Public Domain Tales: Moby-Dick: Book Two

**Public Domain Tales: Moby-Dick: Book Two** is the fortieth book in the Public Domain Tales series.

29. Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb
Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the
bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal
August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant
days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.
The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in
lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For
sleeping man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights.
But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies
to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours
of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless
twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught
that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their
berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed
so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than
from, the cabin to the planks. “It feels like going down into one’s tomb,”—he would mutter
to himself,—“for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my
grave-dug berth.”
So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on
deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon
the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness
dropt it to its place, for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady
quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin�scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge, griping at the iron banister, to help his
crippled way. Some considerating touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he
usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates, seeking
repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and
din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks. But
once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like
pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the odd second mate, came
up from below, and with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if
Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might be
some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe
of tow, and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou did’st not know Ahab then.
“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that fashion? But go thy
ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to
use ye to the filling one at last.—Down, dog, and kennel!”
Starting at the unforeseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb
was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I
do but less than half like it, sir.”
“Avast!” gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some
passionate temptation.
“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a dog, sir.”
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“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I’ll clear the
world of thee!”
As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that
Stubb involuntarily retreated.
“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” muttered Stubb, as he found
himself descending the cabin-scuttle. “It’s very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t
well know whether to go back and strike him, or—what’s that?—down here on my knees and
pray for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time I
ever did pray. It’s queer; very queer; and he’s queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he’s
about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!—his eyes like
powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway there’s something on his mind, as sure as there must be
something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out
of the twenty-four; and he don’t sleep then. Didn’t that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that
of a morning he always finds the old man’s hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and
the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of
frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I guess he’s got what
some folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse nor a
toothache. Well, well; I don’t know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He’s
full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells
me he suspects; what’s that for, I should like to know? Who’s made appointments with him
in the hold? Ain’t that queer, now? But there’s no telling, it’s the old game—Here goes for a
snooze. Damn me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall right
asleep. And now that I think of it, that’s about the first thing babies do, and that’s a sort of
queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em. But that’s against my
principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my
twelfth—So here goes again. But how’s that? didn’t he call me a dog? blazes! he called me
ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that! He might as well have kicked
me, and done with it. Maybe he did kick me, and I didn’t observe it, I was so taken all aback
with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil’s the matter with
me? I don’t stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me
wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though—How? how? how?—but
the only way’s to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I’ll see how
this plaguey juggling thinks over by day-light.”
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30. The Pipe
When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had
been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory
stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the
weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.
In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition,
of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of
bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a
king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in quick and
constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How” now, he soliloquized at last,
withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me
if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring,—aye, and
ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as
if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business
have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors
among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I’ll smoke no more—”
He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the
ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the
planks.
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31. Queen Mab
Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
“Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man’s ivory leg, well I
dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I
kicked my leg right off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool,
kept kicking at it. But what was still more curious, Flask—you know how curious all dreams
are—through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after
all, it was not much of an insult, that kick from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the row? It’s
not a real leg, only a false leg.’ And there’s a mighty difference between a living thump and a
dead thump. That’s what makes a blow from the hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear
than a blow from a cane. The living member—that makes the living insult, my little man.
And thinks I to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that
cursed pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I say, I was thinking
to myself, ‘what’s his leg now, but a cane—a whalebone cane. Yes,’ thinks I, ‘it was only a
playful cudgelling—in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me—not a base kick. Besides,’
thinks I, ‘look at it once; why, the end of it—the foot part—what a small sort of end it is;
whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me, there’s a devilish broad insult. But this insult is
whittled down to a point only.’ But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I
was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his
back, takes me by the shoulders, and slews me round. ‘What are you ’bout?’ says he. Slid!
man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over the fright.
‘What am I about?’ says I at last. ‘And what business is that of yours, I should like to know,
Mr. Humpback? Do you want a kick?’ By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he
turned round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a clout—
what do you think, I saw?—why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck full of marlinspikes,
with the points out. Says I, on second thoughts, ‘I guess I won’t kick you, old fellow.’ ‘Wise
Stubb,’ said he, ‘wise Stubb;’ and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own
gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn’t going to stop saying over his ‘wise Stubb, wise
Stubb,’ I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted
my foot for it, when he roared out, ‘Stop that kicking!’ ‘Halloa,’ says I, ‘what’s the matter
now, old fellow?’ ‘Look ye here,’ says he; ‘let’s argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye,
didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I—‘right here it was.’ ‘Very good,’ says he—‘he used his
ivory leg, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I. ‘Well then,’ says he, ‘wise Stubb, what have you
to complain of? Didn’t he kick with right good will? it wasn’t a common pitch pine leg he
kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg,
Stubb. It’s an honor; I consider it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest
lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but,
be your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember
what I say; be kicked by him; account his kicks honors; and on no account kick back; for you
can’t help yourself, wise Stubb. Don’t you see that pyramid?’ With that, he all of a sudden
seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over; and
there I was in my hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?”
“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho’.”
“May be, may be. But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask. D’ye see Ahab standing there,
sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing you can do, Flask, is to let that old man
alone; never speak to him, whatever he says. Halloa! what’s that he shouts? Hark!”
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“Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts! If ye see a white one,
split your lungs for him!”
“What d’ye think of that now, Flask? ain’t there a small drop of something queer about that,
eh? A white whale—did ye mark that, man? Look ye—there’s something special in the wind.
Stand by for it, Flask. Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this
way.”
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32. Cetology
Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored,
harborless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side
with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter
almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic
revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.
It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put
before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing
less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.
“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology,” says Captain
Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
“It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of
dividing the cetacea into groups and families. \* \* \* Utter confusion exists among the
historians of this animal” (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
“Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.” Impenetrable veil covering
our knowledge of the cetacea. “A field strewn with thorns.” “All these incomplete indications
but serve to torture us naturalists.”
Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of
zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books
there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales.
Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or
in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny;
Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnæus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green;
Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacépède; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick
Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of
Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate generalizing
purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show.
Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen ever saw living whales;
and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain
Scoresby. On the separate subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing
authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared
with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that the
Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the
largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the profound
ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the then fabulous and utterly
unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some
few scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete.
Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days, will satisfy
you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But the
time has at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people
all,—the Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm whale now reigneth!
There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale before
you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are
Beale’s and Bennett’s; both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and
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both exact and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in
their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though
mostly confined to scientific description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or
poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an
unwritten life.
Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if
only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by
subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer
my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to
be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute
anatomical description of the various species, or—in this place at least—to much of any
description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I
am the architect, not the builder.
But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-office is equal to it. To grope
down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable
foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should
essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me.
“Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain!” But I
have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with
these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle.
First: the uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule
attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a
fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales
from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and
shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were still found dividing the
possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.
The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he
states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable
eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex
lege naturæ jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the
opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they
were humbug.
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale
is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental thing settled, the next point
is, in what internal respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnæus has given
you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish
are lungless and cold blooded.
Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label
him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal
tail. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded
meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is
amphibious. But the last term of the definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first.
Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a
vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be
similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position.
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By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic
brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the whale by the best informed
Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as
alien0F
1
. Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this
ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire whale host.
First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible
into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large.
I. The FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the OCTAVO, the Grampus; of the
DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.
FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The Sperm Whale; II.
the Right Whale; III. the Fin Back Whale; IV. the Hump-backed Whale; V. the Razor Back
Whale; VI. the Sulphur Bottom Whale.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER I. (Sperm Whale).—This whale, among the English of old
vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is
the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottfisch of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus
of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most
formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most
valuable in commerce; he being the only creature from which that valuable substance,
spermaceti, is obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon. It is
chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some
centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in his own proper
individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those
days spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a creature
identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland or Right Whale. It was the
idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale
which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment and medicament. It was
only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I
opine, in the course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name
was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely
significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon
the whale from which this spermaceti was really derived.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER II. (Right Whale).—In one respect this is the most venerable of
the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man. It yields the article commonly
known as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as “whale oil,” an inferior article
in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the following
titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale;
the Right Whale. There is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus
multitudinously baptized. What then is the whale, which I include in the second species of
my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the
English Whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of
1 I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the
Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a nosy,
contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not
spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of
Cetology.
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the Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the
Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen have long
pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’ West Coast, and various other
parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and the right
whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet
been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by
endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of
natural history become so repellingly intricate. The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at
some length, with reference to elucidating the sperm whale.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER III. (Fin-Back).—Under this head I reckon a monster which, by
the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea
and is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the
Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin�back resembles the right whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter color, approaching
to olive. His great lips present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds
of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which he derives his name,
is often a conspicuous object. This fin is some three or four feet long, growing vertically from
the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if
not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen
plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked
with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the
wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat
resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the
shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some
men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in
the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall
misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in
swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and
unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From having
the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a
theoretic species denominated Whalebone whales, that is, whales with baleen. Of these so
called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however,
are little known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched
whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen’s names for a few sorts.
In connexion with this appellative of “Whalebone whales,” it is of great importance to
mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient in facilitating allusions to
some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan,
founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those marked
parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system of
Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents.
How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are
indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard to what may be the
nature of their structure in other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and
the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same
humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen; but there again the
similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other parts above mentioned. In various
sorts of whales, they form such irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of them
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detached, such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon
such a basis. On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has split.
But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in his anatomy—
there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is
there in the Greenland whale’s anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that
by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And if you descend
into the bowels of the various leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth
part as available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated. What then
remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and
boldly sort them that way. And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the
only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.
Book I. (Folio), CHAPTER IV. (Hump Back).—this whale is often seen on the northern
American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed into harbor. He has a great
pack on him like a peddler; or you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate,
the popular name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also
has a hump, though a smaller one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most
gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water
generally than any other of them.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER V. (Razor Back).—Of this whale little is known but his name. I
have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and
philosophers. Though no coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which
rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER VI. (Sulphur Bottom).—Another retiring gentleman, with a
brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder
divings. He is seldom seen; at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern
seas, and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never chased; he
would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I
can say nothing more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins BOOK II. (Octavo).
OCTAVOES.1F
2

```
These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which at present

```

may be numbered:—I., the Grampus; II., the Black Fish; III., the Narwhale; IV.,
the Thrasher; V., the Killer.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER I. (Grampus).—Though this fish, whose loud sonorous
breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen
of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand
distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one. He is of
moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet in length, and of corresponding
dimensions round the waist. He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is
considerable in quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is
regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER II. (Black Fish).—I give the popular fishermen’s names for
all these fish, for generally they are the best. Where any name happens to be vague or
2 Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, while the whales of this order,
though smaller than those of the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet
the bookbinder’s Quarto volume in its diminished form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the
Octavo volume does.
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inexpressive, I shall say so, and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so
called, because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena Whale,
if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of
his lips are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This
whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost all latitudes. He
has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin in swimming, which looks something
like a Roman nose. When not more profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes
capture the Hyena whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment—as
some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by themselves, burn
unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their blubber is very thin, some of these
whales will yield you upwards of thirty gallons of oil.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER III. (Narwhale), that is, Nostril whale.—Another instance of
a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar horn being originally
mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn
averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking,
this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed from
the horizontal. But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its
owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise purpose
this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used like the
blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs
it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for
an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted
with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these
surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may really be
used by the Narwhale—however that may be—it would certainly be very convenient to him
for a folder in reading pamphlets. The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the
Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism
to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain cloistered old authors I
have gathered that this same sea-unicorn’s horn was in ancient days regarded as the great
antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also
distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the male deer are
manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity.
Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen
Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his
bold ship sailed down the Thames; “when Sir Martin returned from that voyage,” saith Black
Letter, “on bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the
Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor.” An Irish author avers
that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn,
pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature.
The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a milk-white ground color,
dotted with round and oblong spots of black. His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there
is little of it, and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER IV. (Killer).—Of this whale little is precisely known to the
Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a
distance, I should say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage—a sort
of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs there like a
leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what
sort of oil he has. Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the
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ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks
included.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER V. (Thrasher).—This gentleman is famous for his tail, which
he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts the Folio whale’s back, and as he swims,
he works his passage by flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a
similar process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are outlaws, even
in the lawless seas.
Thus ends BOOK II. (Octavo), and begins BOOK III. (Duodecimo).
DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise. II. The
Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may possibly seem strange,
that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five feet should be marshalled among
WHALES—a word, which, in the popular sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But
the creatures set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my
definition of what a whale is—i. e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER I (Huzza Porpoise).—This is the common porpoise
found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own bestowal; for there are more than
one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them. I call them thus,
because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing
themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their appearance is generally
hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy
billows to windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted
a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish,
then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza
Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid extracted
from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among jewellers and watchmakers.
Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It may never have
occurred to you that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very readily
discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and you will then see the great
Sperm whale himself in miniature.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER II. (Algerine Porpoise).—A pirate. Very savage. He is
only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much
of the same general make. Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him
many times, but never yet saw him captured.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER III. (Mealy-mouthed Porpoise). The largest kind of
Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is known. The only English name, by
which he has hitherto been designated, is that of the fishers—Right-Whale Porpoise, from the
circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs in some
degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a
neat and gentleman-like figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he
has a lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all.
Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as
the mark in a ship’s hull, called the “bright waist,” that line streaks him from stem to stern,
with two separate colors, black above and white below. The white comprises part of his head,
and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just escaped from a felonious
visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common
porpoise.
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Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the
smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of
uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by
reputation, but not personally.
I shall enumerate them by their forecastle appellations; for possibly such a list may be
valuable to future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If any of the
following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated
into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:—The Bottle�Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading
Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the
Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old
English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all
manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help
suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.
Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected.
You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System
standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still
standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their
first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me
from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a
draught. Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
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33. The Specksnyder
Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a
little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of
officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.
The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by the fact, that
originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale
ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided between
him and an officer called the Specksnyder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage,
however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In those days, the captain’s
authority was restricted to the navigation and general management of the vessel: while over
the whale-hunting department and all its concerns, the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer
reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer,
this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he
ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain’s more inferior
subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the success of a
whaling voyage largely depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only an
important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling
ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the
sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in
some way distinguished as their professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly
regarded as their social equal.
Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this—the first lives aft,
the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters
with the captain; and so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in
the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the captain’s cabin, and sleep
in a place indirectly communicating with it.
Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of all voyages now
or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the community of interest prevailing
among a company, all of whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages,
but upon their common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard
work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in
merchantmen generally; yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these
whalemen may, in some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious
externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done
away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see the skipper parading his
quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting
almost as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of
pilot-cloth.
And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to that sort of
shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he ever exacted, was implicit,
instantaneous obedience; though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere
stepping upon the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar
circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual
terms, whether of condescension or in terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by
no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.
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Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it
were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more
private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his
brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms
that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man’s
intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy
over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in
themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of
the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to
those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden
handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of
the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions
invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.
But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire
encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous
centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its
fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the
one now alluded to.
But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess;
and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do
with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and
housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at
from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!
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34. The Cabin-Table
It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face from the cabin�scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just
been taking an observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the
smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part of his
ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had
not heard his menial. But presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to
the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr. Starbuck,” disappears into
the cabin.
When the last echo of his sultan’s step has died away, and Starbuck, the first Emir, has every
reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns
along the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of
pleasantness, “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and descends the scuttle. The second Emir lounges about
the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see whether it be all right
with that important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid “Dinner, Mr.
Flask,” follows after his predecessors.
But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to feel relieved
from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions,
and kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over
the Grand Turk’s head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop
for a shelf, he goes down rollicking, so far at least as he remains visible from the deck,
reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into the
cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and, then, independent,
hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of sea-usages,
that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves
boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those very officers
the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that same commander’s cabin, and
straightway their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at
the head of the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference?
A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been
Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of
mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own
private dinner-table of invited guests, that man’s unchallenged power and dominion of
individual influence for the time; that man’s royalty of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for
Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to
be Cæsar. It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now, if to this
consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a ship-master, then, by inference, you
will derive the cause of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the white coral
beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each
officer waited to be served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there
seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened
upon the old man’s knife, as he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the
world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even upon so
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neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his knife and fork, between which
the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck’s plate towards him, the mate
received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if,
perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not
without circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German
Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were
somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab forbade not
conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat
made a sudden racket in the hold below. And poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and
little boy of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would
have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this must have seemed
to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had he helped himself at that table,
doubtless, never more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world;
nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself, the
chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did Flask presume to help
himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of
its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in
such marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern;
however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!
Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask is the first man up.
Consider! For hereby Flask’s dinner was badly jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb
both had the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb
even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and soon
shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get
more than three mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to
the deck. Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to
the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise
than hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it
immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from my
stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the
forecastle, as I used to when I was before the mast. There’s the fruits of promotion now;
there’s the vanity of glory: there’s the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any mere
sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask’s official capacity, all that sailor had
to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at
Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.
Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table in the Pequod’s
cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth
was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the
three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees. They made a
sort of temporary servants’ hall of the high and mighty cabin.
In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless invisible domineerings of
the captain’s table, was the entire care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of
those inferior fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the
sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food with such a relish
that there was a report to it. They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all
day loading with spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill
out the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on
a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not lively
about it, if he did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an
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ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoonwise. And once
Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy’s memory by snatching him up
bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in
hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very
nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt
baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab,
and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy’s whole life was
one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things
they demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and
fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was over.
It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing his filed teeth to the
Indian’s: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought his
hearse-plumed head to the low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low
cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a ship. But for all
this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible
that by such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so
broad, baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank
deep of the abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime
life of the worlds. Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he
had a mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating—an ugly sound enough—so much so, that
the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own
lean arms. And when he would hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his
bones might be picked, the simple-witted Steward all but shattered the crockery hanging
round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the
harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their lances and other weapons; and with which
whetstones, at dinner, they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did
not at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his Island days,
Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some murderous, convivial
indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a
napkin should he carry on his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight,
the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all
their martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.
But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived there; still, being
anything but sedentary in their habits, they were scarcely ever in it except at meal-times, and
just before sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains, who, as a
set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship’s cabin belongs to them; and that it is
by courtesy alone that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the
mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to have lived out of the
cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a house;
turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing,
residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no companionship;
socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom,
he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled
Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods,
burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so,
in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there
fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!
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35. The Mast-Head
It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen my first
mast-head came round.
In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the
vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail
ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage she
is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her—say, an empty vial even—then, her mast�heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the
port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very ancient and
interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take it, that the earliest standers of
mast-heads were the old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.
For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have
intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was
put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread
gale of God’s wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the
Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based
upon the general belief among archæologists, that the first pyramids were founded for
astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like formation of
all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those
old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look�outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the
famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent
the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a
tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was
not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing
everything out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we
have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing
out a stiff gale, are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering
any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Vendome, stands
with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the
decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington,
too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’
pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go.
Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square;
and ever when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is
there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon,
nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by
their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that
their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what
rocks must be shunned.
It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers of the land with
those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed
Macy, the sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us, that in
the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game,
the people of that island erected lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs
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ascended by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few
years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon
descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this custom
has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at
sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their
regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather
of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is
delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as
if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim
the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous
Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing
ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow;
everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime
uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts
of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic
afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you
shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks,
and your bill of fare is immutable.
In one of those southern whalemen, on a long three or four years’ voyage, as often happens,
the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire
months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a
portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything
approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling,
such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of
those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most
usual point of perch is the head of the t’ gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel
sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t’ gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by
the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull’s horns. To be sure, in
cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but
properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as
the soul is glued inside of its fleshly tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even
move out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the
snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or
additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no
more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.
Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are
unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow’s-nests, in which the
lookouts of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas.
In the fire-side narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled “A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of
the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of
Old Greenland;” in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a
charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crow’s-nest of the Glacier,
which was the name of Captain Sleet’s good craft. He called it the Sleet’s crow’s-nest, in
honor of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous
false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers
being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves
any other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet’s crow’s-nest is something like a large
tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with a movable side-screen to
keep to windward of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you
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ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern
of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and
coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and
other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow’s
nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together
with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant
sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from the deck
owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing.
Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little
detailed conveniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and
though he treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a
small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is
called the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal
vicinity of the iron in the ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s case, perhaps, to there having
been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is
very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned “binnacle deviations,” “azimuth
compass observations,” and “approximate errors,” he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he
was not so much immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted
occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of
his crow’s nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and
even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he
should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must
have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics
aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches of the pole.
But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his
Greenland-men were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counterbalanced by the widely
contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I
used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg,
or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and
throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and
so at last mount to my ultimate destination.
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the
problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at
such a thought-engendering altitude,—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe
all whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”
And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of
enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to
unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phædon instead of Bowditch in
his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed;
and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never
make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For
nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and
absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment
in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of
some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:—
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
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Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to
task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that
they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would
rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion
that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve?
They have left their opera-glasses at home.
“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard
upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth
whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of
them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious
reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at
last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep,
blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding,
beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible
form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by
continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it
came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes,
forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by
her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this
sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your
identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day,
in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into
the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
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36. The Quarter-Deck
(enter Ahab: Then, all.)
It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly after breakfast,
Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains
usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the
garden.
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so
familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar
mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also,
you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing
thought.
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous step that
morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn
that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that
thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him,
indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement.
“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks the shell. ’Twill
soon be out.”
The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the deck, with the
same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his
bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck
to send everybody aft.
“Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on ship-board except in
some extraordinary case.
“Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mast-heads, there! come down!”
When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly
unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a
storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes
among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed
his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace,
unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to
Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian
feat. But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:—
“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into
which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
“And what do ye next, men?”
“Lower away, and after him!”
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“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
“A dead whale or a stove boat!”
More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old
man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling
how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one
hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them
thus:—
“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye!
d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a
sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.”
While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly rubbing the
gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any
words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled
and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer
uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice
exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a
crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured
in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall
have this gold ounce, my boys!”
“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing
the gold to the mast.
“It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the top-maul; “a white whale.
Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.”
All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more intense
interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw
they had started as if each was separately touched by some specific recollection.
“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that some call Moby
Dick.”
“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”
“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the Gay-Header
deliberately.
“And has he a curious spout,” too, said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and
mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”
“And he have one, two, tree—oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,” cried Queequeg
disjointedly, “all twiske-tee betwisk, like him—him—” faltering hard for a word, and
screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle—“like him—him—”
“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him;
aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our
Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a
split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—
Moby Dick!”
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“Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his
superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat
explained all the wonder. “Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby
Dick that took off thy leg?”
“Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round;
it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand
on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken
moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging
lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he
shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the horn, and round
the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what
ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides
of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on
it, now? I think ye do look brave.”
“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: “A
sharp eye for the White Whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”
“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw
the great measure of grog. But what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase
the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?”
“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly
comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my
commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou
gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
“Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer. If
money’s to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting�house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me
tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!”
“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for? methinks it rings most vast, but
hollow.”
“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct!
Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
“Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard
masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but
still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning
mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except
by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.
Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in
him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is
chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will
wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted
me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play
herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play.
Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’
glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to
anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are
men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go.
Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the
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sun. The Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and
give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all
with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts
to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And
what is it? Reckon it. ’Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it
more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not
hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize
thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices
thee. (aside) something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck
now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.”
“God keep me!—keep us all!” murmured Starbuck, lowly.
But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did not hear his
foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations
of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a
moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck’s downcast eyes lighted up with the
stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out;
the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not
when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much
predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little
external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on.
“The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab.
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered them to produce
their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the capstan, with their harpoons in their
hands, while his three mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship’s
company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every
man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves
meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas!
only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
“Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest seaman. “The
crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short draughts—long swallows, men; ’tis hot as
Satan’s hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent�snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me—
here’s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward,
refill!
“Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye mates, flank me
with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring
me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O
men, you will yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand it me.
Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer’t not thou St. Vitus’ imp—away, thou
ague!
“Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch the axis.” So
saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre;
while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from
Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior
volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within
the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained,
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and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck
fell downright.
“In vain!” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ’tis well. For did ye three but once take the full-forced
shock, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it
would have dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I
do appoint ye three cup-bearers to my three pagan kinsmen there—yon three most honorable
gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the great
Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own
condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and
draw the poles, ye harpooneers!”
Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached iron part of
their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him.
“Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not the goblet end?
Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance. The irons! take them; hold them
while I fill!” Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon
sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are
now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon
ratifying sun now waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that
man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt
Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and
maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a
hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished
pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all
dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
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37. Sunset
The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious
billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow
plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon,—goes down; my soul mounts up!
she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? This Iron Crown
of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but
darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ’Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ’Tis
split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid
metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset
soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I
can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned,
most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good
night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)
’Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged
circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant�hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the
match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll
do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That
wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be
dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my
dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great
gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and
blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as school-boys do to bullies,—Take some one of your own
size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and
hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come,
Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve
me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose
is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through
the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle,
naught’s an angle to the iron way!
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38. Dusk
By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it.
My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that
sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my
reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill
I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible
old man! Who’s over him, he cries;—aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he
lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse
yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had
I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world
to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God
may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my
heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
[A burst of revelry from the forecastle.]
Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them!
Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the
infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures
life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but
only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the
dead water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills
me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! ’tis in an hour like this, with soul
beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild, untutored things are forced to feed—Oh, life!
’tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but ’tis not me! that horror’s out of me! and
with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures!
Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!
125
39. First Night-Watch: Fore-Top
(Stubb solus, and mending a brace.)
Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been thinking over it ever since, and that ha, ha’s
the final consequence. Why so? Because a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s
queer; and come what will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all
predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor eye Starbuck then looked
something as I the other evening felt. Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it,
knew it; had had the gift, might readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my eye upon
his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb—that’s my title—well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb?
Here’s a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it
laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra,
skirra! What’s my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes out?—Giving a party
to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate’s pennant, and so am I—fa, la!
lirra, skirra! Oh—
We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light,

```
To love, as gay and fleeting

```

As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,

```
And break on the lips while meeting.

```

A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—(Aside) he’s my superior, he
has his too, if I’m not mistaken.—Aye, aye, sir, just through with this job—coming.
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40. Midnight, Forecastle
HARPOONERS AND SAILORS.
(Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and lying in various
attitudes, all singing in chorus.)
Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!

```
Our captain’s commanded.—

```

1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR.
Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!
(Sings, and all follow.)
Our captain stood upon the deck,

```
A spy-glass in his hand,

```

A viewing of those gallant whales

```
That blew at every strand.

```

Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,

```
And by your braces stand,

```

And we’ll have one of those fine whales,

```
Hand, boys, over hand!

```

So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!
MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK.
Eight bells there, forward!
2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR.
Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d’ye hear, bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou
blackling! and let me call the watch. I’ve the sort of mouth for that—the hogshead mouth. So,
so, (thrusts his head down the scuttle,) Star—bo—l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells there below!
Tumble up!
DUTCH SAILOR.
Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark this in our old Mogul’s wine; it’s
quite as deadening to some as filliping to others. We sing; they sleep—aye, lie down there,
like ground-tier butts. At ’em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail ’em through it.
Tell ’em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell ’em it’s the resurrection; they must kiss their
last, and come to judgment. That’s the way—that’s it; thy throat ain’t spoiled with eating
Amsterdam butter.
FRENCH SAILOR.
Hist, boys! let’s have a jig or two before we ride to anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye?
There comes the other watch. Stand by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!
PIP.
(Sulky and sleepy.)
Don’t know where it is.
FRENCH SAILOR.
Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; merry’s the word; hurrah! Damn me,
127
won’t you dance? Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw
yourselves! Legs! Legs!
ICELAND SAILOR.
I don’t like your floor, maty; it’s too springy to my taste. I’m used to ice-floors. I’m sorry to
throw cold water on the subject; but excuse me.
MALTESE SAILOR.
Me too; where’s your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right, and say to
himself, how d’ye do? Partners! I must have partners!
SICILIAN SAILOR.
Aye; girls and a green!—then I’ll hop with ye; yea, turn grasshopper!
LONG-ISLAND SAILOR.
Well, well, ye sulkies, there’s plenty more of us. Hoe corn when you may, I say. All legs go
to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the music; now for it!
AZORE SAILOR.
(Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the scuttle.)
Here you are, Pip; and there’s the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now, boys!
(The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some sleep or lie among the coils
of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.)
AZORE SAILOR.
(Dancing.)
Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy; Make fire-flies; break the
jinglers!
PIP.
Jinglers, you say?—there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.
CHINA SAILOR.
Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.
FRENCH SAILOR.
Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! split jibs! tear yourselves!
TASHTEGO.
(Quietly smoking.)
That’s a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat.
OLD MANX SAILOR.
I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I’ll dance over
your grave, I will—that’s the bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds
round corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well, well;
belike the whole world’s a ball, as you scholars have it; and so ’tis right to make one
ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you’re young; I was once.
3D NANTUCKET SAILOR.
Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm—give us a whiff, Tash.
(They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky darkens—the wind rises.)
LASCAR SAILOR.
By Brahma! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high-tide Ganges turned to wind!
Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
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MALTESE SAILOR.
(Reclining and shaking his cap.)
It’s the waves—the snow’s caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake their tassels soon. Now
would all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with them evermore!
There’s naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!—as those swift glances of
warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting
grapes.
SICILIAN SAILOR.
(Reclining.)
Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet interlacings of the limbs—lithe swayings—coyings—
flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come
satiety. Eh, Pagan? (Nudging.)
TAHITAN SAILOR.
(Reclining on a mat.)
Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed
Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my
mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me!—not thou
nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring
streams from Pirohitee’s peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the
villages?—The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (Leaps to his feet.)
PORTUGUESE SAILOR.
How the sea rolls swashing ’gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just
crossing swords, pell-mell they’ll go lunging presently.
DANISH SAILOR.
Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! Well done! The mate there
holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the
Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR.
He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall,
something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol—fire your ship right into it!
ENGLISH SAILOR.
Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt him up his whale!
ALL.
Aye! aye!
OLD MANX SAILOR.
How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when shifted to any other
soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the
sort of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has
his birth-mark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in the sky—lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch
black.
DAGGOO.
What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me! I’m quarried out of it!
SPANISH SAILOR.
(Aside.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes me touchy. (Advancing.) Aye,
harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish dark at that. No
offence.
129
DAGGOO (grimly).
None.
ST. JAGO’S SAILOR.
That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t be, or else in his one case our old Mogul’s fire�waters are somewhat long in working.
5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR.
What’s that I saw—lightning? Yes.
SPANISH SAILOR.
No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
DAGGOO (springing).
Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
SPANISH SAILOR (meeting him).
Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!
ALL.
A row! a row! a row!
TASHTEGO (with a whiff).
A row a’low, and a row aloft—Gods and men—both brawlers! Humph!
BELFAST SAILOR.
A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge in with ye!
ENGLISH SAILOR.
Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife! A ring, a ring!
OLD MANX SAILOR.
Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right
work! No? Why then, God, mad’st thou the ring?
MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK.
Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!
ALL.
The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (They scatter.)
PIP (shrinking under the windlass).
Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God!
Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the
last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing,
and here I don’t. Fine prospects to ’em; they’re on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini,
what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet—they are your white squalls, they. White
squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white
whale—shirr! shirr!—but spoken of once! and only this evening—it makes me jingle all over
like my tambourine—that anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big
white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down
here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!
130
41. Moby Dick
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been
welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath,
because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s
quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous
monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had
haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all
of them knew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him;
while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small
indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were
sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their
quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a
stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each
separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other
circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide
whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to
be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on
such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which
whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some
minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no
other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various
and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked;
therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such
hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more,
as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause. In
that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been
popularly regarded.
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught sight of him;
in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly
lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did
ensue in these assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and ancles, broken limbs, or
devouring amputations—but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous
repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far
to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had
eventually come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the true histories
of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very
body of all surprising terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in
maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any
adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the
whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and
fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a
body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all
sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is
appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but,
131
hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a
thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled
hearthstone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes,
pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to
make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the widest watery
spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves
all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed fœtal suggestions of supernatural agencies,
which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that
visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by
those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to
encounter the perils of his jaw.
But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Not even at the present
day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other
species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those
this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to the
Greenland or Right whale, would perhaps—either from professional inexperience, or
incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are
plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the American
flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of
the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on
their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fire-side interest and awe, to the wild,
strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm
Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem
him.
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary times thrown its shadow
before it; we find some book naturalists—Olassen and Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale
not only to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly
ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor even down to so late a time as
Cuvier’s, were these or almost similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the
Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are “struck
with the most lively terrors,” and “often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves
against the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death.” And however the
general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full
terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in
some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen
recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was
oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new
and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully
pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for
mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this
head, there are some remarkable documents that may be consulted.
Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase
to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and
vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious
accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.
132
One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale
in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was
ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same
instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint
show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet
been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale
when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time
to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them,
especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he
transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed
upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far
north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the
Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared
that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days.
Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the nor’ west passage, so
long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living
experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain in
Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up
to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse
(whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage);
these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whaleman.
Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated,
intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise
that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not
only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of
spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he
should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for
again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more
be seen.
But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and
incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it
was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm
whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a
high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even
in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew
him.
The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue,
that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed,
literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea,
leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.
Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw,
that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity
which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults.
More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For,
when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had
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several times been known to turn around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either
stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters, however little
bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed
the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he
caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate
hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn
comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene,
exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain,
seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist
at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale.
That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw
beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the
field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more
seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal
encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for
that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily
woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him
as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel
eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible
malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians
ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue
devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea
to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens
and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the
sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy
Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon
the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from
Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his
bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose
to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he
probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this
collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and
anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling
Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so
interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the
encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at
intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such
vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium,
that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock.
In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more
sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics,
and, to all appearances, the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn
swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he
bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his
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mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self,
raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it
fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy
subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble
Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his
narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in
that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living
agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy
stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own
mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a
thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable
object.
This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize
profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from within the very heart of this
spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it;—
and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far
beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful
essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes!
So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient
sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye
prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye,
ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are sane, my motive
and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew
that to mankind he did now long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his
dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate. Nevertheless,
so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last,
no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with
the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.
The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred
cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of
sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very
unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such
dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit,
that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full
of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without,
with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found,
would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all
brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one
would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be
all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and
keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all�engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore
but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous
souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises,
the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious,
immitigable, and supernatural revenge.
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Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round
the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways,
and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right�mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb,
and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked
and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that
they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their souls were
possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their
insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how
to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have
seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,—all this to explain, would be to dive
deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell
whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the
irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave
myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter
the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.
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42. The Whiteness Of The Whale
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet
remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but
occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather
vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely
overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost
despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above
all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim,
random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some
special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations
have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric,
grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other
magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same
snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure
of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian, heir to overlording Rome,
having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it
applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky
tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for
among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies
and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things—the
innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving
of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes,
whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the
daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher
mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness
and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on
the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself made incarnate in a snow-white
bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was
by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the
purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity;
and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of
one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among
the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the
Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed,
and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the
Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with
whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the
innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which
affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more
kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the
furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what
but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly
whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific,
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to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat
can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.2F
3

Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale
dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that
spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.3F
4

Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the
Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with
the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected
Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the
Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that
chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane,
the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and
silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that
unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories
of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-bowed and fearless as
this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless
cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly
reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect
3 With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper into this
matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that
brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only arises from the circumstance, that the
irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and
hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so
unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have
that intensified terror.

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As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary

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moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the
French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with “Requiem eternam”
(eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any other funereal music. Now, in allusion to
the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin. 4 I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic
seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main
hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At
intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and
throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress.
Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled
waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of
plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning,
asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! I never had heard that name before; is it
conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned that
goney was some seaman’s name for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have had
aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For neither
had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a
little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.

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I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the

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more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have
frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.

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But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as

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the fowl floated on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round its
neck, with the ship’s time and place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for
man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring
cherubim!
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he presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence
and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse,
that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this
divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a
certain nameless terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory
which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that
sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a
thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men—has no
substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more
strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious
agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its
snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White
Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so potent an
auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the
snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
market-place!
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear
witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible
quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering
there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world,
as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue
of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the
same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while
these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the
evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by
whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar
apparition to the soul.
But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for it? To
analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances
wherein this thing of whiteness—though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of
all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to
exert over us the same sorcery, however modified;—can we thus hope to light upon some
chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no
man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least of the
imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few
perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to recall
them now.
Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the
peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such
long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, downcast and hooded with
new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American
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States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless
statue in the soul?
Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings (which will not
wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell so much more strongly on
the imagination of an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its
neighbors—the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White
Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness
over the soul at the bare mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge is
full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes,
does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy, while that of the
Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves,
followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial
instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe,
does the tall pale man of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrestingly glides
through the green of the groves—why is this phantom more terrible than all the whooping
imps of the Blocksburg?
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the
stampedoes of her frantic seas: nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight
of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted
yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each
other, as a tossed pack of cards;—it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the
strangest, saddest city thou can’st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher
horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever
new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts
the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to
be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the
unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another
mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any
form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by these two statements
may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following examples.
First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar
of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his
faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to
view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness—as if from encircling
headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent,
superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real
ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go
down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell
thee, “Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous
whiteness that so stirred me?”
Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snow-howdahed Andes
conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted
desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it
would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie
sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness.
Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some
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infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems
a boundless church-yard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered
crosses.
But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out
from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed
from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo
robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—
why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There
is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that
the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience
of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant
Oregon?
No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the
demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that
savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the
prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of
mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael,
are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth
such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many
of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in
fright.
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with
such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it
is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s
Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to
mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the
universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the
white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as
the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these
reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—
a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other
theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely
emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of
butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not
actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house
within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces
every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself,
and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses,
with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and
like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their
eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps
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all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.
Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
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43. Hark!
“Hist! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon, extending
from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this
manner, they passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the
hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet.
From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by the occasional
flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel.
It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose post was near the
after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the words above.
“Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
“Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”
“There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a cough—it sounded like a
cough.”
“Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket.”
“There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over, now!”
“Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper
turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the bucket!”
“Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”
“Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress’s knitting-needles
fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re the chap.”
“Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after�hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it
too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the
wind.”
“Tish! the bucket!”
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44. The Chart
Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took place on the
night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him
go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts,
spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you
would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye;
and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank.
At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the
seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had
been captured or seen.
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually
rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines
upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and
courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon
the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered
over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil
marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before
him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain
accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an
absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this
planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and
thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling to mind the
regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable
surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or
that ground in search of his prey.
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm whale’s resorting to
given waters, that many hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied
throughout the world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully
collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in
invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts
have been made to construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.4F
5

Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales,
guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret intelligence from the Deity—mostly
swim in veins, as they are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such
undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe of
such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale be
5 Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant
Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that circular, it appears that precisely
such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented in the circular. This chart divides the
ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of
which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of which districts are
three lines; one to show the number of days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the two
others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.
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straight as a surveyor’s parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own
unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to swim,
generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand
or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads, when
circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that
breadth and along that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for.
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate feeding-grounds, could
Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the widest expanses of water between those
grounds he could, by his art, so place and time himself on his way, 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 hunted 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;
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any wind but the Levanter and Simoom, 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 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.
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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 earliest 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 know 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.
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But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity—nay, you may
call it an ocean-wide 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 Cæsar. 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 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
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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 tempted 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.5F
6

Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807 totally lost off the Azores
by a similar onset, but the authentic particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to
encounter, though from 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 after, 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
6 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 which, according to their direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being
made ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the exact
manœuvres which he made were necessary. His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and
fury. He came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his
companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.” Again: “At all events, the whole circumstances taken
together, all happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided,
calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to be
satisfied that I am correct in my opinion.”

```
Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a black night in an open boat, when almost

```

despairing of reaching any hospitable shore. “The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the fears of
being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects
of fearful contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment’s thought; the dismal looking wreck, and the
horrid aspect and revenge of the whale, wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance.”

```
In another place—p. 45,—he speaks of “the mysterious and mortal attack of the animal”.

```

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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 uncommon
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
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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.
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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 employment 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
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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 mast-heads and
admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise. This
vigilance was not long without reward.
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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 revery
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.
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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 round, 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.
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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 his 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,” drawingly 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
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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 silver-spoons! 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
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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 whale-bone; 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 out-stretched 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 loggerhead 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 on to 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
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standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a breast-band 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 loggerhead 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 sand-paper 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.
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“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 the shoulder. But this was against all
rule; for the oarsmen must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage
pronouncing 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
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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 water-proof 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.
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