opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why,
you King-Post, you, I suppose you would have every man in the world go about
..
with a small lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a militia
officer's skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why don't ye
be sensible, Flask? it's easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man
with half an eye can be sensible. I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes
find it rather hard. Yes, when a fellow's soaked through, it's hard to be
sensible, that's a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never
mind; catch the turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down
these anchors now as if they were never going to be used again. tying these
two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands behind him. And what
big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists, hey?
What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored
anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though. There,
hammer that knot down, and we've done. So; next to touching land, lighting
on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts,
will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a
long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails
tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d'ye see. Same with
cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more
monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and drive
down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord,
Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is
a nasty night, lad.
..






.. < chapter cxxii 2 MIDNIGHT ALOFT—THUNDER AND LIGHTNING >
The
Main-top-sail yard. —Tashtego passing new lashings around it. Um, um, um.
Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use of
thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass
of rum. Um, um, um!
..






.. < chapter cxxiii 10 THE MUSKET >
During the most violent shocks of the
Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's jaw-bone tiller had several times been
reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer
tackles had been attached to it —for they were slack — because some play to
the tiller was indispensable. In a severe gale like this, while the ship is
but a tossed shuttle-cock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see
the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus
with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to
notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a
sight that hardly any one can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.
Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb —one engaged forward and the other
aft —the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut
adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers
of
..
an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed
bird is on the wing. The three corresponding new sails were now bent and
reefed, and a storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went
through the water with some precision again; and the course —for the present,
East-south-east —which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more given
to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only steered
according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the ship as near
her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a good sign!
the wind seemed coming round astern; aye! the foul breeze became fair!
Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of Ho! the fair
wind! oh-he-yo, cheerly, men! the crew singing for joy, that so
promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding
it. In compliance with the standing order of his commander — to report
immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change in
the affairs of the deck, —Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to the
breeze —however reluctantly and gloomily, —than he mechanically went below to
apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance. Ere knocking at his state-room, he
involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp —taking long swings
this way and that —was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the
old man's bolted door, —a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of
upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain
humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of
the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as
they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest,
upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw the
muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its
neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for
itself. He would have shot me once, he murmured, yes, there's the very
musket that he pointed at me; —that one with the studded stock; let me touch
it —lift it. Strange, that I, who have
..
handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded?
I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan; — that's not good. Best spill
it? —wait. I'll cure myself of this. I'll hold the musket boldly while I
think. —I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death
and doom, — that's fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only fair for
that accursed fish. —The very tube he pointed at me! —the very one; this one
—I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now.
—Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike
his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these
same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the
error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he
would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely
suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him? —Yes, it would
make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any
deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab
have his way. If, then, he were this instant—put aside, that crime would
not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there, —in there,
he's sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I
can't withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not
entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy
own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men
have vow'd thy vow; say'st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid! — But is
there no other way? no lawful way? —Make him a prisoner to be taken home?
What! hope to wrest this old man's living power from his own living hands?
Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with
ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would
be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight;
could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable
reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains?
The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand
alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between
me and law. —Aye, aye, 'tis so. —Is heaven a murderer
..
when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets
and skin together? —And would I be a murderer, then, if —and slowly,
stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket's end
against the door. On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head
this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child
again. —Oh Mary! Mary! —boy! boy! boy! —But if I wake thee not to death, old
man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week may
sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art thou? Shall I? shall I? —The
wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed
and set; she heads her course. Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart
at last! Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's
tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream to
speak. The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;
Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he
placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place. He's too sound
asleep, Mr Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I must see to
the deck here. Thou know'st what to say.
..






.. < chapter cxxiv 25 THE NEEDLE >
Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea
rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's
gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The strong,
unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying
sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning
light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;
where his bayonet
..
rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and
queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold,
that bubblingly leaps with light and heat. Long maintaining an enchanted
silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the tetering ship loweringly
pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced
ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and
saw the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with
his undeviating wake. Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for
the sea-chariot of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring
the sun to ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the
sea! But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards
the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading. East-sou-east,
sir, said the frightened steersman. Thou liest! smiting him with his
clenched fist. Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun
astern? Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very
blinding palpableness must have been the cause. Thrusting his head half way
into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted
arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind
him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the
Pequod was as infallibly going West. But ere the first wild alarm could get
out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, I have
it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our
compasses —that's all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take
it. Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir, said the pale
mate, gloomily. Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in
more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The
..
magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know,
essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be
much marvelled at, that such things should be. In instances where the
lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the
spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more
fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before
magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle. But in
either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue
thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same
fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost
one inserted into the kelson. Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and
eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his
extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that
the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's
course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the
Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed
fair one had only been juggling her. Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret
thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders;
while Stubb and Flask —who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing
his feelings —likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some
of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of
Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly
unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into
their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's. For a space the old man walked
the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he
saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before
dashed to the deck. Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday
I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would feign have wrecked me. So,
so. But Ahab is lord over the level load-stone
..
yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of
the sail-maker's needles. Quick! Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse
dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives,
whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of
his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses.
Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though
clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious
sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents. Men, said he,
steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had
demanded, my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this
bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any.
Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was
said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But
Starbuck looked away. With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel
head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining,
bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the
maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the
blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that,
several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through
some small strange motions with it —whether indispensable to the magnetizing
of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain
—he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two
reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its
middle, over one of the compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and
round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its
place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped
frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it,
exclaimed, —Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level
loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it! One after another
they peered in, for nothing but their own
..
eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they
slunk away. In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all
his fatal pride.
..






.. < chapter cxxv 6 THE LOG AND LINE >
While now the fated Pequod had been
so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use.
Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's
place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising,
wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and frequently more
for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary
slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of
progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel
and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of
the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; the sun and wind had
warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly.
But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance
upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how
his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log
and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in
riots. Forward, there! Heave the log! Two seamen came. The golden-hued
Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave.
They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the deck,
with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy,
sidelong-rushing sea. The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by
the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool
..
of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab
advanced to him. Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty
or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the
old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
speak. Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet
have spoiled it. 'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they
spoiled thee? Thou seem'st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not
thou it. I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these
grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing, 'specially with a
superior, who'll ne'er confess. What's that? There now's a patched
professor in Queen Nature's granite-founded College; but methinks he's too
subservient. Where wert thou born? In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.
Excellent! Thou'st hit the world by that. I know not, sir, but I was born
there. In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it's good. Here's a
man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man;
which is sucked in —by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts
all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So. The log was heaved. The
loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging line astern, and
then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised and
lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the
old reelman to stagger strangely. Hold hard! Snap! the overstrained line
sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was gone. I crush the
quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the
log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman.
And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See
to it.
..
There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me, the skewer seems
loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These
lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha,
Pip? come to help; eh, Pip? Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the
whale-boat. pip's missing. let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here,
fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk
him off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho! there's his arm just breaking
water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off — we haul in no cowards here.
Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again. Peace,
thou crazy loon, cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. Away from the
quarter-deck! The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser, muttered Ahab,
advancing. Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
Astern there, sir, astern! Lo, lo! And who art thou, boy? I see not my
reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a
thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy? Bell-boy,
sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds
of clay reward for Pip; five feet high— looks cowardly —quickest known by
that! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip the coward? There can be no hearts
above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget
this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here,
boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou
touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my
heart-strings. Come, let's down. What's this? here's velvet shark-skin,
intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it. Ah, now, had poor Pip but
felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to
me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let
old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the
white, for I will not let this go.
..
Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors
than are here. come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all
goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of
suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet
full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading
thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's! There go two
daft ones now, muttered the old Manxman. One daft with strength, the other
daft with weakness. But here's the end of the rotten line —all dripping, too.
Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether. I'll see Mr.
Stubb about it.
..






.. < chapter cxxvi 14 THE LIFE-BUOY >
Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's
levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and
line; the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator. Making so long a
passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long,
sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild;
all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate
scene. At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of
the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the
dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch —then headed by
Flask —was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly —like
half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered Innocents
—that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of
some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening, like the
carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The
Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered;
but the pagan harpooneers remained
..
unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman —the oldest mariner of all — declared that
the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned
men in the sea. below in his hammock, ahab did not hear of this till grey
dawn, when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus
explained the wonder. Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort
of great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams,
or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept
company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this
only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very
superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones
when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and
semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In
the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken
for men. But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most
plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At
sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and
whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors
sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the man,
there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at
his perch, when a cry was heard —a cry and a rushing —and looking up, they
saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of
white bubbles in the blue of the sea. The life-buoy —a long slender cask —was
dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring;
but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask
it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled
at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the
bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one. And
thus the first man of the pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the
White Whale, on the White Whale's own
..
peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps,
thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at
this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a
foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already
presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks
they had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay. The
lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to it;
but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish
eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were
impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with its final end,
whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going to leave the
ship's stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and
inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin. A life-buoy of a
coffin! cried Starbuck, starting. Rather queer, that, I should say, said
Stubb. It will make a good enough one, said Flask, the carpenter here can
arrange it easily. Bring it up; there's nothing else for it, said
Starbuck, after a melancholy pause. Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me
so — the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it. And shall I nail down
the lid, sir? moving his hand as with a hammer. aye. And shall I caulk
the seams, sir? moving his hand as with a caulking-iron. Aye. And shall
I then pay over the same with pitch, sir? moving his hand as with a
pitch-pot. Away! What possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the
coffin, and no more. —Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me. He goes
off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks. Now I don't
like this. i make a leg for captain ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman;
but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he wont put his head into it. Are
..
all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I'm ordered to make
a life-buoy of it. It's like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on
the other side now. I don't like this cobbling sort of business —I don't like
it at all; it's undignified; it's not my place. Let tinkers' brats do
tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean,
virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins
at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at
the conclusion; not a cobbler's job, that's at an end in the middle, and at
the beginning at the end. It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling
jobs. Lord! what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old
woman of sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And
that's the reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when
I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their
lonely old heads to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea
but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over
the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring
over the ship's stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some
superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere they
would do the job. But I'm made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don't budge.
Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard tray! But never
mind. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as
coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit;
not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too
confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can. hem! i'll do the job,
now, tenderly. I'll have me —let's see —how many in the ship's company, all
told? But I've forgotten. Any way, I'll have me thirty separate,
Turk's-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the
coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there'll be thirty lively fellows all
fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come
hammer, calking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let's to it.
..






.. < chapter cxxvii 2 THE DECK >
The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between
the vice-bench and the open hatchway; the Carpenter calking its seams; the
string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the
bosom of his frock. —Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip
following him. Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not
this hand complies with my humor more genially than that boy. — Middle aisle
of a church! What's here? Life buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck's orders. Oh,
look, sir! Beware the hatchway! Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to
the vault. Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does. Art
not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop? I
believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir? Well enough. But art
thou not also the undertaker? Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a
coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into something
else. Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, inter-meddling,
monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next
day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same
coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
jack-of-all-trades. But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do. The
gods again. hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The
Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes;
and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?
Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the
reason why the grave-digger made music must
..
have been because there was none in his spade, sir. But the calking mallet is
full of it. Hark to it. Aye, and that's because the lid there's a
sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this
—there's naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty
much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the
coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in? Faith, sir, I've—
Faith? What's that? Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like
—that's all, sir. Um, um; go on. I was about to say, sir, that— Art
thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy
bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight. He goes aft. That was
sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes. I've heard that the
Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the
middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his
middle. He's always under the Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He's looking this
way —come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork,
and I'm the professor of musical glasses —tap, tap! ( Ahab to himself.)
There's a sight! There's sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the
hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests
on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow.
Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What
things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the very
dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the
help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go
further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but
an immortality-preserver! I'll think of that. But no. So far gone
..
am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one,
seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with
that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return
again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous
philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must
empty into thee!
..






.. < chapter cxxviii 9 THE PEQUOD MEETS THE RACHEL >
Next day, a large
ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the Pequod, all her
spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was making good
speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh
to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that are
burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull. Bad news; she brings bad
news, muttered the old Manxman. But ere her commander, who, with trumpet to
mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was
heard. Hast seen the White Whale? Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a
whale-boat adrift? Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this
unexpected question; and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when
the stranger captain himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen
descending her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the
Pequod's main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was
recognized by ahab for a nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was
exchanged. Where was he? —not killed! —not killed! cried Ahab, closely
advancing. How was it? It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the
day previous, while three of the stranger's boats were engaged with
..
a shoal of whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship;
and while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of
Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the blue water, not very far to
leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat —a reserved one —had been
instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth
boat —the swiftest keeled of all —seemed to have succeeded in fastening —at
least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In
the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of
bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded
that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as
often happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet.
The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced
to pick up her three far to windward boats —ere going in quest of the fourth
one in the precisely opposite direction —the ship had not only been
necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the
time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at
last safe aboard, she crowded all sail —stunsail on stunsail —after the
missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every
other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a
sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when last
seen; though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her;
and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her
boats; and though she had thus continued doing till day light; yet not the
least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen. The story told, the
stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the
Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search; by sailing
over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping
a double horizon, as it were. I will wager something now, whispered Stubb
to Flask, that some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best
coat; mayhap, his watch —he's so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever
heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after
..
one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only
see how pale he looks —pale in the very buttons of his eyes —look —it wasn't
the coat —it must have been the— My boy, my own boy is among them. For
God's sake —I beg, I conjure —here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab,
who thus far had but icily received his petition. For eight-and-forty hours
let me charter your ship —I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it
—if there be no other way —for eight-and-forty hours only —only that —you
must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing. His son! cried Stubb,
oh, it's his son he's lost! I take back the coat and watch —what says Ahab?
We must save that boy. He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night, said
the old Manx sailor standing behind them; I heard; all of ye heard their
spirits. Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the
Rachel's the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of
the Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew; but among the
number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other hand,
separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had
been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched father was plunged
to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which was only solved for him by
his chief mate's instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship
in such emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided
boats, always to pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some
unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not
till forced to it by Ahab's iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy;
a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but
unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought
to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially
the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket
captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted
three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their
first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance
display
..
of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness
and concern. Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of
Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but
without the least quivering of his own. I will not go, said the stranger,
till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like
case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab —though but a child, and nestling
safely at home now —a child of your old age too — Yes, yes, you relent; I
see it —run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards. Avast,
cried Ahab — touch not a rope-yarn; then in a voice that prolongingly
moulded every word — Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose
time. Good bye, good bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself,
but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three
minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward
again, and let the ship sail as before. Hurriedly turning, with averted face,
he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this
unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from
his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than
stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship. Soon the two ships diverged
their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw
hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea. This way
and that her yards were swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to
tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it;
while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as
three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs. But by
her still halting course and winding, woful way, you plainly saw that this
ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was
Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
..






.. < chapter cxxix 2 THE CABIN >
(Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches
him by the hand to follow.) Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab
now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would
not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too
curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes
my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve
thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own
screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be. No, no, no! ye have not
a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread
upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye. Oh! spite of
million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man! —and
a black! and crazy! —but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he
grows so sane again. They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor
little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his
living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must
go with ye. If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up
in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be. Oh good master, master, master!
Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know
that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand! —Met! True art thou, lad,
as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it
come to that, — God for ever save thee, let what will befall.
..
Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.) Here he this instant stood;
I stand in his air, —but I'm alone. Now were even poor Pip here I could
endure it, but he's missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip?
He must be up here; let's try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor
bar; and yet there's no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to
stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I'll
seat me, against the transom, in the ship's full middle, all her keel and
her three masts before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black
seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows
of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what's this? epaulets! epaulets! the
epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill
up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy's host to white men
with gold lace upon their coats! —Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip? —a little
negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a
whale-boat once; —seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and
let's drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put
one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards. —Hist! above there, I hear
ivory —Oh, master, master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me.
But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge
through; and oysters come to join me.
..






.. < chapter cxxx 26 THE HAT >
And now that at the proper time and place,
after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab, —all other whaling waters
swept —seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more
securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and
longitude where his tormenting wound
..
had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day
preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick; —and now that all his successive
meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac
indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or
sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's
eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the
unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night
sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly
gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered
above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain
to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf. In
this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished.
Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one.
Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and
powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of ahab's iron soul. like
machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old
man's despot eye was on them. But did you deeply scan him in his more secret
confidential hours; when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you
would have seen that even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable
Parsee's glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times
affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin
Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked
dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a
mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some
unseen being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by
night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below.
He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but
wondrous eyes did plainly say —We two watchmen never rest. Nor, at any time,
by night or day could the mariners now step up the deck, unless Ahab was
before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planks
between two
..
undeviating limits, —the main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him
standing in the cabin-scuttle, —his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if
to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless
he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung
in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell
unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or
whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so
in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp
gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes
that the night had wet, the next day's sunshine dried upon him; and so,
day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks;
whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for. He ate in the same
open air; that is, his two only meals, — breakfast and dinner: supper he
never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as
unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base,
though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now
become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's mystic watch was without
intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak —one man to the
other —unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it
necessary. Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain;
openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day
they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as
concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours,
without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his
scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each
other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the
Parsee his abandoned substance. And yet, somehow, did Ahab —in his own proper
self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his
subordinates, —Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave.
Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen
..
tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee
what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab. At the first faintest
glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft — Man the
mast-heads! —and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight,
the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman's bell, was heard
— What d'ye see? —sharp! sharp! But when three or four days had slided by,
after meeting the children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen;
the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at least,
of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether
Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if
these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally
expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them. I will have
the first sight of the whale myself, —he said. Aye! Ahab must have the
doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and
sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to secure to the
main-mast head, he received the two ends of the downward-reeved rope; and
attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order to
fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing
beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the
other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning
Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,
— Take the rope, sir —I give it into thy hands, Starbuck. Then arranging
his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his
perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards
stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab
gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles, —ahead, astern, this side, and
that, —within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height. When
in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging,
which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that
spot, and sustained there by
..
the rope; under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given
in strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in
such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft
cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck;
and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down
from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with
a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the
crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea. So Ahab's proceedings
in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to
be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose
him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision —one of
those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;
—it was strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman;
freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's
hands. Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a
maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight
up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his
head. But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it
much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful
eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight. Your
hat, your hat, sir! suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted at
the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than
his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them. But already the sable
wing was before the old man's eyes; the long hooked bill at his head: with a
scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.
..
an eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace it,
and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome.
But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab's
hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in
advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that
disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast
height into the sea.
..






.. < chapter cxxxi 10 THE PEQUOD MEETS THE DELIGHT >
The intense Pequod
sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy-coffin still
lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight, was
descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams,
called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the
height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or
disabled boats. Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white
ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but
you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse. Hast seen the White
Whale? Look! replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and
with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck. Hast killed him? The harpoon is
not yet forged that will ever do that, answered the other, sadly glancing
upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless
sailors were busy in sewing together. Not forged! and snatching Perth's
levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming — Look ye,
Nantucketer;
..
here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by
lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot
place behind the fin, where the white whale most feels his accursed life!
Then God keep thee, old man —see'st thou that —pointing to the hammock — I
bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead
ere night. Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died;
you sail upon their tomb. Then turning to his crew — Are ye ready there?
place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then — Oh! God
—advancing towards the hammock with uplifted hands — may the resurrection and
the life— Brace forward! Up helm! cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of
the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so quick,
indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with
their ghostly baptism. As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the
strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.
Ha! yonder! look yonder, men! cried a foreboding voice in her wake. In
vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail
to show us your coffin!
..






.. < chapter cxxxii 26 THE SYMPHONY >
It was a clear steel-blue day. The
firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure;
only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look,
and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells,
as Samson's chest in his sleep.
..
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to
and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty
leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled,
murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. But though thus contrasting within,
the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one;
it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them. Aloft, like a royal
czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling
sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a
soft and tremulous motion —most seen here at the equator —denoted the fond,
throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom
away. Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm
and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of
ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his
splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven. Oh,
immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures
that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were
ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and
Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire;
sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that
burnt-out crater of his brain. Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle,
Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and
sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the
profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to
dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air,
that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world,
so long cruel — forbidding —now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn
neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however
wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her
..
heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear
into the sea; nor did all the pacific contain such wealth as that one wee
drop. Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the
side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing
that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch
him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there. Ahab
turned. Starbuck! Sir. Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a
mild looking sky. On such a day —very much such a sweetness as this —I
struck my first whale —a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty— forty—forty years
ago! —ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and
peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has
Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors
of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent
three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of
solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness,
which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without
—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! —when
I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before
—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare — fit emblem of the
dry nourishment of my soul —when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to
his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts —away,
whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and
sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage
pillow —wife? wife? —rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed
that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the
frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand
lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey —more a demon
than a man! —aye, aye! what a forty years' fool —fool —old fool, has old
Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary,
..
and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or
better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this
weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me?
Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks
so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so
very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though
I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God!
God! God! —crack my heart!— stave my brain! —mockery! mockery! bitter,
biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem
and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me
look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better
than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this
is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no;
stay on board, on board! —lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase
to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far
away home I see in that eye! Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul!
grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish!
Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child,
too, are Starbuck's —wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow
youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing,
paternal old age! Away! let us away! —this instant let me alter the course!
How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to
see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days,
even as this, in nantucket. they have, they have. I have seen them —some
summer days in the morning. About this time —yes, it is his noon nap now —
the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me,
of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to
dance him again. Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy,
every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of
his father's sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket!
Come, my Captain, study out the course,
..
and let us away! See, see! the boy's face from the window! the boy's hand
on the hill! But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he
shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. What is it, what
nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and
master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural
lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on
all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural
heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who,
that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an
errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible
power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think
thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this
world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time,
lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who
put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go,
man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is
a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it
blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the
slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the
new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the
field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung
down, and left in the half-cut swaths —Starbuck! But blanched to a
corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away. Ahab crossed the deck
to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in
the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.
..






.. < chapter cxxxiii 2 THE CHASE—FIRST DAY >
That night, in the mid-watch,
when the old man —as his wont at intervals —stepped forth from the scuttle in
which he leaned, and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his
face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in
drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near.
Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the
living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner
surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and
then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab
rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be
shortened. The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently
vindicated at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and
lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift
tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream. Man the mast-heads! Call
all hands! Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the
forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that
they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
with their clothes in their hands. What d'ye see? cried Ahab, flattening
his face to the sky. Nothing, nothing, sir! was the sound hailing down in
reply. T'gallant sails! —stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides! All
sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to
the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him
thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering
ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and
top-gallant-sail,
..
he raised a gull-like cry in the air, There she blows! —there she blows! A
hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick! Fired by the cry which seemed
simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the
rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had
now gained his final perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego
standing just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant mast, so that the
Indian's head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel. From this height the
whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing
his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air.
To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long
ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans. And did none of ye see
it before? cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him. I saw him
almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out, said
Tashtego. Not the same instant; not the same —no, the doubloon is mine,
Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the
White Whale first. There she blows! there she blows! —there she blows!
There again! —there again! he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic
tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets. He's
going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three
boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship. Helm
there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No,
no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by!
Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower, —quick, quicker! and he slid through
the air to the deck. He is heading straight to leeward, sir, cried Stubb,
right away from us; cannot have seen the ship yet. Be dumb, man! Stand
by the braces! Hard down the helm! —brace up! Shiver her! —shiver her! So;
well that! Boats, boats! Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped;
all the boat-sails set —all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness,
shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer
..
lit up Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth. Like
noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only
slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more
smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so
serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his
seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly
visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually
set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast,
involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out
on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his
broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade;
and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley
of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his
side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl
softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to
some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but
shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back; and
at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro
skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this
pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons. A gentle joyousness —a
mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the
white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful
horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth
bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not
Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale
as he so divinely swam. On each soft side —coincident with the parted swell,
that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away —on each bright side,
the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters
who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to
assail it; but had fatally
..
found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm,
oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no
matter how many in that same way thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed
before. And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea,
among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby
Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged
trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the
fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole
marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and
warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed
himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping on
the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool that
he left. With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails
adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's
reappearance. An hour, said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern;
and he gazed beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide
wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes
seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze
now freshened; the sea began to swell. The birds! —the birds! cried
Tashtego. In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds
were now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few yards began
fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover no
sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he
profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with
wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and
then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening
teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick's open
mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the
blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath
..
the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one side-long sweep with
his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous
apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went
forward to the bows, and seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew to
grasp their oars and stand by to stern. Now, by reason of this timely
spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by anticipation, was made to
face the whale's head while yet under water. But as if perceiving this
strategem, moby dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him,
sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his
pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat. Through and through; through every
plank and each rib, it thrilled for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on
his back, in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its
bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw
curled high up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock.
The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of
Ahab's head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale
now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished
eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were
tumbling over each other's heads to gain the uttermost stern. And now, while
both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with
the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged
beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were
almost inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily
paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that
monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which
placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with
all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to
wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped
from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws,
like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in
twain, and locked themselves fast again in
..
the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the
broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales,
and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across. At that preluding
moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to perceive the whale's
intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement that loosed his
hold for the time; at that moment his hand had made one final effort to push
the boat out of the bite. But only slipping further into the whale's mouth,
and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on
the jaw; spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell
flat-faced upon the sea. Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now
lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and
down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled
body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose —some twenty or more feet
out of the water —the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray still
higher into the air. So, in a gale, the but half-baffled Channel billows only
recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its summit
with their scud. But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam
swiftly round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his
vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly
assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood
of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book of
Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent
tail, and too much of a cripple to swim, —though he could still keep afloat,
even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen,
like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst. From the
boat's fragmentary
..
stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the
other drifting end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for them
to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's
aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that
he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats,
unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to
strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of the
jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves
hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge
of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man's head.
Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's mast
heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and was
now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her; — Sail on the —but that
moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the
time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering
crest, he shouted, — Sail on the whale! —Drive him off! The Pequod's
prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually
parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the boats
flew to the rescue. Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes,
the white brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily
strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a
time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under
foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as
desolate sounds from out ravines. But this intensity of his physical
prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it. In an instant's compass,
great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those
shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such
hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it,
in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of
instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble
natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
..
The harpoon, said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one
bended arm — is it safe? Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it, said
Stubb, showing it. Lay it before me; —any missing men? One, two, three,
four, five; —there were five oars, sir, and here are five men. That's
good. —Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there! there!
going to leeward still; what a leaping spout! Hands off from me! The eternal
sap runs up in Ahab's bones again! Set the sail; out oars; the helm! It
is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by
another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued
with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the added power
of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have
treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed,
that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an
indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for
so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a
thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself,
then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means
of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were
soon swayed up to their cranes —the two parts of the wrecked boat having been
previously secured by her —and then hoisting everything to her side, and
stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails,
like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the
leeward wake of Moby Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the
whale's glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads;
and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time,
and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second
of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard. — Whose is the doubloon
now? D'ye see him? and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he
commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab,
..
now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks. As he was thus
walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to bid them
hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still greater breadth —thus
to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his own
wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there
reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At last he paused before it; and
as in an already over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail
across, so over the old man's face there now stole some such added gloom as
this. Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his
Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed — The thistle
the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha! What
soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I not know
thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a
poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck. Aye, sir, said
Starbuck drawing near, 'tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one.
Omen? omen? —the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man,
they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old
wives' darkling hint. —Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing;
Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all
mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor
gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold —I shiver! —How now? Aloft there!
D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second!
The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling. Soon,
it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset. Can't see
the spout now, sir; —too dark —cried a voice from the air. How heading when
last seen? As before, sir, —straight to leeward. Good! he will travel
slower now 'tis night. Down royals and
..
top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before
morning; he's making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there!
keep her full before the wind! —Aloft! come down! —Mr. Stubb, send a fresh
hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning. —Then advancing
towards the doubloon in the main-mast — Men, this gold is mine, for I earned
it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then,
whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold
is that man's; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times
its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now! —the deck is thine, sir.
And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching
his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to
see how the night wore on.
..
This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation
(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise
of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view
whatever objects may be encircling him.
..






.. < chapter cxxxiv 16 THE CHASE—SECOND DAY >

At day-break, the three
mast-heads were punctually manned afresh. D'ye see him? cried Ahab, after
allowing a little space for the light to spread. see nothing, sir. Turn
up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for; —the
top-gallant sails! —aye, they should have been kept on her all night. But no
matter —'tis but resting for the rush. Here be it said, that this
pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, continued through day into
night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in
the South sea fishery. For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of
experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses
among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale
when last descried, they will,
..
under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the
direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight,
as well as his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in these
cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose
general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to
again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass,
and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the
more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be
visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after
being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight,
then, when night obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the
darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the
pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the
proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired
purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron
Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace,
that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a
baby's pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will
reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there
are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep,
according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many
hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about
reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this
acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the
whaleman's allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound
mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a
quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many
collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales. The ship tore on;
leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a
plough-share and turns up the level field. By salt and hemp! cried Stubb,

but this swift motion of the deck creeps up one's legs and tingles at the
heart. This
..
ship and I are two brave fellows! —Ha! ha! Some one take me up, and launch
me, spine-wise, on the sea, —for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel. Ha, ha!
we go the gait that leaves no dust behind! There she blows —she blows! —she
blows! —right ahead! was now the mast-head cry. Aye, aye! cried Stubb.

I knew it —ye can't escape —blow on and split your spout, O whale! the mad
fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump —blister your lungs! —Ahab will
dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his water-gate upon the stream! And
Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of the
chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew.
Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before;
these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab,
but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares
that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all
their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the
past night's suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which
their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things,
their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their
sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this
seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;
though it was put together of all contrasting things —oak, and maple, and pine
wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp —yet all these ran into each other in the one
concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long
central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's
valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded
into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one
lord and keel did point to. The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops
of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a
spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings;
others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat
..
far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals,
ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that
infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them! Why sing ye
not out for him, if ye see him? cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some
minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. Sway me up, men; ye
have been deceived; not moby dick casts one odd jet that way, and then
disappears. It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had
mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon
proved; for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed
to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made
the air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as —much nearer to the ship than
the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead —Moby Dick bodily
burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the
peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now
reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching.
Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale
thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a
mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and
more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his
mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance. There she
breaches! there she breaches! was the cry, as in his immeasureable
bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly
seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer
margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably
glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and
fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an