Moby Dick; or The Whale
by
Herman Melville

Part 5 out of 12

as even then not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting.

There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed
to entangle his delirious but still methodical scheme.
But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the gregarious
sperm whales have their regular seasons for particular grounds,
yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which haunted
such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn
out to be identically the same with those that were found there
the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable
instances where the contrary of this has proved true.
In general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit,
applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured,
aged sperm whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a former
year been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle
ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast;
yet it did not follow that were the Pequod to visit either
of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season,
she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some
other feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.
But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and
ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode.
And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object
have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made
to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his,
ere a particular set time or place were attained, when all
possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab
fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty.
That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one
technical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,
for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically
descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun,
in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any
one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of
the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place;
there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was
that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found
the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious
comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab
threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not
permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact
above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes;
nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize
his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning
of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could
enable her commander to make the great passage southwards,
double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude
arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there.
Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.
Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps,
been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion
of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five
days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of
impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;
if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas
far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up
his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay,
or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race.
So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind
but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious
zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly,
seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad
boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered,
should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter,
even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares
of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of
Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable.
And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself,
as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would
throw himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape?
His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear!
And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race;
till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him!
and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover
his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man
endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.
He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody
nails in his palms.

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably
vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts
through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies,
and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain,
till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish;
and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him
heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him,
from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends
beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself
yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship;
and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though
escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of
being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright
at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity.
For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast
hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock,
was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again.
The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him;
and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind,
which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent,
it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the
frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral.
But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it
must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts
and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer
inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind
of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly
live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined,
fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth.
Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what
seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing,
a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure,
but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself.
God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee;
and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus;
a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very
creature he creates.

CHAPTER 45

The Affidavit

So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed,
as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious
particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its
earlier part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume;
but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and more
familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood,
and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance
of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural
verity of the main points of this affair.

I care not to perform this part of my task methodically;
but shall be content to produce the desired impression
by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known
to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, I take it--
the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself.

First: I have personally known three instances where a whale,
after receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape;
and, after an interval (in one instance of three years), has been
again struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two irons,
both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken from the body.
In the instance where three years intervened between the flinging
of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more
than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval,
to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there,
joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior,
where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered
by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other
common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions.
Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on its travels;
no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its
flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and
this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other.
I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this;
that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second
attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them,
afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance,
it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and last,
and the last time distinctly recognized a peculiar sort of huge mole
under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three years previous.
I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that.
Here are three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of;
but I have heard of many other instances from persons whose veracity
in the matter there is no good ground to impeach.

Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant
the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several
memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean
has been at distant times and places popularly cognisable.
Why such a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally
owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales;
for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be,
they soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling
him down into a peculiarly valuable oil. No: the reason was this:
that from the fatal experiences of the fishery there hung
a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a whale as there
did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen were
content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins
when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea,
without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance.
Like some poor devils ashore that happen to known an irascible
great man, they make distant unobtrusive salutations to him
in the street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance further,
they might receive a summary thump for their presumption.

But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great
individual celebrity--nay, you may call it an oceanwide renown;
not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in
forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted into
all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name;
had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so,
O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg,
who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name,
whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it
not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed
their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so,
O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times
assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky?
Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like
an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back!
In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students
of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.

But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various
times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels,
were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out,
chased and killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their
anchors with that express object as much in view, as in setting
out through the Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it
in his mind to capture that notorious murderous savage Annawon,
the headmost warrior of the Indian King Philip.

I do not know where I can find a better place than just here,
to make mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important,
as in printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness
of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe.
For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires
full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some
of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without
some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise,
of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable,
or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general
perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid
conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur.
One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters
and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record
at home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record.
Do you suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps
caught by the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being
carried down to the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan--
do you suppose that that poor fellow's name will appear in the newspaper
obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the
mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact,
did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or indirect
from New Guinea? Yet I will tell you that upon one particular voyage
which I made to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty
different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale,
some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat's crew.
For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon
you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.

Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea
that a whale is an enormous creature of enormous power;
but I have ever found that when narrating to them some specific
example of this two-fold enormousness, they have significantly
complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I declare upon
my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,
when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.

But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established
upon testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this:
The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing,
and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in,
utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more,
the Sperm Whale has done it.

First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard,
of Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day
she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal
of sperm whales. Ere long, several of the whales were wounded;
when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from the boats,
issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the ship.
Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in,
that in less than "ten minutes" she settled down and fell over.
Not a surviving plank of her has been seen since.
After the severest exposure, part of the crew reached the land
in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain Pollard
once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship,
but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers;
for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith
forswearing the sea, he has never attempted it since.
At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have
seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time
of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative;
I have conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles
of the scene of the catastrophe.*

*The following are extracts from Chace's narrative:
"Every fact seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was
anything but chance which directed his operations; he made two
several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval between them,
both of this catastrophe I have never chanced to their direction,
were calculated to do us the whale hunters I have now and then
heard casual allusions to it.

Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J---then commanding
an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining
with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the
harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales,
the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing
strength ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present.
He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could
so smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much
as a thimbleful. Very good; but there is more coming.
Some weeks later, the Commodore set sail in this impregnable craft
for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale,
that begged a few moments' confidential business with him.
That business consisted in fetching the Commodore's craft such a thwack,
that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest
port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I
consider the Commodore's interview with that whale as providential.
Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright?
I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.

I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little circumstance
in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you
must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern's
famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century.
Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:

"By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail,
and the next day we were out in the open sea, on our way
to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine, but so intolerably
cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing.
For some days we had very little wind; it was not till
the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up.
An uncommonly large whale, the body of which was larger
than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water,
but was not perceived by any one on board till the moment
when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him,
so that it was impossible to prevent its striking against him.
We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic
creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least
out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether,
while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck,
concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we
saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity.
Captain D'Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine
whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock,
but we found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured."

Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship
in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual
adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village
of Dorchester near Boston. I have the honor of being a nephew
of his. I have particularly questioned him concerning
this passage in Langsdorff. He substantiates every word.
The ship, however, was by no means a large one: a Russian
craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle
after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.

In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure,
so full, too, of honest wonders--the voyage of Lionel Wafer,
one of ancient Dampier's old chums--I found a little matter
set down so like that just quoted from Langsdorff, that I
cannot forbear inserting it here for a corroborative example,
if such be needed.

Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "John Ferdinando,"
as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes. "In our way thither,"
he says, "about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about
one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship
felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation
that they could hardly tell where they were or what to think;
but every one began to prepare for death. And, indeed, the shock
was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the ship
had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over,
we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. ... The
suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages,
and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks.
Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown
out of his cabin!" Lionel then goes on to impute the shock
to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation
by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time,
did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land.
But I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early
hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen
whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.

I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known
to me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale.
In more than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase
the assailing boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself,
and long withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks.
The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head;
and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples
where the lines attached to a running sperm whale have, in a calm,
been transferred to the ship, and secured there! the whale towing
her great hull through the water, as a horse walks off with a cart.
Again, it is very often observed that, if the sperm whale, once struck,
is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so often with blind rage,
as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to his pursuers;
nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his character,
that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth,
and retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes.
But I must be content with only one more and a concluding illustration;
a remarkable and most significant one, by which you will not fail
to see, that not only is the most marvellous event in this book
corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels
(like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for
the millionth time we say amen with Solomon--Verily there is nothing
new under the sun.

In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian
magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian
was Emperor and Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote
the history of his own times, a work every way of uncommon value.
By the best authorities, he has always been considered a most
trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in some one
or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently
to be mentioned.

Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of
his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the
neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels
at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years.
A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid.
Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species this
sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships,
as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am
strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why.
For a long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always
unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it.
Even now I am certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be,
in the present constitution of things, a place for his habitual
gregarious resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me,
that in modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence
of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority,
that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found
the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes
through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route,
pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.

In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar
substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale.
But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale--
squid or cuttle-fish--lurks at the bottom of that sea,
because large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort,
have been found at its surface. If, then, you properly
put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit,
you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning,
Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships
of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale.

CHAPTER 46

Surmises

Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his
thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;
though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that
one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature
and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways,
altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage.
Or at least if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other
motives much more influential with him. It would be refining
too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to hint that his
vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended
itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters
he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances that each
subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he hunted.
But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were still
additional considerations which, though not so strictly according
with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means
incapable of swaying him.

To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used
in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.
He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some
respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover
the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority
involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual,
the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation.
Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab
kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; still he knew that for all this
the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain's quest, and could he,
would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it.
It might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale
was seen. During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall
into open relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership,
unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought
to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab
respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his
superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present,
the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative
impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the
voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's
courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action);
that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must
have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick. For however eagerly
and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of his quest;
yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable--
they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness--
and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit,
however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things
requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene
and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.

Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man,
thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully
incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round
their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism
in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick,
they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites.
For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times
were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight
for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries,
picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way.
Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object--
that final and romantic object, too many would have turned
from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab,
of all hopes of cash--aye, cash. They may scorn cash now;
but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them,
and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them,
this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.

Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more
related to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable,
and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private
purpose of the Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that,
in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable
charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal,
his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all
further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command.
From even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible
consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground,
Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself.
That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain
and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention
to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his
crew to be subjected to.

For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally
developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree
continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's voyage;
observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself
to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit
of his profession.

Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard
hailing the three mastheads and admonishing them to keep
a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise.
This vigilance was not long without reward.

CHAPTER 47

The Mat-Maker

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging
about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters.
Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,
for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet
somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of revelry
lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his
own invisible self.

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat.
As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline
between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle,
and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy
oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon
the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn;
I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over
the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting
dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were
the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically
weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed
threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning,
unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit
of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own.
This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own
hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into
these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,
indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly,
or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be;
and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a
corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric;
this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions
both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance--
aye, chance, free will, and necessity--no wise incompatible--
all interweavingly working together. The straight warp
of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course--
its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;
free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads;
and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines
of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will,
though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either,
and has the last featuring blow at events.

Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound
so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly,
that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood
gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing.
High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego.
His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out
like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries.
To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being
heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs
perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could
that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence
as from Tashtego the Indian's.

As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly
and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought
him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate,
and by those wild cries announcing their coming.

"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"

"Where-away?"

"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"

Instantly all was commotion.

The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating
and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this
fish from other tribes of his genus.

"There go flukes!" was now the cry from Tashtego;
and the whales disappeared.

"Quick, steward!" cried Ahab. "Time! time!"

Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact
minute to Ahab.

The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently
rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales
had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked
to see them again directly in advance of our bows.
For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when,
sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless,
while concealed beneath the surface, mills around, and swiftly
swims off in the opposite quarter--this deceitfulness of his
could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose
that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed,
or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected
for shipkeepers--that is, those not appointed to the boats,
by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head.
The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line
tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out;
the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over
the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs.
Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung
to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale.
So look the long line of man-of-war's men about to throw
themselves on board an enemy's ship.

But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took
every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab,
who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed
out of air.

CHAPTER 48

The First Lowering

The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other
side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose
the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had
always been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called
the captain's, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter.
The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart,
with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips.
A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him,
with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely
crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban,
the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head.
Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid,
tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives
of the Manillas;--a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty,
and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies
and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord,
whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.

While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers,
Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head,
"All ready there, Fedallah?"

"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.

"Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck.
"Lower away there, I say."

Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their
amazement the men sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled
round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped
into the sea; while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring,
unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped
down the rolling ship's side into the tossed boats below.

Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when a fourth keel,
coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern,
and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect
in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread
themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water.
But with all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and
his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command.

"Captain Ahab?-" said Starbuck.

"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four boats.
Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!"

"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his
great steering oar. "Lay back!" addressing his crew. "There!--there!--
there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!--lay back!

"Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."

"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now.
Didn't I hear 'em in the hold? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it?
What say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."

"Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children;
pull, my little ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb
to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of uneasiness.
"Why don't you break your backbones, my boys? What is it you stare at?
Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands
come to help us never mind from where the more the merrier.
Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone devils are good
fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that's the stroke
for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes!
Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes!
Three cheers, men--all hearts alive! Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry--
don't be in a hurry. Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals?
Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so, then:--softly, softly!
That's it--that's it! long and strong. Give way there, give way!
The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep.
Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull,
can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and
ginger-cakes don't ye pull?--pull and break something! pull,
and start your eyes out! Here," whipping out the sharp knife
from his girdle; "every mother's son of ye draw his knife,
and pull with the blade between his teeth. That's it--that's it.
Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her--
start her, my silverspoons! Start her, marling-spikes!"

Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large,
because he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general,
and especially in inculcating the religion of rowing.
But you must not suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings
that he ever flew into downright passions with his congregation.
Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity.
He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone
so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed
so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman
could hear such queer invocations without pulling for
dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing.
Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself,
so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped--
open-mouthed at times--that the mere sight of such a yawning commander,
by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew.
Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists,
whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put
all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.

In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
across Stubb's bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were
pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.

"Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir,
if ye please!"

"Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch
as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew;
his face set like a flint from Stubb's.

"What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!

"Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed.
(Strong, strong, boys!)" in a whisper to his crew,
then speaking out loud again: "A sad business, Mr. Stubb!
(seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb,
all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what will.
(Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead,
Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!)
Sperm, sperm's the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit
hand in hand."

"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the
boats diverged, "as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so.
Aye, and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often,
as Dough-Boy long suspected. They were hidden down there.
The White Whale's at the bottom of it. Well, well, so be it!
Can't be helped! All right! Give way men! It ain't the White Whale
to-day! Give way!"

Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical
instant as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not
unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of
the ship's company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time
previous got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then,
this had in some small measure prepared them for the event.
It took off the extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all
this and Stubb's confident way of accounting for their appearance,
they were for the time freed from superstitious surmisings; though the
affair still left abundant room for all manner of wild conjectures
as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the matter from the beginning.
For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen
creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn,
as well as the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.

Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided
the furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats;
a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him.
Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone;
like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes
of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water
like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer.
As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer oar,
he had thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest
with the whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut
against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon;
while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer's,
thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any
tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar
as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him.
All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion
and then remained fixed, while the boat's five oars were seen
simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea.
Instantly the three spread boats in the rear paused on their way.
The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the blue,
thus giving no distantly discernible token of the movement,
though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.

"Every man look out along his oars!" cried Starbuck. "Thou, Queequeg,
stand up!"

Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow,
the savage stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed
off towards the spot where the chase had last been descried.
Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also
triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself
was seen coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking
tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the vast
blue eye of the sea.

Not very far distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still;
its commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead,
a stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet
above the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns
with the whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a
man's hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched
at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks.
But little King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little
King-Post was full of a large and tall ambition, so that this logger
head stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.

"I can't see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let
me onto that."

Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way,
swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty
shoulders for a pedestal.

"Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?"

"That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow;
only I wish you fifty feet taller."

Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of
the boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm
to Flask's foot, and then putting Flask's hand on his hearse-plumed
head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one
dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders.
And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing
him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.

At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with
what wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman
will maintain an erect posture in his boat, even when pitched
about by the most riotously perverse and cross-running seas.
Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the logger
head itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of little
Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious;
for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of,
barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously
rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask
seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.
Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask
would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added
heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest.
So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living
magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her
seasons for that.

Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes.
The whales might have made one of their regular soundings,
not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case,
Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace
the languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from
his hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather.
He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his thumb-end;
but hardly had he ignited his match across the rough sandpaper
of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been
setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light
from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy
of hurry, "Down, down all, and give way!--there they are!"

To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish
white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it,
and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from
white rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled,
as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron.
Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath
a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance
of all the other indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted,
seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders.

All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot
of troubled water and air. But it bade far to outstrip them;
it flew on and on, as a mass of interblending bubbles borne
down a rapid stream from the hills.

"Pull, pull, my good boys," said Starbuck, in the lowest possible
but intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp
fixed glance from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow,
almost seemed as two visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses.
He did not say much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything
to him. Only the silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly
pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with command,
now soft with entreaty.

How different the loud little King-Post. "Sing out and
say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts!
Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me,
and I'll sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys;
including wife and children, boys. Lay me on--lay me on!
O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad! See! see that
white water!" And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his head,
and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it
far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging
in the boat's stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.

"Look at that chap now," philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his
unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth,
at a short distance, followed after--"He's got fits, that Flask has.
Fits? yes, give him fits--that's the very word--pitch fits into 'em.
Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;--
merry's the word. Pull, babes--pull, sucklings--pull, all.
But what the devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly,
and steadily, my men. Only pull, and keep pulling; nothing more.
Crack all your backbones, and bite your knives in two--that's all.
Take it easy--why don't ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your
livers and lungs!"

But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that
tiger-yellow crew of his--these were words best omitted here;
for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land.
Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear
to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder,
and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.

Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific
allusions of Flask to "that whale," as he called the fictitious
monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing
his boat's bow with its tail--these allusions of his were at
times so vivid and life-like, that they would cause some one
or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over his shoulder.
But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put
out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks;
usages announcing that they must have no organs but ears;
and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments.

It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells
of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made,
as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a
boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat,
as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the
sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two;
the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows;
the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill;
the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these,
with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering
gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory
Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails,
like a wild hen after her screaming brood;--all this was thrilling.
Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into
the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost
encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;--
neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than
that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling
into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.

The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more
and more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun
cloud-shadows flung upon the sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended,
but tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed
separating their wakes. The boats were pulled more apart;
Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward.
Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along;
the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee
oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn
from the row-locks.

Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist;
neither ship nor boat to be seen.

"Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet
of his sail; "there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.
There's white water again!--close to! Spring!"

Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted
that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard,
when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said:
"Stand up!" and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.

Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death
peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense
countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew
that the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous
wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter.
Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist,
the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests
of enraged serpents.

"That's his hump. There, there, give it to him!" whispered Starbuck.

A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron
of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible
push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge;
the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up
near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us.
The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed
helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall.
Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale,
merely grazed by the iron, escaped.

Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed.
Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing
them across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places.
There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering
every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes
the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from
the bottom of the ocean.

The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us
like a white fire upon the prairie, in which unconsumed,
we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death! In vain we
hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down
the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm.
Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker
with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.
The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat.
The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the office
of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof
match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite
the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole,
handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope.
There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart
of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign
and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope
in the midst of despair.

Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat,
we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread
over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat.
Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear.
We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled
by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were
dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into
the sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon
us within a distance of not much more than its length.

Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one
instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip
at the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it,
and it was seen no more till it came up weltering astern.
Again we swam for it, were dashed against it by the seas,
and were at last taken up and safely landed on board.
Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose
from their fish and returned to the ship in good time.
The ship had given us up, but was still cruising,
if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing,--
an oar or a lance pole.

CHAPTER 49

The Hyena

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed
affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast
practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns,
and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing.
He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions,
all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby;
as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints.
And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden
disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself,
seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches
in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.
That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man
only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst
of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him
a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.
There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy
sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this
whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.

"Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck,
and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water;
"Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?"
Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me
to understand that such things did often happen.

"Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; "Mr. Stubb, I
think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met,
our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent.
I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail
set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?"

"Certain. I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale
off Cape Horn."

"Mr. Flask," said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing
close by; "you are experienced in these things, and I am not.
Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery,
Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself
back-foremost into death's jaws?"

"Can't you twist that smaller?" said Flask. "Yes, that's the law.
I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale
face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint
for squint, mind that!"

Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate
statement of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls
and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep,
were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that
at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I
must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat--
oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness
upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings;
considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat
was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale
almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck,
notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery;
considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat;
and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was implicated,
touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say,
I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will.
"Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer,
executor, and legatee."

It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering
at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people
in the world more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth
time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing.
After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion,
I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart.
Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days
that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary
clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case may be.
I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest.
I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet
ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a
snug family vault.

Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction,
and the devil fetch the hindmost.

CHAPTER 50

Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah

"Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb;
"if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat,
unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe.
Oh! he's a wonderful old man!"

"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account,"
said Flask. "If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be
a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee,
and good part of the other left, you know."

"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."

Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether,
considering the paramount importance of his life to the
success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain
to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase.
So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes,
whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into
the thickest of the fight.

But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect.
Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight
in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales
is always under great and extraordinary difficulties;
that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril;
under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter
a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners
of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.

Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think
little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless
vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene
of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab
to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular
headsman in the hunt--above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied
with five extra men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew
that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners
of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat's crew
from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.
Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching
all that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery,
the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when,
after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded
the customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service;
when some time after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring
himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his own hands
for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when
the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow:
when all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude
in having an extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat,
as if to make it better withstand the pointed pressure of his
ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in exactly shaping
the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called,
the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the knee
against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was
observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary
knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat,
and with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here
and straightened it a little there; all these things, I say,
had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time.
But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative
heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate
chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention
to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition
did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat's
crew being assigned to that boat.

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon
waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then
such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from
the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating
outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer
castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks,
bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks,
and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step
down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create
any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.

But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it
were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah
remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly
world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced
himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far
as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows,
but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew.
But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was
such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone
only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom
now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities,
especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent--
those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in
these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness
of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the first
man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,
unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked
of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end;
when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with
the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Robbins,
indulged in mundane amours.

CHAPTER 51

The Spirit-Spout

Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod
had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds;
that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate
(so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata;
and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality,
southerly from St. Helena.

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one
serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like
scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings,
made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a
silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white
bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial;
seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.
Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights,
it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand
a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day.
And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one
whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them.
You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld
this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours;
his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when,
after spending his uniform interval there for several successive
nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence,
his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet,
every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged
spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew.
"There she blows!" Had the trump of judgment blown,
they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror;
rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour,
yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting,
that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded
the t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread.
The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every
mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind.
The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze
filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck
to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along,
as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her--one to mount
direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal.
And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought
that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live
leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb
sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.
But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye,
like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no
more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not
a second time.

This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when,
some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced:
again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it,
once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served
us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it.
Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight,
as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day,
or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct
repetition to be advancing still further and further in our van,
this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.

Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race,
and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed,
which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting
some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried;
at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes
and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one selfsame whale;
and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense
of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were
treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster
might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest
and most savage seas.

These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a
wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather,
in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there
lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along,
through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space,
in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself
of life before our urn-like prow.

But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds
began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long,
troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply
bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till,
like showers of silver chips, the foamflakes flew over her bulwarks;
then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place
to sights more dismal than before.

Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And
every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen;
and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp,
as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft;
a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place
for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly
heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience;
and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long
sin and suffering it had bred.

Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto,
as called of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences
that before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into this
tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls
and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without
any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon.
But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain
of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before,
the solitary jet would at times be descried.

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming
for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and
dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom
than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these,
after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more
can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale.
Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So, with his
ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand
firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand
gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet
or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together.
Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship
by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows,
stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better
to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped
himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which
he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken;
and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax,
day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness
of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity
before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men
swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast.
Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek
that repose in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the old
man's aspect, when one night going down into the cabin to mark
how the barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting
straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted
sleet of the storm from which he had some time before emerged,
still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat.
On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts
of tides and currents which have previously been spoken of.
His lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand.
Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that
the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale
that swung from a beam in the ceiling.*

*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without
going to the compass at the helm, the Captain, while below,
can inform himself of the course of the ship.

Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale,
still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.

CHAPTER 52

The Albatross

South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts,
a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead,
the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh,
from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view
of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries--
a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.

As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached
like the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides,
this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust,
while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches
of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set.
A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three
mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and
bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising.
Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung
over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided
close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each
other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one
ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen,
mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own
look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.

"Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?"

But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks,
was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow
fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain,
he in vain strove to make himself heard without it.
Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between us.
While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing
their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere mention
of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused;
it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat
to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade.
But taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized
his trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was
a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed--"Ahoy there!
This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address
all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years,
if I am not at home, tell them to address them to-"

At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly,
then, in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small
harmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly swimming
by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins,
and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger's flanks.
Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often
before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man,
the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.

"Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep
helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced.
But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship
in the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion
voice,--"Up helm! Keep her off round the world!"

Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire
proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct?
Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started,
where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could
for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange
than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise
in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of,
or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other,
swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe,
they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.

CHAPTER 53

The Gam

The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler
we had spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms.
But even had this not been the case, he would not after all,
perhaps, have boarded her--judging by his subsequent conduct on
similar occasions--if so it had been that, by the process of hailing,
he had obtained a negative answer to the question he put.
For, as it eventually turned out, he cared not to consort,
even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, except he could
contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought.
But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not
something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels
when meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on
a common cruising-ground.

If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State,
or the equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually
encountering each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain,
for the life of them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation;
and stopping for a moment to interchange the news;
and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and resting in concert:
then, how much more natural that upon the illimitable Pine Barrens
and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying
each other at the ends of the earth--off lone Fanning's Island,
or the far away King's Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under
such circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails,
but come into still closer, more friendly and sociable contact.
And especially would this seem to be a matter of course, in the case
of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose captains, officers,
and not a few of the men are personally known to each other;
and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things
to talk about.

For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps,
has letters on board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her
have some papers of a date a year or two later than the last
one on her blurred and thumb-worn files. And in return for
that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive the latest
whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she
may be destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her.
And in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling vessels
crossing each other's track on the cruising-ground itself,
even though they are equally long absent from home. For one
of them may have received a transfer of letters from some third,
and now far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be
for the people of the ship she now meets. Besides, they would
exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable chat.
For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of sailors,
but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from
a common pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.

Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference;
that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case
with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number
of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they
do occur there. is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them;
for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not
fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English
whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority
over the American whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer,
with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But
where this superiority in the English whaleman does really consist,
it would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively,
kill more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years.
But this is a harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which
the Nantucketer does not take much to heart; probably, because he knows
that he has a few foibles himself.

So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea,
the whalers have most reason to be sociable--and they are so.
Whereas, some merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the
mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a single
word of recognition, mutually cutting each other on the high seas,
like a brace of dandies in Broadway; and all the time indulging,
perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other's rig.
As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first
go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings,
such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much
right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all.
As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a
prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible.
And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's
cross-bones, the first hail is--"How many skulls?"--
the same way that whalers hail--"How many barrels?"
And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart,
for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don't like
to see overmuch of each other's villanous likenesses.

But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets
another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a "Gam,"
a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never
heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it,
they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about "spouters"
and "blubber-boilers," and such like pretty exclamations.
Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and
Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful
feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard
to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know
whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it.
It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows.
And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has
no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude,
that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman,
in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.

But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running
up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word,
Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's
ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word
has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen
thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition,
and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view,
let me learnedly define it.

GAM. NOUN--A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on
a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange
visits by boats' crews, the two captains remaining, for the time,
on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.

There is another little item about Gamming which must not
be forgotten here. All professions have their own little
peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery. In a pirate,
man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed anywhere
in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a comfortable,
sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty
little milliner's tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons.
But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever,
and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled
about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs.
And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy;
and therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew must leave the ship,
and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number,
that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain,
having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing
like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being conscious
of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from
the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive
to the importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs.
Nor is this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense
projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of
his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front.
He is thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only
expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs;
but a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him,
because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth.
Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up.
Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes,
it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen
steadying himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything
with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command,
he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being
generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast.
Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too,
where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or two,
in a sudden squall say--to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's hair,
and hold on there like grim death.

CHAPTER 54

The Town-Ho's Story

(As told at the Golden Inn)

The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there,
is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you
meet more travellers than in any other part.

It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another
homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered.
She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that
ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general
interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance
of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale
a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called
judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men.
This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments,
forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to
be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates.
For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain
of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three
confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems,
communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy,
but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed
so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not
well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did
this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full
knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so,
were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among
themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast.
Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story
as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair
I now proceed to put on lasting record.

*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.

For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated
it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,
smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those
fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer
terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put,
and which are duly answered at the time.

"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward from
the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of
the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps according to daily usage,
it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common.
They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain,
having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited
him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them,
and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed,
they could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was
possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings,
the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good
luck came; more days went by and not only was the leak yet undiscovered,
but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm,
the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among
the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.

"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest
chance favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder
by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically
relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily
keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her.
In truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very
prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect
safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality,
had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate,
a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt,
a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.

"'Lakeman!--Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'
said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.

"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave
your courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that.
Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships,
well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your
old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart
of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian
freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean.
For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas
of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--
possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's
noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and
of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,
even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two
great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long
maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East,
dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon
by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw;
they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals,
they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted
faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues
are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt
pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies;
those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken
creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors;
they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as
Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship,
the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe;
they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful
as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,
for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned
full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.
Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born,
and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.
And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him
down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea;
though in after life he had long followed our austere
Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite
as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman,
fresh from the latitudes of buckhorn handled Bowie-knives. Yet
was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits;
and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed,
might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common
decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave's right;
thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile.
At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed
and made mad, and Steelkilt--but, gentlemen, you shall hear.

"It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow
for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again increasing,
but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day.
You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic,
for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole way
across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck
happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability would be that
he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of all
hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage
seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual
for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even
for a voyage of considerable length! that is, if it lie along a tolerably
accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them.
It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part
of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins
to feel a little anxious.

"Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak
was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern
manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney the mate.
He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew,
and every way expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose,
was as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort
of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own person as any fearless,
unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently
imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this imagine,
solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared
that it was only on account of his being a part owner in her.
So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on this
head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood
with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water;
clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen--that bubbling from the pumps
ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at
the lee scupper-holes.

"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this
conventional world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person
placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be
very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood,
straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike
and bitterness; and if he had a chance he will pull down and pulverize
that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.
Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all events
Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman,
and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your
last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart,
and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne,
had he been born son to Charlemagne's father. But Radney, the mate,
was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious.
He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.

"Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump
with the rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed,
went on with his gay banterings.

"'Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin,
one of ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth bottling!
I tell ye what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it!
he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home.
The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he's come
back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish,
and what not; and the whole posse of 'em are now hard at work
cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose.
If old Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump overboard and scatter 'em.
They're playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him.
But he's a simple old soul,--Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say
the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder
if he'd give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.'

"'Damn your eyes! what's that pump stopping for?' roared Radney,
pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk. 'Thunder away at it!'

'Aye, aye, sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket.
'Lively, boys, lively, now!' And with that the pump clanged
like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it,
and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard
which denotes the fullest tension of life's utmost energies.

"Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman
went forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass;
his face fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat
from his brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed
Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state,
I know not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck,
the mate commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks,
and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon
allowing a pig to run at large.

"Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of household
work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended
to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships
actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility
of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen;
some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces.
But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province
of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger
men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns
at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all,
Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs;
consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business
not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case
with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you
may understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men.

"But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost
as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney
had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship
will understand this; and all this and doubtless much more,
the Lakeman fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command.
But as he sat still for a moment, and as he steadfastly
looked into the mate's malignant eye and perceived the stacks
of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match silently
burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this,
that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper
passionateness in any already ireful being--a repugnance most felt,
when felt at all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved--
this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.

"Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that
sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would not do it.
And then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed
to three lads, as the customary sweepers; who, not being
billeted at the pumps, had done little or nothing all day.
To this, Radney replied, with an oath, in a most domineering
and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his command;
meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted
cooper's club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by.

"Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps,
for all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating
Steelkilt could but ill brook this bearing in the mate;
but somehow still smothering the conflagration within him,
without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to his seat,
till at last the incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few
inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do his bidding.

"Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass,
steadily followed by the mate with his menacing hammer,
deliberately repeated his intention not to obey. Seeing, however,
that his forbearance had not the slightest effect, by an awful
and unspeakable intimation with his twisted hand he warned off
the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to no purpose.
And in this way the two went once slowly round the windlass;
when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him
that he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor,
the Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:

"'Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look
to yourself.' But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him,
where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch
of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye
with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his
right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his persecutor
that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would murder him.
But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods.
Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower
jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting
blood like a whale.

"Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing
their mastheads. They were both Canallers.

"'Canallers!' cried Don Pedro. 'We have seen many whaleships
in our harbors, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and
what are they?'

Back to Full Books

Moby Dick; or The WhalebyHerman Melville

Part 5 out of 12

Moby Dick; or The Whale
by
Herman Melville