. He looked about him tranquilly, like a quiet ghost in a snug family vault, and resolved to make a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, devil take the hindmost.
Chapter 50 — Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah
Stubb and Flask discussed in frank amazement the revelation of Ahab's secret crew — that a one-legged man should go personally in the boats was wonderful enough; that he should have smuggled aboard his own specially chosen complement of exotic harpooneers and oarsmen was something else entirely. Ahab had known that the ship's owners, who had extracted guarantees against his venturing into the active peril of the chase, would never have sanctioned him a boat's crew, and so had prepared his own through private measures — fitting a spare boat with particular care, gouging the cleat for his ivory leg, shaping the thigh-board to brace his knee, all under the guise of preparing for the eventual encounter with Moby Dick. The five Manilla phantoms settled into the crew's life with that ready assimilation that characterizes the strangely democratic society of whalers, to whom all manner of odd castaway creatures from every corner of the earth are a commonplace. But Fedallah himself remained apart — a muffled mystery from beginning to end, his turbaned figure belonging to those immemorial unchanging Asiatic communities where the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations still persists, where one might almost fancy the memory of the first man a distinct recollection and the angels' congress with mortal women an unfinished business.
Chapter 51 — The Spirit-Spout
Weeks passed as the Pequod swept across her succession of cruising grounds, down past the Azores and the Cape de Verdes, southward along the Plate and beyond. One serene moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver, a silvery jet was seen far ahead of the bow — celestial in the moonlight, like some plumed and glittering god rising from the sea. It was Fedallah who first saw it, as was his wont to mount to the masthead on these moonlit nights with the same precision as by day, his turban and the moon keeping companionship in one sky. When at last his unearthly voice announced it, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if a winged spirit had lighted in the rigging.
Ahab drove the ship forward under every stitch of canvas, every mast-head manned; but the silvery jet was no more seen that night. It reappeared a few nights later — then again, and again, always just ahead in the moonlight, advancing further and further in their van, drawing them on like a perpetual allurement. Many of the crew swore it was the same whale each time: Moby Dick himself, treacherously beckoning them on to the remotest and most savage seas. These apprehensions derived a terrible potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, the seas so wearily, lonesomely mild that all space seemed vacating itself of life before their urn-like prow.
At last the Cape winds came howling around them, and the ivory-tusked Pequod bowed to the blast as it gored through dark waves, foam-flakes flying over her bulwarks like silver chips. Sea-ravens settled in rows along the stays and refused to leave — as if, thought Ishmael, the ship had been appointed to desolation. Ahab stood for hours gazing dead to windward, his ivory leg in its accustomed hole, one hand gripping a shroud, occasional squalls of sleet half-congealing his very eyelashes. One night Starbuck found him in the cabin with closed eyes, still upright in his chair, the sleet from the storm still dripping slowly from his hat and coat onto the unrolled chart beneath his clenched hand. Terrible old man, thought Starbuck: sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
Chapter 52 — The Albatross
Southeast from the Cape, a sail loomed ahead: the Goney, or Albatross, bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus, her sides streaked with reddened rust, her spars furred with what seemed hoar-frost, her lookouts at the three mast-heads clad in the skins of beasts after nearly four years at sea. As the two ships came close under each other's stern, the lookouts aloft from each vessel were near enough to have leaped between the two — yet said not a word to one another, while from the quarter-deck Ahab hailed with his trumpet: had they seen the White Whale?
The Goney's captain, leaning over his pallid bulwarks, lifted his trumpet to reply — and it fell from his hand into the sea. The wind rose; he could not make himself heard without it. The distance grew. Ahab, seizing his own trumpet and knowing by her aspect she was homeward bound to Nantucket, hailed once more with instructions to address all future letters to the Pacific Ocean, and if in three years he was not at home — here his voice was cut off by the increasing wind, the sentence dropping away unfinished into the air. As the two wakes crossed, the shoals of small fish that had been swimming alongside the Pequod darted away to range themselves with the stranger, abandoning their old companionship without ceremony. "Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing down. The tone carried more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. Then, turning sharply to the steersman: "Up helm! Keep her off round the world!"
Round the world. There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but what does all that circumnavigation conduct to? Only through numberless perils back to the very point whence we started, where those we left behind secure were waiting all along.
Chapter 53 — The Gam
The true reason Ahab did not board the Albatross was not solely the weather: had she answered his question with any intelligence of the White Whale, he might have found means enough to go across. But in any case the chapter affords occasion to explain the peculiar institution of the Gam — that social meeting of two or more whalerships, generally on a cruising ground, when after exchanging hails they exchange visits by boats' crews, the two captains remaining on board of one ship and the two chief mates on board of the other. No other ships on the sea maintain such a custom; it belongs uniquely to whaling. The chapter observes with some relish the different manners of ships meeting at sea: merchantmen cutting each other as coolly as dandies in Broadway; men-of-war exchanging elaborate ceremonial bowings; slave ships running from each other as fast as possible; pirates asking only "How many skulls?" as whalers ask "How many barrels?" The honest, hospitable whaler alone maintains this free-and-easy sociability — standing in the boat throughout the visit, wedged fore-and-aft by oars, hands thrust deep in his pockets for ballast, the very model of democratic fraternity.
Chapter 54 — The Town-Ho's Story
(As told at the Golden Inn.)
Not long after the Albatross, the Pequod fell in with another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho of Nantucket, manned chiefly by Polynesians. In their brief gam she brought strong news of Moby Dick, but wrapped about a darker tale within a tale — a secret portion of the story unknown even to the Town-Ho's captain, which reached the Pequod's forecastle only through the somnambulant ramblings of Tashtego in his sleep and thereafter circulated below the Pequod's main-mast in a strange delicacy of silence, never reaching Ahab or his mates. Ishmael here narrates the whole as he once told it to a company of young Spanish gentlemen — the Dons Pedro and Sebastian among them — on a saint's eve at the piazza of the Golden Inn in Lima, the listeners interrupting with questions and refilling his cup, and Ishmael swearing at the end upon a Gospel brought by a solemn priest.
The Town-Ho was cruising north of the equatorial Pacific when she began taking on water — a sword-fish, the men supposed, had stabbed her. The captain, reluctant to quit waters where he hoped for good fortune, kept on, the men pumping at wide intervals. But the leak increased. More urgently making sail for the nearest island harbor, the ship would have arrived in perfect safety but for a fatality that had nothing to do with the sea: the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman from Buffalo, upon the shores of that inland sea — Lake Erie — which Ishmael describes with considerable passionate digression as an ocean-world of its own, full of the same freebooting spirit as the salt-water seas, its western shores furred with ancient forests, its cities mirroring themselves in its surface, its storms capable of drowning full ships out of sight of land.
These two men — Radney ugly as a mule yet as hardy and malicious, Steelkilt tall and noble as a Roman with a flowing golden beard and a brain that might have made him Charlemagne had he been born to different station — had long circled one another with the instinctive antipathy of a commander who recognizes in a subordinate his unmistakable superior. The crisis came at the pumps. Exhausted from his gang's turn at the handles, Steelkilt sat resting when Radney ordered him to fetch a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, to clean up after a pig. This was not merely demeaning duty; among sailors the sweeping of decks belongs to the boys, and the order was meant plainly as a calculated insult and degradation. Steelkilt, sensing the powder-casks stacked in the mate's eyes, replied with remarkable restraint that sweeping was not his business, and pointed to three idling lads who were the customary sweepers. Radney repeated his command with an oath and advanced with an uplifted cooper's club-hammer. Steelkilt retreated step by deliberate step around the windlass, warned the mate off with a gesture of terrible meaning, and when the hammer finally grazed his cheek, drove his fist with such force that the mate's lower jaw was stove in. Radney fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale.
The mutiny was brief and violent: Steelkilt and his two Canaller comrades — men of the Erie Canal, those lawless waterway adventurers who, Ishmael digresses, supply the whale fishery with some of its most finished and dangerous graduates — barricaded themselves behind a row of casks on the forecastle deck. The captain menaced them with pistols and demanded their return to duty; Steelkilt, striding along the barricade, told the captain plainly that his death would be the signal for a general slaughter, and offered terms: no flogging, and they would work. The captain refused terms. Steelkilt and his band were locked in the forecastle, the scuttle padlocked, bread and water lowered to them at intervals. Day by day the other mutineers surrendered to the stench and the hunger, emerging in ones and twos until only Steelkilt and the two Canallers remained. On the fifth morning those two, having secretly conspired to betray their leader in exchange for clemency, bound Steelkilt while he slept and shrieked for the captain at midnight.
Steelkilt was hauled up bound and flung into the mizzen rigging alongside the two traitors; the captain flogged the traitors till they hung limp. Then he came to Steelkilt. The Lakeman, through cramped jaws, hissed his warning: "If you flog me, I murder you." The captain made as if to strike — then stopped, and suddenly threw down the rope and ordered the man cut loose, to the amazement of all hands. Something Steelkilt had whispered in that instant, inaudible to anyone else, had turned the captain's resolution inside out. But Radney, who had crept from his berth and watched the whole scene with his bandaged head and broken jaw, snatched the rope from the captain's hands and advanced in his turn. Steelkilt was silent. Radney flogged him; Steelkilt took it. The men were cut down. The crew returned to work in sullen silence, Steelkilt having already determined in his own unshared mind a deeper revenge — one that now required patience, braiding something curious in his watches below, eventually obtaining twine from Radney himself under the guise of mending a hammock, the next night an iron ball rolling half-seen from his jacket pocket.
But the fool was saved from his intended murder, and his revenge was given him entire without his hand's being the instrument. On the morning of the second day, while they were washing down the decks, a Teneriffe man drawing water at the chains suddenly shouted the old cry: "There she rolls! Jesu, what a whale!" It was Moby Dick. The compact among the crew — to give no cry for whales — was instantly forgotten in the phrensy of the moment. The White Whale, huge and milky in the horizontal morning sun, glinted like a living opal on the blue sea. Four boats went down. Steelkilt was the bowsman in the mate's boat, seated next to Radney as prescribed; Radney stood spear in hand at the bow. Their harpooneer got fast; Radney drove them onto the whale's topmost back. The boat struck as against a sunken ledge; Radney was spilled onto the whale's slippery back and then washed off into the sea. The White Whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom, seized Radney between his jaws, reared high, and went down. Steelkilt, from the stern, had slackened the line as the boat tipped, watching calmly with his own thoughts; he cut it when the moment came. Moby Dick rose once more in the distance, trailing tatters of Radney's red woolen shirt in his teeth, and disappeared.
The Town-Ho reached a savage island harbor. There, led by Steelkilt, most of the forecastle deserted — seized a war-canoe from the islanders and set sail elsewhere. The captain, reduced to a handful, was forced to sail a small boat to Tahiti to recruit men, and met Steelkilt one last time at sea — the Lakeman standing on the prows of yoked war-canoes, laughing the pistol to scorn, exacting a sworn oath that the captain would beach himself for six days on a nearby island, which oath the captain fulfilled. Steelkilt reached Tahiti before him, shipped on a French vessel, and was gone. The widow of Radney still turns to the sea, which refuses to give up its dead, and sees in dreams the awful white whale.
Ishmael, having concluded the story, swore upon the Gospel brought by the priest: it is true in substance and in all its great particulars; he trod the ship; he knew the crew; he spoke with Steelkilt after the death of Radney.
Chapter 55 — Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales
Before attempting any true depiction of the whale as he actually appears in life, the narrator undertakes to clear away the accumulated rubbish of false images that have misled the imagination of landsmen since antiquity. The primal source of all these pictorial delusions lies among the oldest Hindu, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures, whose uncorrupted fancy gave the whale a serpent's tail and a dragon's head. Later artists fared no better: Guido's whale attacking Andromeda is a fantastical chimera, Hogarth's no more convincing; the old scientific illustrations of Sibbald and Colnett are filled with perpendicular flukes and bow-window eyes on a scale calibrated to absurdity. Frederick Cuvier's celebrated Sperm Whale, produced by a man who never went to sea, is not a sperm whale but a squash. Sign-painters' whales over the oil-dealers' shops are Richard III. whales with dromedary humps, breakfasting on boatfuls of mariners. The real difficulty is that the living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters, with the vast bulk of him invisible below the surface; and no skeleton, however accurate in its articulation, conveys the true form of the creature that so enormously invested it. To know what a whale really looks like, one must go whaling — at the not inconsiderable risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him.
Chapter 56 — Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes
Of the better depictions, Beale's published outlines of the sperm whale are the most accurate among the few that merit any trust. But the finest overall representations of whales and whaling scenes are two large French engravings by the painter Garnery: one showing a noble sperm whale just risen from the deep beneath a stoven boat, an oarsman hanging in mid-leap over the churning spout-hole; the other depicting a great running right whale alongside a vessel, seabirds pecking at the crustaceans on its weedy back, the boat rocking in its enormous wake like a skiff beside a steamer's paddle-wheels. Though anatomically imperfect, these engravings capture the living spirit and action of the chase with a truth no purely mechanical outline has equaled. The French, Ishmael notes with admiration, have a peculiar genius for picturesqueness — a genius amply demonstrated at Versailles, where the consecutive battles of France hang in a gallery where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights.
Chapter 57 — Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars
The whale as artistic subject turns up everywhere a whaleman casts his eye: painted boards held by crippled beggars on Tower Hill, scrimshaw carved on whale's teeth with the patience of ancient Hawaiians on their war-clubs, wooden whale-profiles in the forecastles of American ships, brass-whale door-knockers, sheet-iron weather-vanes on church steeples. In rocky regions whale-forms emerge from the strewn masses of cliffs; in mountainous countries a trained eye catches whale-profiles along the undulating ridges — though the precise vantage-point must be recovered by exact latitude and longitude or the sight is lost again like the incognita Soloma Islands. And in the starry heavens one who has been a whaleman long enough will find them there too, chasing the revolutions of the Pole; the narrator has traced Leviathan round and round the Arctic star-fields, and beneath Antarctic skies has joined the chase against the starry Cetus beyond the reach of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.
Chapter 58 — Brit
Steering northeast from the Crozettes, the Pequod fell in with vast meadows of brit — the minute yellow substance on which the right whale largely feeds — that undulated around them for leagues and leagues so that they seemed sailing through fields of ripe and golden wheat. Right whales moved through these meadows like morning mowers advancing their scythes through long wet grass, their Venetian-blind mouths straining the brit from the water as they went, their vast black forms from aloft looking more like lifeless masses of rock than breathing creatures. The chapter widens into a meditation on the fundamental strangeness of the sea — a medium so alien to man that even after millennia of drowning men in its depths, the repetition of terror has deadened the sense of full awfulness that ought to accompany it. Noah's flood is not yet subsided: two-thirds of this world remains under those same waters. The sea is a fiend not only to man but to its own creatures, smashing even the mightiest whales against rocks without mercy; a masterless ocean that overruns the globe, dashing the stateliest frigate to splinters regardless of all man's science and skill. And beneath the loveliest azure tints, the most dreaded creatures glide in devilish subtlety, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Yet consider the green and docile land beside all this — and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee; push not off from that isle — thou canst never return.
Chapter 59 — Squid
Threading the brit-meadows on the way toward Java, the Pequod still saw the solitary spirit-spout at wide intervals in the silver nights. But one transparent morning of preternatural stillness, Daggoo at the masthead cried out at a great white mass lazily rising from the blue, gleaming like a snow-slide fresh from the hills, and raised the alarm for the White Whale. Four boats went into the water instantly; Ahab's in the lead. But when the mass rose again before their suspended oars, it was not a whale at all — it was the great live squid, a vast pulpy mass furlongs in breadth, of a glancing cream-color, innumerable long arms radiating from its center and curling like a nest of anacondas, without any perceptible face or front, an unearthly formless chance-like apparition of life. As it slowly sank once more with a low sucking sound, Starbuck stared at the agitated waters and said, in a voice gone wild: "Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!" It is believed among whalemen that the sperm whale feeds exclusively on this creature, descending to unknown abyssal zones to tear it from the ocean floor with those teeth — the only species of whale so equipped — and that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppidan may ultimately resolve itself, much reduced, into the same terrible form.
Chapter 60 — The Line
Before the next whaling scene, the narrator pauses to explain the whale-line, that magical and sometimes horrible rope which pervades every moment of the actual hunt with a peril invisible to the landsman. Originally of best hemp, now commonly Manila — stronger, softer, more elastic, and, Ishmael notes, more beautiful — the line runs two hundred fathoms in length, coiled with extreme care in its tub to prevent any kink or tangle that might in running-out take off a man's arm, leg, or entire body. From the tub it is led forward through the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise on every oarsman's wrist, passing between the men at their opposing gunwales, threading through the chocks in the prow and connecting ultimately to the harpoon via the short-warp. Thus the line folds the entire boat in its coils, enwrapping every man in its hempen intricacies; to the timid eye of the landsman the crew seem Indian jugglers festooning their limbs with deadly snakes. In the moment the harpoon is darted, all these coils become rings of lightning — the man seated in the midst of them is as exposed as a figure at the center of a steam-engine in full play, every beam and shaft grazing him. Yet habit accomplishes everything; the whalemen pull into the jaws of death with a halter around every neck, and crack jokes over the half-inch cedar as brightly as any company over their mahogany. There is a deeper philosophy here: all men live enveloped in whale-lines, all are born with halters around their necks, and it is only when caught in the swift sudden turn of death that mortals realize the silent, ever-present perils of life. If you are a philosopher, seated in the whale-boat or before your evening fire, the terror ought to be the same.
Chapter 61 — Stubb Kills a Whale
Queequeg had declared, honing his harpoon in the bow of his hoisted boat, that when you see the squid you will quickly see the sperm whale — and so it proved. The next day, a still and sultry morning off the Indian Ocean, the Pequod's crew drifted in a kind of collective enchantment of sleep, the very helmsman nodding, when Ishmael at the foremost-head felt his soul going out of his body like a pendulum losing its pendulum's power. He snapped back to life to find a gigantic sperm whale rolling not forty fathoms under the lee — glossy, Ethiopian-hued, tranquilly spouting his vapory jet like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of an afternoon. But that pipe, Ishmael notes with relish, was his last.
The boats went down; the whale, alarmed by the tumult, turned and swam away in such majestic tranquillity that Ahab ordered not an oar used and no man to speak above a whisper, the crews paddling as silently as Ontario Indians. When the whale sounded, Stubb lit his pipe for the interval, and when the creature rose again in advance of his boat, he cheered his men on with his familiar mixture of ferocity and philosophy — "start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys" — the Indian Tashtego screaming his war-whoop, Daggoo roaring, Queequeg howling, all of them tearing at the sea until Tashtego's iron went in and the magical line hissed searing hot along the oarsmen's wrists.
The boat flew at the whale's side as Stubb, his knee planted in the cleat, drove dart after dart with his crooked lance, the red tide pouring from the monster's flanks like brooks down a hill, his tormented body rolling not in brine but in blood that sent its crimson reflection into every face until they all glowed like red men. Stubb churned the lance deep, seeking the innermost life of the fish with a surgeon's patience, until the great creature entered its final flurry — that unspeakable convulsion in which the dying whale overwhelms itself in boiling spray — and then rolled out into view one last time, spasmodically dilating its spout-hole, sending gush after gush of clotted red gore shooting into the frighted air. His heart had burst. "He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo. "Yes; both pipes smoked out," said Stubb, and withdrew his pipe from his mouth and scattered the dead ashes ceremoniously over the water; and for a moment stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
Chapter 62 — The Dart
Here a word on the structural absurdity of conventional whaling practice. The harpooneer is expected to pull his oar with superhuman exertion through the entire chase, arriving exhausted at the critical moment, then to drop his oar, spin around, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength remains fling it twenty or thirty feet into a fleeing whale — with his back to the fish throughout. It is no wonder that out of fifty fair chances, fewer than five darts in a hundred are successful; no wonder men burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder ships return with four years gone and four barrels in the hold. The harpooneer who makes the voyage must start to his feet from idleness, not from toil.
Chapter 63 — The Crotch
The crotch is a notched stick of peculiar form, some two feet long, perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, serving as a rest for two harpoons — called the first and second irons — both connected to the running line so that if the first should draw out upon the violent running of the whale, the second may still hold. The difficulty is that the first iron's convulsive strike almost never leaves the harpooneer time or capacity to place the second into the fish; the second must therefore be tossed clear of the boat before the line drags it across the gunwale, where it becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling lines and cutting them, a source of prodigious and sometimes fatal confusion. With four boats engaged against one strong and knowing whale, there may be eight or ten such loose second irons simultaneously describing their erratic arcs about him — a circumstance that will illuminate several intricate passages of scenes yet to be painted.
Chapter 64 — Stubb's Supper
Stubb's whale had been killed at some distance from the ship; in the calm that followed, three boats formed a tandem to tow the enormous carcass home in a labor so prolonged and barely perceptible as to furnish excellent evidence of the mass they moved. Night fell before they gained the ship, and they were guided in by Ahab's lanterns hung over the bulwarks. Ahab himself glanced at the dead whale vacantly and went below, unmoved — the sight of any dead whale not Moby Dick serving only to remind him that the White Whale was yet to be slain.
But Stubb, flushed with conquest, had needs of a different and simpler kind. He demanded from Daggoo, overboard, a steak cut from the whale's small, and at midnight stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head by lantern-light, forking it in with the gusto of a man who considers himself a high liver in the matter of whale-flesh. He was not the only diner that night; thousands on thousands of sharks swarmed around the moored carcass, their feasting a constant smacking and slapping that startled sleepers in their bunks, wallowing in the sullen black waters and scooping out hemispheres of blubber with a symmetry that remains a part of the universal problem of all things.
Stubb at length dispatched the ship's cook, old Fleece — a ninety-year-old Black man from the Roanoke country, lame in both knees and carrying himself along the deck with the aid of a pair of iron tongs — to go and preach to the sharks to keep quiet and stop their infernal racket. Fleece shuffled to the rail, lantern in hand, and addressed the congregation below in a mumbled sermon that began with "Fellow-critters" and progressed, with Stubb's editorial interruptions demanding that he preach more gentlemanly and less profanely, through a tolerably sound theological discourse on the distinction between native voracity (blameless, being natur) and the governing of that voracity, which is the pint, the achieving of which would make any shark indistinguishable from an angel. When Fleece delivered his verdict that the dam' gluttons wouldn't hear till their bellies were full, and wouldn't hear then either because they'd sink to the coral and sleep forever, Stubb agreed this was more or less his own opinion, sent Fleece back for the benediction — "Cussed fellow-critters! Fill your dam' bellies till dey bust — and den die" — and then subjected the old man to an elaborate catechism on the proper cooking of whale-steak, insisting it be served nearly raw, warm enough only to have seen a live coal at a distance, and ordering whale-balls for breakfast and cutlets for the mid-watch supper the following night. "Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale," grumbled Fleece, stumping away to his hammock; "I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself."
Chapter 65 — The Whale as a Dish
That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp — that Stubb should eat the whale by its own light — seems outlandish enough to require a brief history and philosophy. The tongue of the right whale was a great delicacy in France three centuries past; a cook of Henry VIII's court was rewarded for an admirable sauce to go with barbecued porpoises, which are after all a species of whale. The Eskimos have always lived upon them. Stranded Englishmen in Greenland have survived for months on the mouldy scraps called "fritters" by the Dutch, brown and crisp and smelling agreeably of something like Amsterdam doughnuts fresh from the frying pan. The difficulty with whale as a civilized dish is excessive richness — he is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good. The spermaceti itself, though bland and creamy as coconut flesh, is far too rich to serve as butter. The brains of a small sperm whale, mixed with flour and cooked, taste something like calves' head; whalemen fry their biscuit in the oil-pots of the try-works on the long night watches, and many a good supper has thus been had.
But the landsman's abhorrence of eating whale comes less from its unctuousness than from the peculiar horror of a man eating a newly murdered thing of the sea by its own light. This is mere squeamishness, Ishmael argues — or worse, hypocrisy. The first man who killed an ox was a murderer; had he been tried by oxen, he would have hanged, and perhaps deservedly. Go to the Saturday-night meat-market and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds: does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Who among us is not a cannibal? The provident Feejee who salts a lean missionary against a coming famine will fare more tolerably in the day of judgment than the enlightened gourmand who nails geese to the ground for their livers. And what is the handle of the carving knife made of but the bone of the ox's brother? What does the Secretary for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders write his circulars with but a goose-quill? It is only within the last month that his society has resolved to patronize nothing but steel pens.
Chapter 66 — The Shark Massacre
When a captured Sperm Whale is brought alongside late at night in the Southern Fishery, the customary practice is to hold the cutting until daylight and send all hands below to their hammocks, leaving only anchor-watches to stand the deck in pairs. But in certain Pacific waters near the Line, this prudent delay is impossible, for the sharks gather in such incalculable hosts around the moored carcass that by morning nothing would remain but the skeleton. The whole round sea that night seemed one vast cheese, and the sharks the maggots riddling it.
Stubb having set the anchor-watch, Queequeg and a forecastle hand lowered cutting stages over the side and hung three lanterns so that long gleams played over the turbid sea. The two mariners drove their long whaling-spades deep into the sharks' skulls — the only vital point in those creatures — but in the foamy confusion of the swarming, struggling mass, they could not always strike true. What followed revealed the incredible ferocity of those foes. When wounded, the sharks bent themselves like flexible bows and bit their own entrails, swallowing them over and over through the same gaping wound. Even the dead were dangerous. One shark, hauled up on deck and killed, nearly took Queequeg's hand clean off when the harpooner moved to shut down the lid of its murderous jaw. "Queequeg no care what god made him shark," said the savage, lifting his mauled hand. "Wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."
Chapter 67 — Cutting In
It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! All whalemen are ex officio professors of Sabbath-breaking, and the ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble, every sailor a butcher. The enormous cutting tackles — a vast cluster of green-painted blocks no single man could lift — were swayed up to the main-top and lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest point above the deck. The great blubber hook, weighing some hundred pounds, was swung over the whale, and Starbuck and Stubb, standing in stages over the side, cut a hole just above the nearest fin, round which the hook was inserted. When the crew struck up their wild chorus at the windlass and began heaving, the entire ship careened over on her side, every bolt straining, the mast-heads trembling toward the sky, until with a swift startling snap the first strip of blubber — the blanket-piece — rose triumphant into view. The blubber wraps the whale precisely as rind wraps an orange, and it is stripped by the same spiraling method: as the windlass turns, the whale rolls over and over in the water while the mates' spades cut along the seam called the scarf, and the great bleeding mass peels off and rises aloft until its upper end grazes the maintop, swinging there in a blood-dripping cradle that every man must take care to dodge. So the work proceeded with two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously, the heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling the long serpentine strips below, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing by way of assuaging the general friction.
Chapter 68 — The Blanket
The question of what exactly constitutes the whale's skin is not so easily settled as a landsman might suppose. The blubber — that substance ranging from eight or ten to fifteen inches thick, of the consistence of firm close-grained beef, yet tougher and more elastic — wraps the creature as completely as any outer envelope; and since no denser enveloping layer can be raised from the whale's body, the argument must be that the blubber is the skin. There is, to be sure, an infinitely thin isinglass-like membrane that can be scraped from the surface, transparent as satin when fresh, through which the whale's extraordinary markings show as through a lens — those oblique cross-hatchings and hieroglyphic scrollings that recall the ancient carved palisades of the Upper Mississippi, undecipherable as those mystic rocks. But to call so delicate a film the proper skin of a creature whose integument yields a hundred barrels of oil would be plainly ridiculous.
The blubber is the whale's blanket — an Indian poncho slipt over his head and skirting his extremity. By reason of this cozy surtout the whale maintains his own interior temperature even in the Hyperborean seas, his blood measurably warmer than that of a Borneo man in summer. Here is a lesson, says Ishmael, for all mankind: remain warm among ice; live in this world without being of it; be cool at the equator and keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, retain in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
Chapter 69 — The Funeral
"Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!" The vast tackles having done their duty, the peeled white body of the beheaded whale — changed in hue but not diminished in bulk — flashes like a marble sepulchre as it drifts away. The insatiate sharks tear the water round it; screaming birds vex the air above, their beaks like so many insulting poniards driven into the flesh. For hours this hideous sight is seen from the ship: beneath unclouded azure sky, upon the fair pleasant sea, wafted by joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on until lost in infinite perspectives.
There is a most doleful and most mocking funeral. The sea-vultures attend piously in black and speckled. In life not one of them would have aided the whale, yet upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth, from which not the mightiest whale is free! Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied from afar by some timid man-of-war whose distance obscures the swarming fowls yet shows the white mass in the sun and the white spray heaving against it, the unharming corpse is entered in the log as shoals, rocks, and breakers — beware! — and ships shun the place for years afterward, leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum because their leader leaped there first when a stick was held. There is your law of precedents; there is your utility of traditions; there is the story of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth and now not even hovering in the air. There is orthodoxy.
Chapter 70 — The Sphynx
It should be noted that before the stripping of the body, the whale was beheaded — a surgical feat upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves, and not without reason. The sperm whale has no proper neck; where head and body seem to join is the thickest part of him, and the surgeon must operate from eight or ten feet above, through discolored bursting seas, cutting many feet deep without a single peep into the gash, skillfully steering clear of adjacent structures to divide the spine at a critical point. Stubb boasted he could behead a sperm whale in ten minutes.
The head, severed, was held astern by a cable while the body was stripped; then hoisted against the ship's side, half in and half out of the sea, its weight leaning the strained craft steeply over. The blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.
When the work was done and the crew gone below to dinner, silence fell over the deserted deck like a universal yellow lotus. Up from his cabin came Ahab alone. He took a few turns on the quarter-deck, then getting into the main-chains with Stubb's long spade, leaned over the hoisted head, studying it. It was a black and hooded head, hanging there in intense calm like the Sphinx in the desert.
"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab. "Which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet lookest hoary with mosses — speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou sawest the locked lovers leaping from their flaming ship, heart to heart sinking beneath the exulting wave. Thou sawest the murdered mate tossed by pirates from the midnight deck. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"
"Sail ho!" cried a triumphant voice from the mast-head, and the cry broke across Ahab's reverie like sunlight through a storm.
Chapter 71 — The Jeroboam's Story
Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on, and presently the stranger proved through the glass to be a whale-ship — the Jeroboam of Nantucket. She squared her yards and lowered a boat, but the visiting captain, Mayhew, refused to come aboard: the Jeroboam carried a malignant epidemic, and though he himself remained untainted, he would not bring his contagion within reach of the Pequod's people. The two parties therefore conversed across an interval of water, the Jeroboam's boat plying its oars to keep parallel while waves occasionally shot it ahead or dropped it astern.
Pulling an oar in that boat was a singular figure: a small, short, youngish man sprinkled all over with freckles, wearing redundant yellow hair and a cabalistically-cut coat of faded walnut tinge, with deep fanatic delirium in his eyes. He was the man the Town-Ho had spoken of. Originally nurtured among the Neskyeuna Shakers, where he had descended from heaven through a trap-door announcing the seventh vial, he had shipped aboard the Jeroboam under a pretense of sanity. Once at sea, his insanity broke out in a freshet: he announced himself the archangel Gabriel, commanded the captain to jump overboard, and proclaimed himself deliverer of the isles of the sea. By the preternatural force of his manner and the dark, daring play of his sleepless imagination, he had invested himself in the minds of the ignorant crew with an atmosphere of sacredness. Afraid to put him ashore, afraid to maltreat him, the captain had surrendered the ship to his complete freedom. When the epidemic broke out, Gabriel declared it was at his sole command, and his authority became absolute.
When Ahab asked whether they had seen the White Whale, Gabriel leapt to his feet: "Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!" Captain Mayhew then told, between the interruptions of waves and Gabriel's wild ejaculations, the story of Moby Dick's encounter with the Jeroboam. The chief mate, Macey, had burned to attack the White Whale despite Gabriel's solemn warnings; he had persuaded five men to his boat and at last got an iron fast. As Macey stood in the bow, poising his lance, a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick fanning motion it seemed to take the breath from the oarsmen's bodies; and then the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, swept in a long arc, and fell into the sea fifty yards away. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, not a hair of any oarsman's head disturbed; but the mate for ever sank. Gabriel called the crews off with a shriek — "The vial! the vial!" — and from that day his influence over the Jeroboam was absolute.
After Mayhew had finished, Ahab answered that yes, he intended to hunt the White Whale, upon which Gabriel pointed his finger and vehemently cried: "Think, think of the blasphemer — dead, and down there! — beware of the blasphemer's end!" Ahab stolidly turned away and directed Starbuck to check the letter-bag; there was a letter for one of the Jeroboam's officers. Starbuck found it — damp, tumbled, spotted with green mould, as if Death himself might have been the post-boy. Ahab read the direction and muttered that it was addressed to Mr. Harry Macey — his wife's hand, by the look of it — and the man was dead. Starbuck split the end of a pole and inserted the letter to hand it across without the boat drawing nearer, but as Ahab extended it, the wave shot the boat forward, and Gabriel's eager hand caught it; he seized his boat-knife, impaled the letter, and flung it back into the ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then Gabriel shrieked to his comrades to give way, and the mutinous boat shot rapidly off, leaving the Pequod to resume its work upon the whale's jacket amid much dark, strange talk.
Chapter 72 — The Monkey-Rope
In the tumultuous business of cutting-in, one of the duties requiring description is how the blubber-hook was inserted into the hole cut by the mates. It fell to Queequeg, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster's back for this purpose, and in many cases the harpooneer must remain there throughout the entire flensing operation — half on the whale and half in the water, the vast revolving mass a tread-mill beneath his feet. Being Queequeg's bowsman, it was Ishmael's cheerful duty to attend him, holding him by what is technically called a monkey-rope — a rope of canvas attached to a strong strip belted round Queequeg's waist, the other end fast to Ishmael's own leather belt.
This arrangement was humorously perilous for both parties, for the monkey-rope was fast at both ends: should Queequeg sink to rise no more, usage and honor both demanded that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag Ishmael down in his wake. So for the time they were wedded — an elongated Siamese ligature united them. Queequeg was Ishmael's own inseparable twin brother, and he could not be rid of the dangerous liabilities the hempen bond entailed. And so strongly and metaphysically did Ishmael conceive of the situation that he seemed distinctly to perceive his own individuality merged in a joint-stock company of two, his free will receiving a mortal wound; another's mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent him into unmerited disaster and death. This, he came to see, was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes: most men have this Siamese connection with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die.
Unappalled by the night's massacre, the sharks swarmed in the whale's blood round Queequeg's floundering feet. Tashtego and Daggoo, suspended on the stages, flourished their spades over his head to slaughter as many sharks as they could reach — a disinterested and benevolent proceeding which, given the blood-muddled water and the proximity of Queequeg's limbs, was as likely to amputate a leg as a tail. Poor Queequeg, straining and gasping with the great iron hook, gave himself up to his Yojo.
When at last the exhausted Queequeg climbed up the chains, all dripping and trembling, the steward advanced with a cup of tepid ginger-and-water. Stubb was outraged. Ginger! What manner of fuel was ginger, to kindle fire in a shivering cannibal? The disgrace was traced to Aunt Charity, who had placed the ginger on board with instructions that the harpooneers receive no spirits. Stubb swept the insult away and procured from the locker a dark flask of strong liquor, which was pressed upon Queequeg; Aunt Charity's ginger-jub was freely given to the waves.
Chapter 73 — Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him
The Pequod was still carrying the Sperm Whale's great head at her side when the ship drifted into waters bearing the yellow brit that signals the vicinity of Right Whales. Though all hands commonly disdained those inferior creatures, and though the Pequod had not been commissioned to cruise for them, the announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day if opportunity offered. The reason for this unaccountable decree would only emerge later.
Tall spouts were seen to leeward, and Stubb's and Flask's boats were detached in pursuit. The Right Whale was soon fastened and dragged so close to the hull that for a terrifying moment it seemed as though the creature meant the ship malice; it dove under the keel and nearly brought both boats crashing against the vessel's side. After furious work, the whale was killed and towed alongside, its head hoisted to hang opposite the Sperm Whale's head, so that the strained Pequod, which had been leaning toward one side under the great downward drag, now recovered something of an even keel — though sorely strained on both sides, as if balancing the heads of Locke on the one hand and Kant on the other, with the observation that throwing both overboard and floating light and right is the wiser course.
Pulling their boat toward the ship with the Right Whale in tow, Stubb and Flask fell into curious talk. Flask had heard from Fedallah himself that a ship which carries a Sperm Whale's head on one side and a Right Whale's head on the other can never afterward capsize. Stubb expressed his settled opinion that Fedallah was the devil in disguise, forever bargaining for Ahab's soul in exchange for Moby Dick, coiling his tail away in his pockets, sleeping in the eye of the rigging. Fedallah was observed that evening calmly studying the deep wrinkles of the Right Whale's head, and then glancing from them to the lines in his own hand — while Ahab chanced to stand so that the Parsee occupied his shadow, the shadow of the one seeming only to blend with and lengthen the shadow of the other.
Chapter 74 — The Sperm Whale's Head — Contrasted View
Here are two great heads hanging from the Pequod's side; let us now study them together and lay our own heads beside theirs. The Sperm Whale's head and the Right Whale's head represent the two extremes of the leviathan world, and with both suspended within stepping distance of each other across the deck, the student of cetology has a rare opportunity.
The first contrast is of general character. The Sperm Whale's head has a certain mathematical symmetry that the Right Whale's sadly lacks; in the Sperm Whale's there is more pervading dignity, heightened in this gray-headed specimen by the pepper-and-salt colouring of the summit, token of advanced age and large experience. As for the eye: far back on the side of either head, low down near the angle of the jaw, you will find an eye so disproportionately small — no bigger than a young colt's eye — as to occasion wonder. From this peculiar sideway placement the whale can never see an object directly ahead or directly astern; his field of vision consists of two broad side-views, entirely separate, divided by all the cubic feet of solid head between, so that two entirely different pictures register on each eye simultaneously. Man may be said to look out from a sentry-box through two joined sashes; the whale's two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows with profound darkness and nothingness between. The ear has no external leaf whatsoever; in the sperm whale a nearly imperceptible hole is lodged behind the eye; in the right whale, the opening is entirely covered by membrane. The organ seems almost an afterthought on this vast creature, as if the world's thunder came to him through some other medium entirely.
The sperm whale's jaw, when pried open, presents a terrific portcullis of ivory teeth; the lower jaw is afterwards unhinged and hoisted on deck, where the accomplished dentists Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego draw forty-two teeth as Michigan oxen drag stumps from wild wood lands, the jaw then sawn into slabs like so many joists for building houses.
Chapter 75 — The Right Whale's Head — Contrasted View
Crossing the deck, we contemplate the Right Whale's head — broad as a galliot-toed shoe, resembling at distance a shoemaker's last spacious enough to house the old woman of the nursery tale and all her progeny. From its summit the two F-shaped spout-holes make it look like an enormous bass-viol; the green barnacled crown-piece at the top resembles the crotch of a great oak with a bird's nest within; the vast sulk of the lower lip — some twenty feet long and five feet deep — will yield five hundred gallons of oil. Inside the mouth, the baleen hangs like three hundred scimitar-shaped slats of Venetian blinds on each side, those wondrous hairy fibres through which the Right Whale strains the sea of brit. The ages of the creature may be read in the marks and hollows of these bones as the age of an oak is read in its rings. Standing in the mouth — a ridgepole ceiling twelve feet high, ribbed arches on either side — one might imagine oneself inside the great Haarlem organ, with its thousand pipes.
The two heads could not be more different: the Sperm Whale has no baleen, no great sulking lower lip, scarcely any tongue; the Right Whale has no ivory teeth, no deep well of sperm. The Sperm Whale's expression, in death, is one of prairie-like placidity — the repose of a Platonian who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. The Right Whale's enormous practical lower lip pressed against the vessel's side seems to speak of an enormous resolution in facing death: this one was a Stoic.
Chapter 76 — The Battering-Ram
Before quitting the Sperm Whale's head, let the sensible observer remark its front aspect in all its compacted collectedness, with an unexaggerated estimate of its battering-ram power. The front of the head is an almost wholly vertical dead blind wall — no nose, no eyes, no tender prominence of any sort. The lower and backward portion contains the only vestige of bone; not until twenty feet from the forehead does one come to the full cranial development. All this enormous boneless mass is as one wad — yet it is invested by an envelope of boneless toughness inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The severest harpoon rebounds from it as though the forehead were paved with horses' hoofs.
Behind this impregnable wall swims a mass of tremendous life, all obedient to one volition, powerful as an army measured by the cord. Unerringly impelling this dead impregnable wall — containing within it the most delicate oil — the whole enormous creature moves as the smallest insect obeys its instinct: as one. The student who grasps this will not be surprised when told that a sperm whale once stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific. Unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth.
Chapter 77 — The Great Heidelburgh Tun
The internal structure of the sperm whale's head divides, like a solid oblong, into an upper and a lower quoin. The lower bony portion forms the cranium and jaws; the upper unctuous mass, wholly free from bones, comprises the expanded forehead. The lower subdivision of this upper quoin is called the junk: one immense honeycomb of oil formed by ten thousand infiltrated cells of tough elastic white fibre. The upper subdivision — called the Case — is the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale; and as that famous tierce was mystically carved in front, so the whale's vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his wondrous tun. As that tierce was replenished with the most excellent Rhenish wines, so the Case contains the most precious of all the whale's oily vintages: the highly prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state, which upon exposure to air begins to concrete in beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice forms in water. A large whale's Case yields about five hundred gallons of sperm.
Chapter 78 — Cistern and Buckets
Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft and runs out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, where he rigged a light tackle and descended hand-over-hand onto the summit of the hoisted head, calling down to the crew below like a Turkish Muezzin from a tower. He probed the head with a short-handled sharp spade for the proper place to break into the Tun, like a treasure-hunter sounding walls for hidden gold; then directed a well-bucket to be lowered on a whip. Inserting a long pole into the bucket, Tashtego guided it down into the Tun until it disappeared, and at his signal it came back up again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail of new milk. Round after round the operation continued, filling tub after tub with fragrant sperm.
Then, in an instant of fatal carelessness — or perhaps the Evil One himself had a hand in it — Tashtego lost his one-handed grip on the tackle and dropped head-foremost clean into the Heidelburgh Tun, disappearing with a horrible oily gurgling. Daggoo, first to recover his senses, swung himself up to the top of the head and rammed the bucket down toward the buried harpooneer; but even as he worked, with a terrible crack one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, the enormous mass swung sideways, and the drunk ship reeled as if struck by an iceberg. The single remaining hook seemed about to give way. Then with a thunder-boom the entire head dropped into the sea like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool — and poor buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly to the bottom.
Before the blinding spray had cleared, a naked figure was seen for one swift moment hovering over the bulwarks — and then Queequeg had dived to the rescue. Every eye counted every ripple. At last Daggoo shouted — "Both! both!" — and Queequeg was seen striking out with one hand, clutching the long hair of the Indian with the other. Brought to deck, Tashtego was long in coming to; Queequeg did not look very brisk himself. The rescue had been accomplished thus: diving after the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges to scuttle a large hole in the bottom, then thrust his long arm in and hauled out poor Tash by the head — having first thrust back the leg that presented first, working a somerset on the Indian so that he came forth head foremost, in the good old way. The narrator reflects that had Tashtego perished within the head, it would have been a very precious perishing — coffined and tombed in the secret sanctum sanctorum of the whale, smothered in the whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled: the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter who, seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, leaned too far over and was sucked in, dying embalmed.
Chapter 79 — The Prairie
To scan the physiognomy of the Sperm Whale is an enterprise as hopeful as for Lavater to scrutinize the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, yet Ishmael will try all things. The Sperm Whale has no proper nose, which wholly alters the reading of his countenance — yet what would be hideous in a sculptured Jove is, in the Leviathan, no blemish at all, but an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent. In the full front view, the head is sublime: nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead pleated with riddles, dumbly lowering with the doom of boats and ships and men. In profile, a horizontal semi-crescentic depression at the forehead's middle corresponds to what Lavater calls the mark of genius. Has the Sperm Whale genius? His genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it; it is declared in his pyramidical silence. Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics of Egypt, but there is no Champollion to decipher the face of every man or every being. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. How may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? He but puts that brow before us. Read it, if you can.
Chapter 80 — The Nut
To the phrenologist, the Sperm Whale's brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square. In the full-grown creature the skull measures at least twenty feet in length; yet the brain itself — hidden twenty feet behind the apparent forehead, tucked in a cavity seldom exceeding ten inches — is a mere handful, secreted like a choice casket within the amplified fortifications of Quebec. The whale wears a false brow to the common world. And yet — consider the spinal cord: emerging from the brain's cavity with an undecreasing girth nearly equal to that of the brain itself, filling that enormous vertebral canal, communicating with the brain through all its tremendous length. The wonderful comparative smallness of the whale's proper brain is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord. By the spinal theory, the great hump of the Sperm Whale rises over one of the larger vertebrae and may be read as the organ of firmness, or indomitableness. That the great monster is indomitable, the reader will yet have reason to know.
Chapter 81 — The Pequod Meets the Virgin
The Pequod encountered the ship Jungfrau — the Virgin — of Bremen, commanded by Derick De Deer. The Dutch and Germans are now among the least of whaling peoples, though once the greatest, and the Jungfrau had been making a clean voyage of it: her captain came aboard carrying, of all things, a lamp-feeder, begging oil, his last drop of Bremen lamp-oil gone. Ahab had no interest in lamp-feeders; he asked about the White Whale. The German had none of the intelligence required. His necessities supplied, Derick departed, but had not gained his ship's side when whales were simultaneously raised from the mast-heads of both vessels.
There were eight whales going in a pod, and behind them in their wake, struggling to keep up, swam a huge humped old bull — yellowish with incrustations, afflicted apparently with some infirmity, his spout short and laborious, coming forth with a choking gush and accompanied by strange subterranean commotions, his starboard fin a mere stump. The German boats had the start, but this sick old bull was nearest; the Pequod's three boats and Derick's four all aimed for him. A fine chivalrous race ensued, Stubb goading his crew with bribes of brandy and visions of a hundred-barrel whale, Flask dancing in the stern — "Three thousand dollars, men! a whole bank!" — while Derick, leading on the strength of his head start, tauntingly waved his lamp-feeder at his rivals. It seemed the German would have the prize, until a crab caught the blade of his midship oarsman's white-ash and Derick's boat nearly capsized; in that instant Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask shot forward, and the three Nantucket harpooneers — Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo — rising simultaneously like tigers, darted their three irons over the head of the German's own harpooneer and into the whale, bumping the German's boat aside and spilling Derick and his man into the sea. "Ye'll be picked up presently," called Stubb as he shot by. "I saw some sharks astern — St. Bernard's dogs, you know, relieve distressed travellers."
The whale sounded with such violence that the three lines flew round the loggerheads in smoking grooves, the bows of all three boats dragged nearly level with the water while the sterns tilted high in the air. Beneath the placid blue surface the great monster writhed in agony, suspended by three thin threads from three bits of board. By and by the lines vibrated and the whale rose, his extreme exhaustion evident, his blind scar-covered eyes mere horrid protuberances. He was a very old whale; a corroded harpoon was embedded in his flesh, and deeper still, a stone lance-head — not of iron but of stone — lay perfectly healed within him, perhaps darted by some Northwest Indian long before America was discovered. The boats drew close and the lances went in, and at last he spouted thick blood, made one dying rush that capsized Flask's boat and bespattered the crews with gore, then rolled over and over slowly like a waning world and died. His final spout sank lower and lower as a drought-diminished fountain sinks to the ground. The carcass, however, was so heavy with old age that it dragged the Pequod sideways toward capsize; the fluke-chains could not be unshackled; and it required Queequeg with a carpenter's hatchet leaning from a porthole, hacking steel to iron in showers of sparks, before the fastenings snapped and the body sank. The Jungfrau, meanwhile, was last seen gallantly chasing a Fin-Back — a species utterly uncatchable, though its spout resembles the Sperm Whale's closely enough to deceive the unskilled. Oh, there are many Fin-Backs, and many Dericks, in this world.
Chapter 82 — The Honor and Glory of Whaling
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. The more Ishmael dives into the matter of whaling, the more he is impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity, and the more he is transported with the reflection that he himself belongs, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity. Perseus was the first whaleman — attacking the sea-monster to rescue Andromeda, and the skeleton of that very creature stood for ages in the ancient Joppa (from which, it is not without significance, Jonah also set sail). St. George's dragon was manifestly a whale; the ancient chronicles jumble whales and dragons together and often use the terms interchangeably — only a Perseus or a St. George or a Coffin has the heart to march boldly up to one. Hercules was swallowed and thrown up by a whale: he may be admitted as a sort of involuntary whaleman. The prophet Jonah stands as brother-in-the-craft to Hercules by the very antiquity of the parallel. And beyond prophets and heroes, the grand master of the whaling fraternity is Vishnoo himself, who in his first earthly incarnation became a whale to recover the sacred Vedas from the ocean floor. Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo — there is a member-roll for you. What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?
Chapter 83 — Jonah Historically Regarded
Some Nantucket whalemen distrust the historical story of Jonah much as certain skeptical Greeks doubted the story of Hercules and the whale; yet their doubts no more unmade those traditions than Greek skepticism unmade the myths of Perseus. A certain old Sag-Harbor whaleman had numerous objections: the whale depicted in his Bible bore two spout-holes like a Right Whale, whose throat is too narrow to swallow a man; the gastric juices would have destroyed Jonah; and the geography is impossible, since Nineveh is a three days' journey from the Tigris, far beyond any whale's route from the Mediterranean. Continental exegetists respond that Jonah took refuge in a dead whale, or that he escaped to a nearby vessel bearing a whale figure-head, or that the whale mentioned was merely a life-preserver — an inflated bag of wind. As for the geographic objection, a Portuguese Catholic priest calculated that Jonah must have gone via the Cape of Good Hope, which a German theologian endorsed as a signal magnification of the general miracle. The enlightened Turks to this day believe the story devotedly, as the mosque built in Jonah's honor attests. Poor Sag-Harbor seems worsted all round.
Chapter 84 — Pitchpoling
Queequeg one morning anointed the bottom of his boat with unctuousness, as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's bald keel, obeying some particular presentiment — and the event did not leave that presentiment unwarranted. Toward noon whales were raised but fled with the precipitancy of Cleopatra's barges from Actium. Stubb's boat gave chase, and Tashtego got an iron fast, but the stricken whale ran horizontally without sounding, so fast that hauling up to his flank was impossible and the iron would soon pull out. What remained? The pitchpole.
Of all the wondrous devices of veteran whalemen, none equals the pitchpole: that fine maneuver by which the long light lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, violently moving boat across an extraordinary distance. Stubb stands upright in the tossed bow, the towing whale forty feet ahead. Handling the lance lightly, he checks its straightness twice or thrice along its length, gathers the coil of the warp in one hand, levels the weapon at his waist, then steadily depresses the butt until the point rises fifteen feet in the air, balanced upon his palm like a juggler's staff upon his chin — and with a rapid, nameless impulse, the bright steel spans the foaming distance in a superb lofty arch and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Red blood instead of sparkling water. Again and again the dexterous dart is repeated, the spear returning each time to its master like a greyhound in a skilful leash, until the agonized whale goes into his flurry, and the pitchpoler, dropping astern, folds his hands and mute watches the monster die.
Chapter 85 — The Fountain
That for six thousand years — and no one knows how many millions before — the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and that it should still remain a problem whether those spoutings are water or vapor, is surely a noteworthy thing. The whale is air-breathing, warm-blooded, lung-having; his spout-hole is his sole means of respiration and it is on the top of his head; his mouth has no connection to his windpipe. How then does he stay submerged an hour or more? Between his ribs on each side of his spine lies a remarkable Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels which, when he quits the surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood — a surplus stock of vitality carried as the camel carries water in his supplementary stomachs. The whale breathes about one seventh — one Sunday — of his time.
Whether the spout is water or vapor: you cannot settle it by standing close, for the spout is surrounded by such commotion that any drops may be condensed vapor rather than ejected water; and even on a dead calm day the whale carries a small basin of water on top of his head in the countersunk fissure of the spout-hole. The wisest course is to let the deadly spout alone, for it is reputed poisonous to the skin and blinding to the eyes. Ishmael's hypothesis is this: the spout is nothing but mist. And from this follows a noble conceit — that from the heads of all ponderous, profound beings such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, and Dante, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam while they are in the act of thinking deep thoughts. The whale sailing through a calm tropical sea, his vast mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, that vapor sometimes glorified by a rainbow as if Heaven had put its seal upon his thoughts — here is an image of incommunicable contemplation. And through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in Ishmael's mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling the fog with a heavenly ray. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly: this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.
Chapter 86 — The Tail
Less celestial than other poets who warble the praises of soft eyes and lovely plumage, Ishmael celebrates a tail. Reckoning from the point where the sperm whale's trunk tapers to about the girth of a man, the upper surface of the tail alone encompasses at least fifty square feet; at its utmost expansion it exceeds twenty feet across. The organ is composed of three distinct strata — upper, middle, and lower — whose fibres run in different directions, much as the alternating courses of tile and stone give Roman walls their incomparable strength. The entire musculature of the whole whale's body converges in tributaries upon the tail, so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.
Five great motions are peculiar to the tail. First, progression: unlike every other sea creature, the whale propels himself by the horizontal coiling and rapid backward spring of his flukes, while the side-fins serve only to steer. Second, battle: against other sperm whales he uses head and jaw; against man he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail, curving it away and inflicting the blow by recoil. An unobstructed stroke is simply irresistible; no ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Third, sweeping: the whale moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface with a certain soft slowness, and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor. Fourth, lobtailing: the broad palms are flung high in play and smite the surface with a thunderous concussion that resounds for miles. Fifth, peaking flukes: when about to plunge into the deeps, the entire flukes with thirty feet of body are tossed erect in the air, vibrating a moment before plunging out of view — perhaps the grandest sight in all animated nature, as if the gigantic tail were spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. The more Ishmael considers this mighty tail, the more he deplores his inability to express it. Dissect him how one may, one goes but skin-deep; the whale is never known and never will be. And if one knows not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? Much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none?
Chapter 87 — The Grand Armada
The long narrow peninsula of Malacca extends south-eastward from Birmah to form the most southerly point of all Asia; beyond it stretches the vast mole of islands — Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor — forming a rampart that divides the Indian Ocean from the oriental archipelagoes. Through the Straits of Sunda, that central gateway between Sumatra and Java, the Pequod now pressed, bound eastward toward the Japan whaling grounds. Ahab's circumnavigating course would sweep nearly all the known sperm whale cruising grounds of the world before the final descent upon the Line in the Pacific where Moby Dick was most known to frequent.
The green palmy cliffs of Java Head loomed on the starboard bow; the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air; yet not a single spout was descried — until, when the ship had all but entered the straits, the customary cheering cry burst from aloft, and a spectacle of singular magnificence saluted the crew. Broad on both bows at the distance of two or three miles, forming a great semicircle embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of whale-jets played and sparkled in the noon-day air — each individual spout curling upward, seen through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showing like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis descried of a balmy autumnal morning by some horseman on a height.
The vast fleet of whales was hurrying through the straits, accelerating like marching armies pressing through a hostile defile to emerge on the open plain beyond. The Pequod crowded on all sail in pursuit, the harpooneers at the heads of their suspended boats loudly cheering — and who could tell whether Moby Dick himself might not be swimming somewhere in that congregated caravan, like the worshipped white elephant in a Siamese coronation procession?
Then Tashtego's voice was heard directing attention to something in the ship's wake: another crescent had formed astern, of detached white vapors that hovered without quite disappearing. Levelling his glass, Ahab's pivot-wheel turned sharply: "Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the sails — Malays, sir, and after us!" The piratical proas of Malacca, long lurking behind the headlands, had sallied out to make up for their over-cautious delay. As Ahab paced the deck — beholding forward the monsters he chased, behind the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him, and on both sides the green walls of the defile through which lay the route to his vengeance — his brow was left gaunt and ribbed like a black sand beach after a stormy tide has gnawed it without dragging the firm thing from its place. The swift Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, dropped the Malays rapidly astern and shot out upon the broad waters beyond, the harpooneers lamenting rather that the whales had been gaining on the ship than rejoicing that the ship had gained on the pirates.
As the ship neared the herd, the boats were sprung. But no sooner were the three keels a mile behind than the whales rallied, closing ranks so that their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, and pulled away with redoubled velocity. Hours of pulling stripped the crew to shirts and drawers; they were almost disposed to renounce the chase when a general commotion among the whales signaled they had fallen into that strange paralysis the fishermen call being "gallied." The compact martial columns broke apart; the herd dissolved into vast irregular circles, the whales swimming aimlessly, their short thick spoutings betraying their panic. Some floated helplessly like water-logged dismantled ships. Had these leviathans been a flock of simple sheep, they could not have evinced such excessive dismay — yet there is no folly of the beasts of earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
The boats separated, each making for a lone whale on the outskirts. Queequeg's harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in their faces and ran straight for the heart of the herd, dragging them deeper into the frantic shoal until they existed only in a delirious throb. Queequeg steered manfully — sheering off from this whale whose colossal flukes swung overhead, edging away from that one rising bodily from the depths — while Starbuck pricked with short darts whatever whales could be reached, and the oarsmen chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business. Three drugg-harpoons were darted into the herd to wing what could not be killed outright, but when the third was flung the block caught under a seat and tore it away, the sea coming in through the wounded planks, stuffed hastily with drawers and shirts.
As they drove deeper into the herd the tumult gradually diminished; the towing whale's way slackened; and then with the tapering force of his parting momentum they glided between two great bodies into the innermost heart of the shoal — as if from a mountain torrent they had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring outer glens were heard but not felt. The sea within was that smooth satin-like surface called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by whales in their more quiet moods. In the distracted distance they could still behold the tumults of the outer concentric circles, pod after pod of eight or ten whales going round and round like multiplied spans of horses in a ring. They were enclosed; the living wall had admitted them only to shut them up.
And then came the visitors. Small tame cows and calves — the women and children of the routed host — approached the becalmed boat with a wondrous fearlessness, coming snuffling right up to the gunwales and touching them, as if some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance but refrained from darting it, fearful of the consequences.
Far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met their eyes as they gazed over the side. In the exceedingly transparent depths of that enchanted lake floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales and those great-girthed creatures shortly to become mothers. The young calves gazed upward toward the boat with eyes that seemed not to see it, as infants suckling will stare fixedly away from the breast while yet drawing mortal nourishment, feasting spiritually upon some unearthly reminiscence. One infant that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old measured some fourteen feet in length and six feet in girth; his delicate side-fins and flukes still freshly bore the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign parts. Queequeg spotted a harpoon-line rising to the surface: a whale below had become tangled in the umbilical cord of a nursing cub. Some of the subtlest secrets of the sea seemed divulged in this enchanted pond; they saw young Leviathan amours in the deep. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments — serenely revelling in dalliance and delight. But even so, says Ishmael, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe in eternal mildness of joy.
The calm was broken by a new horror. In the outer circles a whale had been partially hamstrung — a cutting-spade driven into the tendon of his tail — but instead of immobilising him, the operation had driven him to madness. He had broken away carrying half the harpoon line, and the cutting-spade had worked loose from his flesh yet remained entangled by its rope around his tail, so that he now churned through the water flailing his flexible tail with the keen spade attached, wounding and murdering his own comrades in a frenzy. This terrific object recalled the whole herd from their stationary fright. The whales forming the margin of the lake began to crowd and tumble; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in contracting orbits the central circles began to thicken. A low advancing hum arose; then the entire host came tumbling inward upon their common centre like the breaking up of block-ice when the great Hudson breaks in spring.
"Oars! Oars!" whispered Starbuck, seizing the helm. "Gripe your oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by!" The boat was all but jammed between two vast black bulks, a narrow Dardanelles of open water between them; by desperate endeavor they shot into a temporary opening and fought their way through hair-breadth escapes, each time watching for another outlet, until at last they glided into what had just been one of the outer circles now crossed by random charging whales. This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, swept clean from his head by the air-eddy of a pair of broad flukes close by.
The entire herd, having clumped at last in one dense body, renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless. The boats lingered to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped astern and to secure one that Flask had killed and marked with his waif-pole. Of all the drugged whales, only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time — though only to be taken, as would hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.
Chapter 88 — Schools and Schoolmasters
The sperm whale moves through the ocean in two distinct kinds of gathering, which the fishermen call schools. The first is the harem school: a single great bull, lord and sultan of all he surveys, who attends upon a retinue of females considerably smaller than himself, these ladies being not more than one-third his bulk and hereditarily entitled, as Melville drily notes, to their plump and rounded condition. The schoolmaster, as this potentate is called, is no elderly sage but a whale in the full prime of his powers — a luxurious Ottoman who sweeps from equatorial feeding grounds to Oriental waters with his concubines, evading every disagreeable season as though the globe were arranged for his private comfort. He fights off impertinent young rivals with furious charges, locks jaws with contending bulls in battles that leave deep scars upon the survivors, and meanwhile, like pious Solomon worshipping among his thousand wives, revels in the tantalizing vicinity of temptation. In time, as years accumulate, the ardor of the schoolmaster cools, his harem is disbanded, and he retires to the solitary life of the aged lone whale — a moss-bearded Daniel Boone who will have no companion but Nature herself, going about among the meridians saying his prayers and warning the young against the errors he has himself so thoroughly explored.
The second sort of school is composed entirely of young males, the forty-barrel-bulls, full of fight and recklessness, tumbling round the world like collegians from Yale or Harvard, too wild for any prudent underwriter to insure. Strike one of these young males, and his comrades immediately abandon him; strike a female of the harem, and her companions linger around her in concern, sometimes so near and so long that they too fall prey to the boats.
Chapter 89 — Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish
The disputes that arise when two vessels contest ownership of a whale have been settled, among American whalemen, by a code of breath-taking brevity: a Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it; a Loose-Fish is fair game for anyone who can soonest catch it. These two laws, however, require a vast volume of commentary to expound, as the whalemen's practical Coke-upon-Littleton is administered not in courts of equity but in hard words and harder knocks.
Fifty years ago a celebrated case of whale-trover was litigated in England, wherein one ship's crew had harpooned a whale, been driven off by peril, and then watched another vessel kill and appropriate it before their very eyes. The witty Mr. Erskine, arguing for the defendants, drew a celebrated parallel with a criminal conversation case in which a gentleman had abandoned a vicious wife to the seas of life, only to later sue for her recovery — the lady having become a Loose-Fish the moment she was abandoned, and thus lawfully re-harpooned by a subsequent gentleman. Lord Ellenborough found in favor of the defendants: the whale was a Loose-Fish at the moment of capture; the harpoons and line, having been carried off by the fish, became the fish's property, and therefore the captor's. The plaintiffs recovered only their boat.
From these two whaling laws, Melville derives nothing less than the foundations of all human jurisprudence. Are not the sinews and souls of Russian serfs but Fast-Fish? The widow's last mite? The Archbishop of Savesoul's income of a hundred thousand pounds seized from the bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers? All Fast-Fish. And what of America in 1492? Poland under the Czar? India under England? Greece under the Turk? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man but Loose-Fish? What are the thoughts of thinkers to the verbalists who steal them? And what, reader, are you yourself but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
Chapter 90 — Heads or Tails
The Latin epigraph declares: of any whale taken on the coast of England, the King shall have the head and the Queen the tail. This ancient law, still technically in force, was put to recent proof when some honest Dover mariners, having killed and beached a fine whale, were confronted by a gentleman with a copy of Blackstone under his arm who quietly announced that the prize belonged to the Duke of Wellington in his capacity as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. To every objection of the barefoot, weary mariners — to the argument of their blistered hands, their invalid mothers, their wasted labor — the gentleman returned the same maddening reply: "It is his." The Duke received the money, and when a charitable clergyman wrote to entreat some consideration for the unfortunate men, his Grace replied in substance that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged if the reverend gentleman would refrain from meddling in other people's business.
Why the King should have the head and the Queen the tail remains a mystery which even the old lawyer Prynne could not satisfactorily explain, suggesting the tail was for the Queen's wardrobe — not perceiving that whalebone is in the head, not the tail. Some allegorical meaning may lurk here.
Chapter 91 — The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud
Some days after the great herd was sighted, the Pequod's noses proved more vigilant than her lookout eyes: a peculiar and decidedly unpleasant smell reached the deck before any sail was visible. Stubb guessed at once that two of the drugged whales he had recently struck had floated up dead, and presently the vapor cleared to reveal a French ship, the Bouton de Rose, or Rose-Bud, lying alongside two such noisome carcasses — one a blasted whale that had died unmolested and reeked accordingly, the other a dried-up dyspeptic specimen with scarcely a gill of oil in its whole carcase. The French captain, a former Cologne manufacturer on his first voyage, was apparently under the impression that toil and pestilence would be rewarded by oil.
Stubb perceived the situation's comic possibilities, and, more importantly, perceived that the dried-up whale might harbor ambergris. He rowed across, fell into conversation with the Guernseyman first mate (the only English speaker aboard), and concocted a scheme of magnificent impudence: the mate would pretend to interpret for the captain while Stubb said whatever nonsense occurred to him. Thus, when Stubb called the captain a baboon fit to command a monkey rather than a whale ship, the mate solemnly translated that a ship in yesterday's speaking had lost six men to a fever caught from a blasted whale. When Stubb elaborated that the other whale was even more deadly, the mate translated that Stubb earnestly conjured them to cut loose immediately. The captain fled to the rail and ordered the whales cast adrift. Stubb then ostentatiously towed the dyspeptic carcass away, the Frenchman gratefully departed in the other direction, and Stubb dug into the body with his spade until, through the stench of the plague, there stole a faint thread of perfume — and he drew out handfuls of ambergris, soft and waxy, of a hue between yellow and ash, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist.
Chapter 92 — Ambergris
Now this ambergris is a most curious substance — soft, waxy, highly fragrant, used by the Turks in cooking and carried to Mecca as frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome, dropped by wine merchants into claret to improve the flavor, fundamental to the perfumer's art. Its origin perplexed the learned for centuries. It is found only at sea, in the intestines of the sperm whale, seemingly a product of the whale's dyspepsia — beauty generated from corruption, fragrance from decay. Melville finds in this a text worthy of St. Paul's meditation in Corinthians on corruption and incorruption, on how we are sown in dishonor but raised in glory. The finest musk, as Paracelsus remarked, comes from sources one would rather not contemplate; and Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst of all ill-savors. So nature moves: the incorruptible perfume found in the heart of putrescence.
As for the claim that whalemen smell bad: Melville defends the profession with some heat. This slander originates with the Dutch and Greenland whale fisheries, which brought home raw blubber in casks to be tried out in fetid shore-works, giving rise to the village of Schmerenburgh, or Smeerenberg. The Southern sperm-whale fishery is another matter entirely. Living or dead, if decently treated, the sperm whale is as fragrant as an elephant draped in myrrh, led out to honor Alexander the Great.
Chapter 93 — The Castaway
What follows is the most significant event in many long leagues of voyage — significant not because it befell anyone of rank or consequence, but precisely because it befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew. Pip, the little Negro boy from Tolland County, Connecticut, had been kept aboard as a ship-keeper on account of his over-tender heart, which made him unsuited to the boats. He was, at bottom, a genuinely bright soul — brilliant with the natural brightness peculiar to his kind, a brightness like the ebony set in a king's cabinet, a brightness that the panic of the whale fishery had sadly blurred. But what was thus temporarily subdued in him was destined, in the end, to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, the way a jeweler brings out the diamond's fire not against the sun's clean light but against artificial gas-flame, making it blaze like a crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell.
When Stubb's after-oarsman sprained his hand in the ambergris affair, Pip was put into his place. The first lowering passed without incident. On the second, as the harpooned whale drove forward and the line ran, the startled Pip leaped overboard with a paddle in his hand, the whale line wrapping round his chest and neck and dragging him to the surface of the chocks foaming and strangling. Tashtego stood in the bow with his knife raised over the line, looking to Stubb for the word. Pip's choked blue face plainly begged, Do, for God's sake. "Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb, and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved.
Stubb gave Pip the wholesome sailor's advice: Stick to the boat, Pip. He added a harder lesson: they could not afford to lose whales by the likes of him. A whale would sell for thirty times what Pip would bring in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more.
But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. This time the line did not wrap around him, and when the whale ran and the boat surged forward, Pip was simply left behind — a dark ebon head bobbing in the vast spangled calm, receding mile by mile. Stubb, true to his word, kept his inexorable back turned. He supposed the other boats would pick Pip up; but those boats, spying other whales, turned away, and it was only by the merest accident of the ship herself running near that Pip was rescued at last.
From that hour the little Negro went about the deck an idiot. Or so his shipmates said. The sea had kept his finite body afloat, but drowned the infinite of his soul — not wholly drowned, rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided before his passive eyes; where the miser-merman Wisdom revealed his hoarded heaps; where Pip saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense, and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought which to reason is absurd and frantic, and feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
Chapter 94 — A Squeeze of the Hand
Stubb's whale was duly brought alongside and processed, and when the spermaceti cooled in the great tubs it concreted into lumps which had to be squeezed back into fluid — a sweet and unctuous duty that proved unexpectedly transcendent. Seated cross-legged on the deck, hands plunged into the bath of cool spermaceti that broke through the fingers like ripe grapes surrendering their wine, Ishmael found himself bathed in a smell like spring violets, washed clean of horrible oaths and mad purposes, divinely free from all ill-will of any sort whatsoever. He squeezed and squeezed till a strange sort of insanity overcame him; he found himself squeezing his co-laborers' hands in the warm liquid, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules, looking up into their eyes sentimentally, full of an abounding, affectionate, loving feeling. Oh, my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities? Let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that he could keep squeezing that sperm forever — for he had come to understand that in all cases man must eventually lower or shift his conceit of attainable felicity, placing it not in the intellect or the fancy but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the fireside, the country. In thoughts of the night, he saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
Melville proceeds through the vocabulary of the sperm-works: the white-horse from the flukes; the plum-pudding of whale flesh adhering to the blanket of blubber, richly mottled in crimson and purple, looking like plums of rubies in pictures of citron; the slobgollion that accumulates after prolonged squeezing; the gurry scraped from the right whale's back; the nipper, that strip of tendinous material cut from the tail that operates edgewise like a leathern squeegee. And below, in the blubber-room where pagan harpooneers work by dim lantern with pike and spade, cutting the blanket-pieces into portable horse-pieces while the ship pitches and the deck slides underfoot, toes are a scarce commodity among veteran men.
Chapter 95 — The Cassock
The mincing of the horse-pieces into thin slices for the try-pots requires a singular vestment. The whale's grandissimus — the great black cone that the sailors carry forward like a grenadier bearing a dead comrade — is stripped of its dark pelt, which is then turned inside out and hung in the rigging to dry. When ready, the mincer slips himself bodily into it, cutting armholes at one end. So arrayed in decent black, occupying his conspicuous pulpit before the mincing horse, intent upon what the mates call "Bible leaves," the mincer looks for all the world like a candidate for an archbishopric — or a Pope.
Chapter 96 — The Try-Works
The American whaler carries upon her deck, between foremast and mainmast, an apparition no landsman expects: a brick kiln. The try-works are ten feet by eight, five feet high, built of solid masonry braced with iron knees and screwed down to the timbers. Within the iron furnace mouths below the pots, the fire feeds first on wood, and then on the whale's own scraps — the crisp fritters of tried-out blubber — so that the whale becomes, in Melville's phrase, a plethoric burning martyr, a self-consuming misanthrope who supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.
When the works were first started on this voyage, it was about nine o'clock at night. By midnight they were in full operation. The darkness was intense, but that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames that forked from the sooty flues and illuminated every rope in the rigging as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. Before the roaring hearth stood the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers — always the whale-ship's stokers — pitching hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots with their pronged poles, while the snaky flames darted from the furnace mouths to catch them by the feet. Their tawny, smoke-begrimed faces and their barbarically white teeth were revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the fire; their uncivilized laughter forked upward like the flames; and the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages and laden with fire and burning a corpse and plunging into the blackness of the sea, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.
So seemed it to Ishmael, standing at the helm through the long dark hours. Wrapped in darkness himself, he the better saw the redness and madness of others; the fiend-shapes before him, capering half in smoke and half in fire, begat kindred visions in his soul as midnight drowsiness stole over him. Then came a moment of terrible, inexplicable wrongness: starting from a brief standing sleep, he was horribly conscious of something fatally amiss. The tiller smote his side; in his ears was the low hum of sails beginning to shake; he believed his eyes were open yet could see no compass, only jet gloom and flashes of redness. He felt that whatever swift thing he stood upon was not rushing toward any haven but fleeing from all havens astern — a stark bewildered feeling as of death. His hands grasped the tiller with the crazy conceit that it was somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. And then understanding broke over him: he had turned himself completely around in his brief sleep, and was fronting the ship's stern with his back to the compass. He faced forward just in time to prevent the ship from flying up into the wind and very probably capsizing.
Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass. Yet the moral extends beyond seamanship. The sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor the Sahara, nor the ocean itself, which is two-thirds of this earth and its dark side. The man who has more of joy than sorrow in him cannot be true — not true, or undeveloped. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Ecclesiastes, the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. But do not give thyself up entirely to the fire, lest it invert thee and deaden thee. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can dive into the blackest gorges and soar out again — and even when he flies forever within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains, so that even in his lowest swoop he remains higher than other birds upon the plain.
Chapter 97 — The Lamp
Had you descended from the try-works to the forecastle where the off-watch lay sleeping, you would have thought yourself in some illuminated shrine. In merchantmen, oil for the common sailor is scarcer than the milk of queens; he dresses in the dark, eats in the dark, stumbles in darkness to his pallet. But the whaleman lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin's lamp, replenishing it freely from the great copper cooler at the try-works, burning the purest and freshest of oil — unknown to any contrivance ashore — sweet as early spring butter. He hunts for his oil as the prairie traveler hunts for his supper of game.
Chapter 98 — Stowing Down and Clearing Up
A day or two after an oil affair, the transformation of the Pequod is remarkable. Where freshets of blood and oil had streamed across the deck, where the try-works had begrimed all the bulwarks and enormous masses of whale's head lay profanely heaped on the sacred quarter-deck, there now reigned a cleanliness bordering on the miraculous. The sperm oil itself has a singularly cleansing virtue; the lye made from the ashes of the burned scraps exterminates any clinging residue from the whale's back; and the entire crew, having scrubbed every implement and every surface, emerge at last fresh and glowing as bridegrooms new-leaped from Holland. They pace the clean planks and discourse of parlors, sofas, and fine cambrics; they propose to lay mats on the deck. Then aloft at the three mast-heads stand three men intent on spying whales, which, if caught, will soil everything again — and many is the time when the weary men, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks after ninety-six hours of uninterrupted labor, are startled by There she blows! and away they fly to fight another whale. This is man-killing. Yet this is life: for hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm, and cleansed ourselves from its defilements and learned to live in clean tabernacles of the soul, when — There she blows! — the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world.
Chapter 99 — The Doubloon
Nailed to the mainmast, the gold doubloon of Ecuador — coin of the equinoctial republic, minted midway up the Andes in the clime that knows no autumn — bears upon its face three mountain peaks: one bearing a tower, one a flame, one a crowing cock, all arching beneath the partitioned zodiac with the keystone sun entering Libra. One morning Ahab paused before it long in his monomania, reading its inscriptions for the first time with attention.
"There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers," he declared. "The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous undaunted fowl, that too is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self." He read in the zodiac a passage from storm to storm, found it fitting, and stalked away.
Starbuck came next, leaning against the bulwarks. He read three heaven-abiding peaks that seemed the Trinity; a dark vale below, but above the sun of Righteousness still shining as a beacon. "This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly," he murmured, "but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely."
Stubb followed, and with Daboll's arithmetic and a Massachusetts almanac proceeded to decode the zodiac as a sermon on the life of man: Aries begets us; Taurus bumps us; Gemini is Virtue and Vice; Cancer drags us back from Virtue; Leo gives fierce bites; Virgo is our first love; Libra is happiness weighed and found wanting; Scorpio stings us in the rear; Sagittarius shoots arrows from behind; Capricornus batters us; Aquarius drowns us; and Pisces, we sleep. All very well and jolly for Stubb, who finds in the sun's passage through these tribulations cause for continued good cheer.
Flask came and counted nine hundred and sixty cigars. The old Manxman circled the mast, noted the horse-shoe nailed to its far side — the sign of the lion — and muttered dire prophecy that the White Whale would be raised only under the roaring and devouring lion. Queequeg studied the coin and compared its engravings with the tattooing on his thigh; he could not make it out, and took it perhaps for an old button off some king's trousers. Then Fedallah passed, made a sign to the sign and bowed himself — a fire-worshiper saluting a sun, as was to be expected.
Last came mad Pip, who had watched all these interpreters, and now offered his own reading: "I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look." And again: "I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look." And finally: "And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow." He called the doubloon the ship's navel, said unscrewing it would have consequences, said that things nailed to the mast are a sign that things grow desperate, and wandered away calling for Jenny and hoe-cakes. Stubb, watching from the try-works: "Too crazy-witty for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering."
Chapter 100 — Leg and Arm: The Pequod Meets the Samuel Enderby
Ahab's cry of "Hast seen the White Whale?" hailed a ship flying English colours, and the answer came wordlessly: the burly, good-natured English captain withdrew from the folds of his blue roundabout jacket an arm of sperm whale bone terminating in a wooden mallet-head. Ahab instantly ordered his boat lowered, but boarding proved awkward — without his own ship's special rigging contrivance, a one-legged man cannot easily mount another vessel's side. The English captain improvised by swinging over the great blubber-hook still in the tackles from a recent whale, and Ahab slid his solitary thigh into its curve and was hoisted aboard. The two men clasped — ivory arm against ivory leg, the meeting of two great ruins crossed like sword-fish blades.
"Let us shake bones together," said Ahab — "an arm that never can shrink and a leg that never can run. Where didst thou see the White Whale?"
Captain Boomer of the Samuel Enderby told his story with good humor. He had lowered for a pod of whales when a bouncing great white-headed whale with old irons sticking in him erupted from below and began snapping furiously at the fast-line — "Aye, an old trick — I know him!" cried Ahab. In the confusion Boomer harpooned the white whale himself, was blinded in a black cloud of foam by the thrashing tail, and as he reached for a second iron the great tail came down like a Lima tower and cut his boat in two. He clung briefly to his own harpoon-pole in the whale's side until a combing sea dashed him off; the second iron, towing nearby, caught him just below the shoulder and bore him down through fathoms of agony until the barb ripped its way along the full length of his arm and he floated up. The ship's surgeon, Dr. Bunger — a man of elaborate comic pomposity — confirmed that the arm had to come off, though he and the captain maintained a prolonged jest about the doctor's regimen of hot rum toddies and the patient's strictly enforced diet.
Twice since, Boomer had crossed Moby Dick's wake; both times he declined to fasten. "Ain't one limb enough? I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows." Bunger observed mathematically that the whale's digestive organs are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence that he cannot fully digest even a man's arm, and that what appears as malice is only awkwardness. Ahab, who had been barely suppressing himself through all this, could bear no more: "What became of the White Whale? Which way heading?" When Boomer gave his answer — east, on the Line, last season — and added with cheerful frankness that the whale was best left alone, Ahab turned his back in mid-conversation, swung over the rail, stood in his boat's stern, and without a word or backward glance drove away from the Samuel Enderby with face set like flint.
Chapter 101 — The Decanter
The Samuel Enderby was named after the merchant who founded the famous London whaling house of Enderby and Sons — a house which, in Melville's poor whaleman's opinion, does not fall far behind the united royal houses of Tudors and Bourbons in point of real historical interest. It was the Enderbys who first sent English ships to hunt the sperm whale; they rounded Cape Horn in 1778 and opened the great Pacific grounds; they sent the sloop-of-war Rattler on a voyage of discovery and fitted out the ship Syren for the Japanese whaling ground. All honor to them.
The English whalers, Melville notes, are famous for extraordinary hospitality — that Saxon generosity of the table which reveals its Dutch origins in a delightful old list, discovered in an ancient volume called Dan Coopman (which he took for a cooper's memoir but turned out to be a Dutch merchant's account): 400,000 pounds of beef, 60,000 pounds of Friesland pork, 550 ankers of Geneva gin, 10,800 barrels of beer — all provisioned for 180 Dutch whalemen for a twelve-week voyage. Two barrels of beer per man, exclusive of gin, among harpooneers who somehow managed to hit their targets while fuddled. The English whalers have not neglected this excellent Dutch precedent: when cruising in an empty ship, they reason, if you can get nothing better out of the world, at least get a good dinner out of it. And this empties the decanter.
Chapter 102 — A Bower in the Arsacides
Having described the whale's exterior at length, Melville proposes now to set before the reader the whale's skeleton — the whale in his ultimatum, as it were unbutton'd and unbuckled down to his innermost bones. His authority for such intimate knowledge is a visit, years ago, to King Tranquo of the island of Tranque in the Arsacides, where a great sperm whale had stranded and died, and its skeleton had been transported to a palm-grove temple near the royal villa at Pupella. The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae carved with hieroglyphic annals; in the skull an eternal aromatic flame was maintained by the priests so that the dead whale's spout still rose in smoke; and the terrific lower jaw vibrated overhead like the hair-hung sword of Damocles.
Wandering among those bony colonnades with a ball of twine, Melville found a scene of extraordinary beauty and strangeness: the skeleton overgrown with living vines, every rib and vertebra wreathed in green, life folded through death as death trellised life. The weaver-god weaves, and by that weaving is so deafened that he hears no mortal voice — and so must we all be, who look on the loom. Melville measured the skeleton by means of a green rod and had its dimensions tattooed on his right arm, the only secure repository available under the circumstances.
Chapter 103 — Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton
The skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet, meaning the living whale was approximately ninety feet in length, since the skeleton loses about one-fifth of its bulk in life. The skull and jaw comprised twenty feet; behind them ran fifty feet of plain backbone with a basket of ten ribs to a side, the longest reaching eight feet at the climax of the fifth pair. The vertebrae numbered forty-odd, graduated from blocks of near three feet at the waist to billiard-ball whiteness at the tail's extremity — and some of the smallest had been lost, Melville was told, to cannibal urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play.
The skeleton, he emphasizes, is a poor index to the living form: the largest rib gave only half the true depth of the invested body; where he now saw naked spine, there had once been wrapped tons of flesh and muscle and blood; where he saw disordered joints, there had been the weighty and majestic flukes. The whale cannot be understood from his dead bones. He can only be truly and livingly found out in the heart of quickest perils, within the eddyings of his angry flukes, on the profound unbounded sea.
Chapter 104 — The Fossil Whale
Give me a condor's quill, cries Melville; give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand. The whale requires treatment in imperial folio. His intestines coil through him like great cables in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship; his bulk outdoes description; and the subject now is his antiquity — for fossil whale remains have been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, France, England, Scotland, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. In Paris a skull was dug up in the Rue Dauphine; in Napoleon's Antwerp, ancient bones came up in the docks. The most wonderful of all cetacean relics was found in Alabama in 1842 — a creature so enormous that the credulous slaves nearby took it for the bones of a fallen angel. Cuvier declared it an unknown leviathanic species; the English anatomist Owen showed it was a whale of a departed species, and rechristened it Zeuglodon.
Standing among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, Melville is borne back to that wondrous period before time itself began — when Saturn's grey chaos rolled over poles pressed hard by ice, when the whole world was the whale's, and Leviathan left his wake along the lines of the Andes and the Himalayas. Ahab's harpoon has shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. Even upon the granite ceilings of the great temple at Denderah the whale's fin is carved, swimming among centaurs and griffins in a planisphere cut centuries before Solomon was cradled. The whale was before all time, and must needs exist after all human ages are over.
Chapter 105 — Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish? Will He Perish?
The evidence shows that the whales of the present day are not smaller but larger than those of earlier geological periods; the fossil Leviathans were inferior to the modern specimens in size. Pliny's fables of whales embracing acres, or Aldrovandus's eight-hundred-foot monsters, are whalemen's fictions that no honest harpooneer would credit. As for extermination: the buffalo of Illinois have been destroyed in a lifetime, but the conditions are not comparable. Forty men in one ship may kill forty whales in four years; the same forty men on horseback could kill forty thousand buffalo in the same time. The whale has a pasture precisely twice the size of all the landmasses of the globe combined, and a probable longevity of a century or more, so that at any moment several distinct adult generations are simultaneously alive. The whale swam the seas before the continents broke water; in Noah's flood he despised the Ark; and if ever the world is flooded again, the eternal whale will rear upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood and spout his frothed defiance to the skies. He is immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.
Chapter 106 — Ahab's Leg
When Ahab leaped from the Samuel Enderby's side into his boat, the impact cracked his ivory leg. Back on the Pequod's deck he wheeled so violently that though the leg remained entire, it was half-splintered and no longer wholly trustworthy. This damage awakened memories of a prior and more terrible mishap — one which had been carefully concealed from the crew but which now revealed itself as the origin of his long seclusion before the Pequod sailed. He had been found one night, some time before departure, lying prone and insensible upon the ground, his ivory limb violently displaced and all but stake-wise pierced through his groin. The wound had been cured only with extreme difficulty; and those who knew of it, sensing terrors in the matter not entirely unconnected with the land of spirits, had conspired to keep it from the rest. In the darker regions of Ahab's monomaniac mind, this prior suffering was the direct issue of the whale's original maiming — grief begetting grief in a genealogy that extends back to the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; for the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than those of Joy. Yet for all his philosophical darkness, Ahab took plain practical measures. He called the carpenter.
Chapter 107 — The Carpenter
The Pequod's carpenter was no mere mechanic but a philosophical curiosity — an omnitooled man, a Sheffield pocket-knife of a human being, containing not only blades but screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers, all in one impersonal, stolid package. He filed belaying-pins, constructed cages for lost sea-birds, concocted soothing lotions for sprained wrists, drilled ears for shark-bone ear-rings, extracted teeth. His brain had long since oozed entirely into his fingers; he was a pure manipulator, a stripped abstract, an unfractioned integral living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. He kept himself company with constant soliloquizing — not from any thought, but as an unreasoning wheel hums in its revolutions, a sentry talking to stay awake.
Chapter 108 — Ahab and the Carpenter
On the first night watch, by the light of two lanterns, the carpenter filed the ivory joist for Ahab's new leg while the blacksmith at the forge hammered the buckle-screws, sending up a fierce red flame. Ahab arrived for the fitting.
The exchange between them moves through comedy into something stranger. Ahab philosophized about Prometheus the blacksmith who made men and animated them with fire, remarked that what is made in fire properly belongs to fire and so hell is probable, and ordered a complete ideal man — fifty feet high, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel, legs with roots to stay in one place, arms three feet through the wrist, no heart at all, a brass forehead, and a quarter of an acre of fine brains, with a skylight on top to illuminate inwards rather than eyes to see outward. He then raised the matter of phantom limbs: his lost leg still pricked and tingled in the place where the carpenter's living leg now stood. There is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. This riddle opened into the abyss: how many invisible things might stand precisely where we now stand, undetectable and undefeated? In thy most solitary hours, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? And if the smart of a dissolved leg persists after the flesh is gone, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell forever, and without a body?
The carpenter, left alone with the finished leg, muttered his own soliloquy: Stubb was right, the captain is queer — very queer. Has a stick of whale jaw-bone for a bedfellow, he has. And now he'll stand on this new leg, which is beginning to look less like a leg than like something else entirely.
Chapter 109 — Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin
The morning pump-watch brought unwelcome news: oil was coming up with the water. Casks below had sprung a leak. Starbuck went below to report it to Ahab, whom he found poring over charts of the Japanese waters, his new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of the table.
Ahab would not hear of heaving-to for repairs. They were nearing Japan — was he to tinker old hoops for a week? Starbuck pressed with patient logic: more oil would be lost in a day than could be earned in a year. "What we came twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir."
"So it is — if we get it."
"I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir."
"And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all." Ahab's voice rose to a kind of mad eloquence. He was himself all aleak — not only full of leaky casks but those leaky casks were in a leaky ship, and that was a far worse plight than the Pequod's. He did not stop to plug his own leak; for who could find it in the deep-loaded hull? Who could hope to plug it in life's howling gale? The Burtons would not be hoisted.
Starbuck reminded him of the owners. Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the typhoons, Ahab replied; the only real owner of anything is its commander, and his conscience was in the ship's keel. Then Starbuck gathered himself for a rarer courage: "A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man. Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?" Ahab answered by seizing a loaded musket from the rack and pointing it at his mate's chest. "There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod. On deck!"
The mate rose half calmly, and at the cabin door paused. "Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir. But let Ahab beware of Ahab." And Starbuck was gone.
Ahab stood alone with the musket, murmuring: "He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys — most careful bravery that!" And then: Ahab beware of Ahab — there's something there. The thick plaits of his forehead slowly relaxed. He set the gun back in its rack, went to the deck, and quietly told Starbuck he was too good a fellow — then gave the order to hoist the Burtons and break out the main-hold. Whether from a flash of honesty or mere prudential policy, he obeyed the counsel he had just refused at gunpoint.
Chapter 110 — Queequeg in His Coffin
The search for the leak drove the men deeper and deeper into the hold, disturbing the slumbers of the great ground-tier butts so ancient and corroded and weedy that one almost looked next for corner-stone casks containing coins of Captain Noah. Among those required to go below for the work was the harpooneer Queequeg, who crawled about in the damp and slime of the hold like a green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well — and there contracted a terrible chill that lapsed into a fever. In his hammock he wasted and wasted, his frame thinning, his cheekbones growing sharp, until there seemed but little left of him but tattooing. Yet his eyes grew fuller and softer as his body dwindled, filled with a strange lustrous depth, looking out from his sickness with what seemed a testimony to that immortal health in him which could not be weakened. His eyes rounded and expanded like the rings of Eternity spreading on still water; and an awe that cannot be named stole over those who sat beside him, beholding in his face what had been beheld by those who stood by when Zoroaster died. The crew gave him up entirely.
Queequeg made one singular request. He had seen in Nantucket certain little canoes of dark wood, like the war-wood of his native isle, in which the Nantucketers buried their dead; and he wished such a coffin made for himself, for it was not unlike the custom of his own people, who would embalm a dead warrior and lay him out in his canoe to float away to the starry archipelagoes — for the stars, in Kokovoko's theology, are isles, and far beyond all visible horizons the seas of this world interflow with the blue heavens to form the white breakers of the Milky Way. He did not want to be tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks.
The carpenter, with all the indifferent promptitude of his character, measured Queequeg precisely and set to work. When the coffin was finished, Queequeg demanded it be brought to him at once. He lay regarding it with an attentive eye, then called for his harpoon-iron, his paddle, biscuits, fresh water, woody earth, and a piece of sail-cloth for a pillow. He was lifted in; the lid was placed over him; he murmured "Rarmai" — it will do; it is easy — and signed to be replaced in his hammock.
Poor mad Pip hovered near throughout, and when Queequeg was back in his hammock, took him by the hand and spoke softly: "Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? If the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye seek out one Pip, who's now been missing long? He must be very sad; for look — he's left his tambourine behind." Then Pip's voice shifted: "Queequeg dies game! — mind ye that, Queequeg dies game! But base little Pip, he died a coward; let 'em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat!" Starbuck, listening through the scuttle, murmured that poor Pip's strange sweetness of lunacy brought heavenly vouchers of their heavenly homes; that such speech could only have been learned there.
But now came the astonishment. Having made every preparation for death, having proved his coffin a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied. When expressions of delighted surprise were offered, he explained simply that he had just recalled a small duty ashore which he was leaving undone, and had therefore changed his mind about dying; he could not die yet. When asked whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure, he answered: certainly. It was his conceit that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him — nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some other violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort. In good time Queequeg leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, gave himself a stretching, and pronounced himself fit for a fight.
With characteristic wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest, filling it with his clothes and spending spare hours carving its lid with grotesque figures — copying, in his rude way, the hieroglyphic tattooing on his own body, that tattooing which had been inscribed by a departed prophet and seer of his island as a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth. So Queequeg in his own person was a riddle to unfold, a wondrous work in one volume, whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them — and these mysteries were therefore destined to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it was which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation when one morning he turned away from surveying the tattooed savage: "Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!"
Chapter 111 — The Pacific
Gliding through the Bashee isles, the Pequod at last emerged upon the great South Sea, that vast and serene Pacific which Ishmael had yearned toward since youth. There is some sweet mystery about this ocean whose gently awful stirrings seem to breathe of a hidden soul beneath, of drowned dreams and somnambulisms, millions of lives and souls lying still and tossing like slumberers in their beds, the rolling waves made restless by their very restlessness. The Pacific rolls the midmost waters of the world; the Atlantic and Indian Oceans are but its arms. Its same swells wash the newest California towns and the ancient skirts of Asiatic lands older than Abraham; between float milky ways of coral isles, impenetrable Japans, endless unknown Archipelagoes. To any meditative spirit, once beheld, it becomes the sea of one's adoption—the tide-beating heart of earth, bowing one's head before Pan.
But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain. Standing iron-still at his accustomed place by the mizen, he unthinkingly snuffed the sweet musk from the Bashee islands with one nostril and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of this new sea—that very sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at last upon these almost final waters, steering toward the Japanese cruising ground, the old man's purpose intensified within him. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice; the veins of his forehead swelled like overladen brooks; even in his sleep his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull: "Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!"
Chapter 112 — The Blacksmith
In the mild weather of these latitudes, Perth the begrimed old blacksmith kept his portable forge on deck, constantly besieged by headsmen and harpooneers requiring their weapons altering, sharpened, or newly shaped. He worked with a patient hammer and a patient arm, silent and slow, bowing over his chronically broken back as if toil were life itself and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart.
The curious yawing in his gait had finally led him to disclose the shameful story of his ruin. Perth had been, in his prime, an artisan of famed excellence—a man with a house, a garden, a loving wife, three ruddy children, a workshop in the basement whose ringing hammer was a kind of iron lullaby to his household. But drink—the Bottle Conjuror—had crept under his cover of darkness into his happy home and robbed it of everything. The blows of the basement hammer grew fewer and fainter; the wife sat frozen at the window; the bellows fell; the forge choked with cinders; the house was sold; the mother and children followed one another to the churchyard; and the old man staggered off a vagabond, his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls. Death seems the only desirable sequel for such a career, but the wide sea spread its unimaginable terrors and wonders before the broken-hearted as an alternative to dying. And so Perth hearkened to the ocean's mermaids singing "Come hither, broken-hearted," and went a-whaling.
Chapter 113 — The Forge
At midday Ahab came along the deck carrying a small rusty leathern bag, pausing before Perth's forge while sparks flew thick from the anvil. He fell into dark philosophical conversation with the blacksmith, asking if he could smooth any seam or dent in any metal. Perth replied that he could smooth all but one. Ahab then seized the blacksmith by the shoulders and pointed to the lightning-forked furrow across his own brow—could Perth smooth that? Perth knew it for the one seam beyond his craft. Impatiently, Ahab flung the leathern pouch upon the anvil: it was filled with the gathered nail-stubs from the steel shoes of racing horses, the stubbornest stuff known to the trade. He commanded Perth to forge him a harpoon that a thousand yoke of fiends could not part—one that would stick in a whale like his own fin-bone—and Ahab himself would weld it. The Parsee Fedallah crept near the forge and, bowing over the fire, seemed to invoke some curse or blessing upon the toil.
When the shank was finally plunged hissing into the cask of water for tempering, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab's face. "Would'st thou brand me, Perth?" he winced—"have I been but forging my own branding-iron?" Perth pleaded with him, fearing for what this harpoon was destined. "For the white fiend!" Ahab replied, commanding Perth to make the barbs from his own razors—the best of steel, which he no longer needed, for he had sworn off shaving and prayer until his purpose was fulfilled. When the barbs were ready, Ahab refused to temper them in water. Instead he called upon Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, and had three punctures made in the heathen flesh of each; the White Whale's barbs were tempered in their mingled blood. Then Ahab raised the smoking iron high and howled his baptism over it: "Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!"—I baptize thee not in the name of the Father, but in the name of the Devil. The harpoon was completed—pole, iron, and rope inseparable like the Three Fates—and Ahab stalked away with it, its hollow ringing along every plank, while behind him poor Pip's wretched laugh mocked the black tragedy of the ship.
Chapter 114 — The Gilder
Deep into the Japanese cruising ground, the Pequod fished long hours at a stretch with but small success. In the dreamy, smooth intervals between lowerings, when the ocean's skin shimmered like flowery earth, a filial, land-like feeling stole over the crew—even over Ahab, though his breath upon the golden keys of those calms tarnished them as soon as they opened. Starbuck gazed deep into the lovely sea and murmured of his faith in its loveliness despite its sharks; Stubb leapt up in the golden light, declaring he had always been jolly. Ishmael meditates that life proceeds not by fixed gradations toward some final harbor, but circles back through infancy, boyhood, doubt, and disbelief, endlessly, the secret of our origins buried with whatever mother bore us—we are all orphans in the deep.
Chapter 115 — The Pequod Meets the Bachelor
Some few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded, a festive sight bore down upon the Pequod: the Nantucket ship Bachelor, homeward bound with every cask full, her decks a spectacle of uproarious triumph. Streamers flew from every spar; Polynesian girls danced with harpooneers on the quarter-deck; three fiddlers played aloft in an ornamented boat; the sailors were tearing out the now-useless masonry of the try-works as if pulling down the Bastille. The Bachelor had enjoyed the most astonishing success, filling herself and bartering for extra casks besides. Her captain stood erect on the quarter-deck, lord over all this jubilation.
As the two ships crossed each other's wakes—one all joy for things past, the other all foreboding for things to come—their captains impersonated the whole striking contrast of the scene. "Come aboard!" cried the Bachelor's commander, lifting a bottle. "Hast seen the White Whale?" gritted Ahab. The other confessed he had only heard of him and did not believe in him at all—"Come aboard, old hearty!" Ahab replied that one was a full ship and homeward bound, and the other was an empty ship and outward bound. "So go thy ways, and I will mine." And thus the two vessels parted—the Bachelor's men never heeding the Pequod's lingering glances—while Ahab, leaning on the taffrail, drew from his pocket a small vial of Nantucket soundings and stared at it in dark silence.
Chapter 116 — The Dying Whale
The day after the Bachelor passed, four whales were slain, one of them by Ahab. Late in the crimson afternoon, Ahab sat in his boat watching his whale die, observing the strange spectacle observable in all dying sperm whales: the slow turning of the head sunward in the beast's final moments, as if in homage to the sun. To Ahab this conveyed a wondrousness unknown before—the whale worshipping the fire, faithful as a vassal to the light, only for the corpse to be whirled some other way by death once the spirit had fled. Ahab mused aloud on this dark lesson—on the twin natures of existence, of life striving sunward and death turning it aside—and ended with a strange communion with the sea: "Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!"
Chapter 117 — The Whale Watch
Four whales had been slain that evening, scattered wide; three were brought alongside ere nightfall, but the windward one could not be reached till morning, and Ahab's boat lay beside it all night under a flickering lantern. The Parsee crouched in the bow watching the sharks that spectrally played around the dead whale. Ahab, roused from his slumber, found Fedallah face to face with him in the darkness, and the two seemed the last men in a flooded world.
Ahab had dreamed again of the hearses. The Parsee elaborated his prophecy: before Ahab could die on this voyage, two hearses must be seen upon the sea—the first not made by mortal hands, the second of wood grown in America. Furthermore, Fedallah declared, he himself must go before Ahab as his pilot, and appear to him again before the end. And last: only hemp could kill Ahab—the gallows rope. Ahab laughed in derision. If he could only die by the gallows, he was immortal on land and on sea—and he could not perish before the two hearses were seen, which meant he would yet slay Moby Dick and survive it. Both men fell silent as one man. The grey dawn came on, and at noon the dead whale was brought to the ship.
Chapter 118 — The Quadrant
At high noon, approaching the Line, Ahab sat in the bows of his hoisted boat taking his daily observation of the sun through the quadrant's coloured glasses, the Parsee kneeling beneath him eyeing the same sun with wild, passionless face. Having calculated his latitude, Ahab fell into brooding reverie, addressing the sun: thou canst tell me where I am but not where Moby Dick swims at this instant—not a drop of water, not a grain of sand of tomorrow's position. He turned his contempt upon the instrument itself—this "foolish toy," this "babies' plaything of haughty Admirals," capable of fixing only one poor pitiful point, unable to light the way to his quarry. "Curse thee, thou quadrant!"—and he dashed it to the deck, stamping it underfoot. No more would he guide himself by heaven-gazing instruments; he would navigate by the level compass and dead reckoning of log and line. Starbuck watched in silent dread, murmuring that from all this fiery life of Ahab's what would remain at the last but one little heap of ashes.
Chapter 119 — The Candles
Warmest climes nurse the cruellest fangs, and in these resplendent Japanese seas the Typhoon strikes without warning. That evening the Pequod was torn of her canvas, bare-poled in the darkness, while sky and sea roared and split with thunder and blazed with lightning. The storm stove in Ahab's own boat at the stern—the very stand-point where he was wont to stand. Starbuck, watching the gale drive them eastward—precisely toward Moby Dick—saw in the darkness a possible deliverance: this same wind could be made a fair wind homeward if only the yards were squared. But before that thought could take hold, Ahab came groping along the bulwarks by elbowed lances of fire.
Then Starbuck cried the great cry: "The corpusants! the corpusants!" All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; each of the three tall masts burned at its tripointed rod-end with three tapering white flames, like gigantic wax tapers before an altar. The enchanted crew clustered on the forecastle, their eyes gleaming in the pale phosphorescence—Daggoo looming three times his size like the black cloud from which the thunder had come, Tashtego's shark-white teeth lit by the preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burning like Satanic blue flames.
Then Ahab seized the mainmast's lightning chain with his left hand, placed his foot upon the kneeling Parsee, and with his right arm high-flung, stood erect before the tri-pointed trinity of flames:
"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will I dispute its unconditional mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee."
The flames leaped to thrice their height; Ahab was blinded for a moment but groped on defiantly, speaking into the darkness: "Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes." He claimed kinship with the fire even in its mystery—fire too was a foundling, an orphan, with its own incommunicable riddle. "Defyingly I worship thee!"
Starbuck then cried out: the special harpoon in its crotch had shed its sheath, and from the keen barb there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire—a serpent's tongue of light. Starbuck seized Ahab's arm in horror: "God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, and make a fair wind homewards." The panic-stricken crew ran for the braces in half-mutiny—but Ahab snatched up the burning harpoon itself and waved it like a torch among them, swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that so much as cast loose a rope's end. Petrified, the men fell back. Ahab spoke: all their oaths to hunt the White Whale were as binding as his. And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.
Chapters 120–122 — The Storm's Aftermath
The typhoon's last business played out in brief, harsh exchanges. From the deck, Starbuck begged Ahab to strike the main-top-sail yard before it carried away; Ahab refused with contemptuous grandeur, saying he would sway up sky-sail poles if he had them—loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds. On the forecastle bulwarks, Stubb and Flask lashed down the anchors in drenching spray, Stubb philosophizing about lightning rods and risk and the general probability of doom with his usual comic fatalism. High aloft in the thunder, Tashtego at the main-top-sail yard muttered his single desire—rum—against the ceaseless noise of the storm.
Chapter 123 — The Musket
Some hours after midnight the typhoon abated enough for Starbuck and Stubb to cut adrift the shredded sails and set new ones; at last the wind came round astern, and fair. In compliance with standing orders, Starbuck went below to report this change to the captain—and paused before the cabin door.
The cabin lamp swung fitfully, casting shifting shadows upon the bolted door. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, standing upright against the forward bulkhead. And out of Starbuck's heart there strangely evolved an evil thought—blent so with its good accompaniments that for a moment he could not know it for itself. He took down the very musket Ahab had once pointed at him, feeling it tremble in his hands. He thought aloud in an agonized interior monologue, the great moral crisis of the voyage: was not Ahab the wilful murderer of thirty men if this ship should come to deadly harm through his monomaniac refusal of every caution? Had he not dashed the quadrant, refused the lightning rods, steered by shattered reckoning, sworn to sail through every gale? Was it not Starbuck's duty—his right, even—to set aside this crazed old man? Not reasoning, not remonstrance, not entreaty would Ahab hear. Could he be imprisoned? He would be more hideous than a caged tiger. The land was hundreds of leagues away. Could a lightning bolt be called murder when it struck a would-be murderer in his bed?
Slowly, stealthily, Starbuck placed the loaded musket's end against the cabin door. "On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh Mary! Mary!—boy! boy! boy!—"
Then from within, Ahab's tormented sleep erupted into that ringing cry: "Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!" The levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel. Starbuck seemed to wrestle with an angel. Then, turning from the door, he placed the death-tube back in its rack and left the place—sending Stubb down in his stead to wake the captain with the news of the fair wind.
Chapter 124 — The Needle
The morning after the typhoon, the sea still rolled in long slow billows under a crucible of molten gold. Ahab stood apart watching the sun, and then demanded of the helmsman what course the ship was heading. "East-sou-east, sir." "Thou liest!"—and Ahab struck him: the sun was astern, which meant the compass showed East while the ship was sailing West. The typhoon's lightning had reversed the needles. The crew was confounded; the Parsee's face showed a sneering triumph and a fatalistic despair.
But Ahab rallied with cold brilliance. He called for a lance without a pole, a top-maul, and a sail-maker's needle, and before the awestruck crew remagnetized the needle himself—hammering the iron rod, stroking the needle against the steel, suspending it from a thread above the compass-card until it quivered and settled true. Then he stepped back and pointed to it: "Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!" One by one the sailors peered in, and one by one slunk away in fascinated dread. In Ahab's fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you saw him in all his fatal pride.
Chapter 125 — The Log and Line
The next episode in the unravelling of the ship's instruments: Ahab ordered the log heaved—the old wooden reel long neglected and warped by weather. The ancient Manxman warned that the line looked far gone, heat and wet having spoiled it. Ahab dismissed the warning with a philosophical aside about life holding men rather than men holding life. The log was heaved, the coils ran out—and snap! the overstrained line parted and the log was gone. "I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line," Ahab muttered. "But Ahab can mend all." It was the Manxman who saw most clearly what it meant: "the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world." In this same scene, mad Pip appeared at the rail babbling of a fisherman hauling him from the sea, and Ahab, seeing Pip's lost eyes, was struck to his deepest tenderness: "Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings."
Chapter 126 — The Life-Buoy
Steering south-eastward now toward the Equatorial fishing ground, the Pequod sailed through monotonously mild trade-wind seas—strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene. Near a cluster of rocky islets in the deep darkness before dawn, the watch was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly—half-articulated wailings—that all stood transfixed. Some said it was mermaids, some the voices of drowned men; the Manxman declared it the newly dead. Ahab explained it as young seals who had lost their dams, crying in their human way.
But the bodings were confirmed at sunrise, when a man going from his hammock to his mast-head fell from it, a falling phantom, and was swallowed by the sea. The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, but it had dried and shrunk and slowly filled with water and followed the sailor to the bottom. When the lost life-buoy was to be replaced, no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, until Queequeg hinted—with strange signs and innuendoes—of his own coffin. A coffin as a life-buoy: Starbuck started at the thought; Stubb found it queer; Flask practical. The carpenter was ordered to rig it accordingly, muttering all the while about cobbling jobs and the unprincipled nature of his trade.
Chapter 127 — The Deck
The carpenter caulked the coffin-life-buoy as Ahab came up from the cabin with Pip following behind. Ahab sent Pip back gently—his presence cured too much—and engaged in bleak, riddling dialogue with the carpenter, accusing him of being an "all-grasping, intermeddling, monopolising, heathenish old scamp" who made legs one day, coffins the next, and life-buoys out of those same coffins. Ahab mused on the hollow ringing of the caulking mallet on the coffin-lid—naught beneath making the sounding board—and then on whether a coffin might not be, in some spiritual sense, an immortality-preserver. But he dismissed the thought: "So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me." He went below to talk philosophy with Pip—his one strange consolation.
Chapter 128 — The Pequod Meets the Rachel
Next day a large ship, the Rachel, bore directly down upon the Pequod with all her spars thickly clustering with men. Before any formal salutation, Ahab cried his eternal question: "Hast seen the White Whale?" "Aye, yesterday," the Rachel's commander replied—and in the next instant asked: "Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?" The Rachel's story poured out: a fourth boat had gone after Moby Dick the previous afternoon and disappeared, dragged under or swept away. All night the Rachel had searched, lighting fires in her try-pots as a beacon, lowering and raising boats, scanning the dark sea in vain.
Captain Gardiner—a Nantucketer whom Ahab knew—came aboard, his face pale as a death-mask, and begged Ahab to unite his ship in the search. "My own boy is among them," he said. "For God's sake—I beg, I conjure—for eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship." Stubb was moved: "His son he's lost! We must save that boy." Gardiner invoked every claim—fellow feeling, Nantucket kinship, the golden rule—even pointing out that Ahab himself had a young son at home, and that he could see Ahab relent. But Ahab stood like an anvil, receiving every blow without quivering: "Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go."
He turned with averted face and descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed. Gardiner silently hurried to the side, fell more than stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship. Long afterward, the Rachel could be seen yawing this way and that at every dark spot on the sea—the very image of Rachel weeping for her children, because they were not.
Chapter 129 — The Cabin
In the cabin Ahab told Pip he must not follow him further—the hour was coming when Ahab would not scare the boy from him, yet would not have him by. Pip's presence was too curative to Ahab's malady, and for the hunt that malady must be preserved. He offered Pip the cabin as his home, his own screwed chair as throne. Pip in his mad tenderness refused: "I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye." Ahab admitted the boy's fidelity touched him past endurance—made him a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man—but held to his resolve. He bid the boy farewell with a solemn "God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that—God for ever save thee." And Pip, left alone in the empty cabin after Ahab's footfall receded on the deck, sat in the great screwed chair of the captain's quarters and spoke to the phantom admirals assembling in his broken mind.
Chapter 130 — The Hat
As the Pequod now moved toward the precise latitude and longitude where Ahab's leg had been taken—and a vessel had been spoken that only yesterday had encountered Moby Dick—something new and barely sufferable appeared in the old man's eyes. He ceased to go below at all, day or night; his gnarled beard grew unkempt; he lived entirely on the open deck, commanding the mast-heads at every hour of light and dark. Fedallah also ceased to sleep or sit, standing motionless for hours, his wan eyes never closing—"We two watchmen never rest." In Ahab the Parsee saw his abandoned substance; in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow.
Ahab rigged a nest of basketed bowlines and had himself hoisted to the royal mast-head to be the first to sight Moby Dick—entrusting the rope, the very rope that held his life, to Starbuck's hands. Then a sea-hawk came wheeling and screaming round his head in swift circlings; it spiralled down, darted—and before the cry could be completed, the black hawk seized Ahab's hat and flew on and on with it, far ahead of the prow, diminishing to a minute black spot that finally fell from that great height into the sea. The hat was never restored.
Chapter 131 — The Pequod Meets the Delight
The intense Pequod sailed on, the coffin life-buoy still swinging at the stern, when another ship was descried—most miserably misnamed the Delight. Upon her shears were the shattered white ribs of what had been a whale-boat. "Hast seen the White Whale?" called Ahab. The hollow-cheeked captain pointed to the wreck for answer. "Hast killed him?" "The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that"—and he glanced toward a rounded hammock on the deck where silent sailors sewed a burial shroud. "Not forged!" cried Ahab, brandishing Perth's harpoon: "here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs!" The Delight's captain, preparing to bury the one of five men he could bury—the rest already given to the sea—offered the bleak warning that the Pequod sailed upon their tomb. Ahab ordered the ship forward before the prayer could be finished, and the splash of the dropped corpse reached them, and ghostly bubbles may have sprinkled the Pequod's hull. As they glided away, a voice cried from the Delight's wake: "In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!"
Chapter 132 — The Symphony
It was a clear steel-blue day, unlike any before it—the firmaments of air and sea barely separable in their all-pervading azure, the air with a woman's look, the sea heaving with long, lingering swells like Samson's chest in sleep. Small white birds glided aloft like gentle feminine thoughts; mighty leviathans and sword-fish moved in the deeps below like the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. At the girdling horizon, a soft tremulous motion—like a bride's throbbing trust.
In this morning's clearness, haggardly firm, his eyes glowing like coals in the ashes of ruin, Ahab stood forth and leaned over the side, gazing down into his own reflection until it sank from his sight. The lovely aromas of that enchanted air seemed at last to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. The step-mother world threw affectionate arms around his stubborn neck. From beneath his slouched hat, Ahab dropped a tear into the sea—nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
Starbuck saw him and drew near without touching, and Ahab turned.
What followed was the most human conversation in the whole voyage—Ahab's last temptation and last confession. Forty years, he told Starbuck. Forty years of continual whaling; forty years of privation and peril and storm-time; not three years ashore in all that span. The desolation of solitary command, the masoned walled-town of a captain's exclusiveness. His young wife, married past fifty, and he had sailed the very next day for Cape Horn, leaving but one dent in the marriage pillow—a widow with her husband alive. All this for what? To palsy the arm at the oar, to chase a demon fish across every ocean? "What a forty years' fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise." He bade Starbuck stand close so he could look into a human eye—better than gazing into sea or sky, better than gazing upon God. In Starbuck's eye he saw his wife and child. He pleaded: when branded Ahab gave chase to Moby Dick, Starbuck should not lower—that hazard should not be his.
Starbuck cried out in passionate appeal: "Oh, my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!" For a moment Starbuck saw his captain almost yield—speaking of the boy waking from his noon nap at home, the wife who had promised the child would be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's sail. "Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course!"
But Ahab's glance was averted. Like a blighted fruit tree he shook and cast his last cindered apple to the soil. What nameless, inscrutable thing commanded him? Against all natural lovings and longings, some hidden lord and emperor drove him on. Was it Ahab who lifted this arm, or God, or who? The great sun did not move of himself; the stars revolved by invisible power; how then could one small heart beat by its own will? "We are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike."
When Starbuck's blanched face stole away in despair, Ahab crossed to the other rail—and saw Fedallah's reflected eyes staring up from the water.
Chapter 133 — The Chase—First Day
That night in the mid-watch, Ahab thrust his face into the sea-air and smelled the sperm whale. He altered course accordingly. At daybreak a long sleek lay ahead on the sea, smooth as oil—the wake of a great whale. "Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!" Ahab had himself hoisted at once, and barely two-thirds aloft he raised the cry that electrified the world: "There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!"
Every soul rushed to the rigging. The whale lay some miles ahead, his hump sparkling, his spout jetting regularly into the still morning air. Ahab claimed the doubloon by right—none of the others could have raised Moby Dick first; Fate had reserved that moment for him alone. Three boats were lowered, Starbuck alone remaining with the ship. They neared Moby Dick through waters gone glassy and still, the great whale gliding in a revolving ring of greenish foam, the shadow of his broad white forehead rippling playfully before him, sea-fowl softly feathering about him like a canopy—a mighty mildness in his swiftness, surpassing even Jove swimming away with ravished Europa. Calm, enticing, divinely indifferent, Moby Dick revealed his full hump arching like Virginia's Natural Bridge, then sounded.
The boats waited. Then the birds cried out; Ahab looked down and saw rising from the undiscoverable bottom a white spot magnifying into two long crooked rows of glistening teeth—Moby Dick's open scrolled jaw, rushing upward. Ahab swept his boat aside barely in time, then went forward to the bows with Perth's harpoon. But the whale, seeming to perceive the stratagem, sidelingly transplanted himself, slid lengthwise beneath the boat, and, turning on his back like a biting shark, took the boat's bows full within his mouth. The long scrolled lower jaw curled high into the open air; one of the teeth caught in a row-lock; the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's head. The White Whale shook the slight cedar as a cruel cat shakes a mouse.
Ahab seized the jaw with his naked hands and strove wildly to wrench it free. The jaw slipped; the gunwales collapsed and snapped like shears; the boat was bitten completely in two. Ahab was spilled flat-faced into the sea. For a terrible interval Moby Dick circled the wreckage, churning the water, drawing ever-tighter circles around Ahab's bobbing head while the other boats dared not enter the direful zone to strike. At last the Pequod herself bore down and broke the charmed circle; the whale sullenly swam off; the boats flew to the rescue. Ahab was dragged into Stubb's boat, crushed and blinded—far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from ravines. But in an instant's compass great hearts condense vast pain, and in the next instant he was half-rising, asking first for the harpoon, then for the count of men—all five accounted for—and then commanding them to set sail and follow the whale.
That day wore on in pursuit, the whale traveling too fast to close upon him. At nightfall Ahab addressed the crew, promising ten times the doubloon's sum to whoever first raised Moby Dick at the kill. He stood through the night in the scuttle, watching the dark sea, waiting for the morning.
Chapter 134 — The Chase—Second Day
At daybreak Moby Dick was not in sight—he had traveled faster than reckoned. "Turn up all hands and make sail! 'tis but resting for the rush." The Pequod tore on, leaving a furrow in the sea like a ploughshare. The frenzies of the previous day had worked the crew into exaltation; all fear was broken up, as timid prairie hares scatter before the bounding bison. They were one man now, not thirty—their individualities welded into oneness, directed by Ahab their one lord and keel. Then the cry: "There she breaches!"—and Moby Dick burst from the furthest depths in a mountain of dazzling foam, salmon-like, hurling himself to Heaven in his act of defiance. "Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick! thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!"
The boats were lowered; this time Moby Dick came for them. He charged among all three boats with open jaws and lashing tail, heedless of the irons darted at him from every side. For a while the boats eluded him by skilful maneuvering, but the tangle of three lines fast to him drew them all together; corkscrewed harpoons and lances came flashing up to the bows of Ahab's boat from the mazes of the fouled line. Ahab cut the rope free with a boat-knife. Then the White Whale rushed among the remaining tangles, dragged Stubb's and Flask's boats together and smashed them—dived beneath the sea and disappeared in a boiling maelstrom.
As the two smashed crews struggled in the water, Moby Dick rose beneath Ahab's boat itself, shooting it straight into the air; it came down gunwale-backward, and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it like seals from a cave. The Pequod bore down and rescued all. When Ahab was helped to the deck, he leaned half-hanging on Starbuck's shoulder; his ivory leg had snapped off to a single short splinter. "Aye and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—but no living bone of mine one jot more me than this dead one that's lost." He dismissed the injury with volcanic pride: "Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being."
Then the muster: the Parsee was missing. Caught in the fouled lines, dragged under. Ahab's first harpoon—the baptized one—was somewhere in the fish. At this blow Ahab shook as if he were the belfry whose death-knell rang. Starbuck pleaded with anguished vehemence: two days chased, twice stove, his leg gone again, his shadow gone—all good angels mobbing him with warnings—would he go on? "Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world?" Ahab replied with cold, terrible clarity: he was the Fates' lieutenant; this whole act was immutably decreed, rehearsed a billion years before this ocean rolled. "Ahab is for ever Ahab, man." He addressed the crew: drowning things rise twice before they sink for evermore—tomorrow Moby Dick would rise for the last time. Through the night the men worked by lanterns, rerigging spare boats, sharpening fresh weapons, while the carpenter built Ahab yet another ivory leg.
Chapter 135 — The Chase—Third Day
The third morning dawned fair and fresh—a day so lovely it seemed made for a summer-house to the angels. Ahab's monologue greeted it: Ahab never thinks, he only feels—thinking is a coolness he no longer possessed, his old skull cracking like a glass whose contents had turned to ice. The whale was not yet in sight; at noon, still nothing—Ahab realized he had oversailed him in the night, run past him. He brought the ship about to retrace her wake, Starbuck noting grimly: "Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw."
A whole hour passed in golden suspense. Then from three points off the weather bow, three mast-heads sent up three shrieks: the spout was sighted again. "Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick!" The boats were lowered. Before descending, Ahab paused and summoned Starbuck to him—spoke of ships that sail from their ports and are never seen again—spoke of men who die at ebb tide and others at the full of the flood—"I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man." Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears were the glue. "Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!" "Lower away!"—and Ahab tossed the mate's arm from him.
From the cabin window, Pip's voice cried "O master, my master, come back!" But Ahab heard nothing; the boat leaped on. Sharks rose maliciously from the dark waters beneath the hull and snapped at the very blades of the oars at every stroke.
The boats rowed on in silence, the whale having sounded. A low rumbling rose from beneath; the waters slowly swelled in broad circles, then heaved upward—and Moby Dick shot lengthwise from the sea, draped in a thin veil of mist, hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air, then fell swamping back. Maddened by the corroding irons still buried in his flesh from the day before, he churned among the boats, flailing them apart, spilling irons and lances from the mates' boats. And then—as the whale swam past them and showed one entire flank—a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round the fish's back, pinioned in the turns of the line upon which the whale had reeled through the night, was the half-torn body of the Parsee, his sable raiment shredded, his distended eyes turned full upon Ahab.
Ahab's harpoon dropped from his hand. "Befooled, befooled!"—a long lean breath—"Aye, Parsee! I see thee again. Thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse?" The Parsee had foretold a second hearse of American wood. The mates' boats were ordered back to the ship for repair; Ahab alone would continue. He bade his crew obey him as his own arms and legs, and pressed on.
Starbuck cried from the ship's rail: "Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!" But Ahab was already sailing to leeward in pursuit. Nearing the whale once more, he passed close along the Pequod's side—glimpsed Starbuck's face over the rail—commanded him to follow at a judicious interval—caught flying glimpses of Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo mounting to the mast-heads, of Stubb and Flask busy at the broken boats, hammers ringing in iron—and heard those hammers drive a nail into his heart. The flag had blown away from the main-mast-head; he shouted to Tashtego to nail a new one fast.
Ahab drew alongside Moby Dick through the smoky mountain mist of the whale's spout and darted his fierce iron—and his far fiercer curse—into the hated flank. The whale writhed sideways; the line raced through the grooves at igniting velocity—fouled—Ahab stooped to clear it, cleared it—but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly, as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, Ahab was shot out of the boat before the crew even knew he was gone. The heavy eye-splice at the rope's end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and disappeared into the depths.
The tranced crew stood still, then turned. The ship—great God, where was the ship? Through dim bewildering mediums they saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana, only the uppermost masts still out of water, and fixed to those once-lofty perches by some infatuation of fidelity or fate, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea.
Moby Dick, having rammed his broad forehead against the Pequod's starboard bow and smashed through her hull, had sent men and timbers reeling—"The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!" Ahab had cried from the water—"its wood could only be American!"—and the Parsee's last prophecy completed itself. The whale ran quivering along the keel beneath the settling ship, then surfaced far off and lay quiescent.
Now concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole—spinning, animate and inanimate alike—all round and round in one vortex, carrying the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight. As the last whelmings poured over the sinking head of Tashtego at the mainmast, leaving but a few inches of erect spar still visible with its streaming flag, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk had followed the truck downward from among the stars, pecking at the flag and incommoding Tashtego; and the bird now interposed its broad wing between the hammer and the wood, and in the death-gasp the submerged savage's hammer froze there—and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks and its imperial beak thrust upward, went down with the ship in the flag of Ahab: the ship, which like Satan would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her.
Now small fowls screamed over the yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Epilogue
"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE." — Job.
The drama is done. Why then does any one step forth? Because one did survive the wreck.
After the Parsee's disappearance, Ishmael had been ordained by the Fates to take the place of Ahab's bowsman; and on that last day, when the three men were tossed from the rocking boat, he was dropped astern. So he floated on the margin of the ensuing scene, in full sight of it all, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship slowly drew him toward the closing vortex. When he reached it, the vortex had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round he revolved, like another Ixion, contracting toward the button-like black bubble at the slowly wheeling axis—until, reaching that vital center, the black bubble burst upward, and the coffin life-buoy—liberated by its cunning spring, buoyed by its great sealed buoyancy—shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by his side.
Buoyed up by that coffin for almost one whole day and night, Ishmael floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near—nearer—and picked him up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, found only another orphan.