CHAPTER 133

  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 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 fowls 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 mayst have bejuggled and destroyed before.

  And thus, through the serene tranquilities 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 sidelong 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 stratagem, 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 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.

  *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.

  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 eved 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 stunsails, 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 paltroon. 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 helm 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 stunsails, 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.