CHAPTER 41

  Moby Dick

  I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the

rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and

more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul.

A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless

feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that

murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our

oaths of violence and revenge.

  For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,

secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly

frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of

his existence; a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him;

while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to

him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of

whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire

watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest

along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole

twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling

sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the

irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with

other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread

through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special

individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be

doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or

such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of

uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great

mischief to his assailants, has completely escaped them; to some minds

it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question

must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale

fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances of

great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore

it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby

Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to

ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils

of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.

In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the

whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.

  And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by

chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had

every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him,

as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities

did ensue in these assaults- not restricted to sprained wrists and

ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations- but fatal to the

last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all

accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had

gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the

story of the White Whale had eventually come.

  Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the

more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not

only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all

surprising terrible events,- as the smitten tree gives birth to its

fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma,

wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to

cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the

whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the

wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes

circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from

that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of

all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into

contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to

face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give

battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed

a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come

to any chiselled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part

of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a

calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all

tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth. No

wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over

the wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale

did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,

and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which

eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from

anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic

did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had

heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to

encounter the perils of his jaw.

  But there were still other and more vital practical influences at

work. Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of the

Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of

the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body.

There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and

courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right

whale, would perhaps- either from professional inexperience, or

incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale;

at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those

whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have never

hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the

leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued

in the North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a

childish fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of

Southern whaling. Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the great

Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of

those prows which stem him.

  And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former

legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book

naturalists- Olassen and Povelson- declaring the Sperm Whale not

only to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but

also to be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for

human blood. Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these

or almost similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the

Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish

(sharks included) are "struck with the most lively terrors," and

"often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the

rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death." And however

the general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as

these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item

of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes

of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.

  So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a

few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the

earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard

to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of

this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other

leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lances

at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man.

That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick

eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may

be consulted.

  Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these

things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater

number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely,

without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without

superstitious accompaniments were sufficiently hardy not to flee

from the battle if offered.

  One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be

linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously

inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous;

that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and

the same instant of time.

  Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit

altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. For

as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been

divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the

Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part,

unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated

the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them,

especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a

great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the

most widely distant points.

  It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships,

and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by

Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the

Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons

darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some

of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time

between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days.

Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the

Nor' West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to

the whale. So that here, in the real living experience of living

men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain

in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the

wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more

wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters

were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground

passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the

realities of the whalemen.

  Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and

knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had

escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen

should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick

not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity

in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his

flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever

be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly

deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues

away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.

  But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough

in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to

strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much

his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm

whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out- a peculiar snow-white

wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were

his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless,

uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those

who knew him.

  The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled

with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his

distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed,

literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high

noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam,

all spangled with golden gleamings.

  Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet

his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural

terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according

to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his

assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of

dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting

pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times

been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either

stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to

their ship.

  Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though

similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means

unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the

White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every

dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as

having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.

  Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the

minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips

of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out

of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene,

exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

  His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling

in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken

prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe,

blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of

the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly

sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped

away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned

Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more

seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since

that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild

vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his

frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only

all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual

exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac

incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel

eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and

half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the

beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe

one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east

reverenced in their statue devil;- Ahab did not fall down and

worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the

abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of

things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and

cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all

evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically

assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the

sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from

Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his

hot heart's shell upon it.

  It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant

rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting

at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden,

passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that

tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but

nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home,

and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay

stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary,

howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed

soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That

it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that

the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact

that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and,

though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his

Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his

mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving

in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of

the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship,

with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and,

to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left behind him with

the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the

blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected

front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his

mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab,

in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning

and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but

become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy

subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson,

when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through

the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one

jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad

madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That

before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a

furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general

sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon

its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab,

to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than

ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.

  This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains

unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is

profound. Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked

Hotel de Cluny where we here stand- however grand and wonderful, now

quit it;- and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast

Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of

man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence

sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and

throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock

that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on

his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye

prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family

likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from

your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.

  Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely; all my

means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to

kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he

did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his

dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will

determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling,

that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer

thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the

quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.

  The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise

popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added

moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the

Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so

very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another

whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating

people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit,

that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on

edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of

whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed,

unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be

found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance

against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason

thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one

would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings

to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the

mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had

purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and

all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his

old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him

then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched

the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable

cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He

was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

  Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with

curses Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too,

chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals-

morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue

or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of

indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity

in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and

packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac

revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old

man's ire- by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at

times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their

insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be- what the White Whale

was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some

dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon

of the seas of life,- all this to explain, would be to dive deeper

than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all,

how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled

sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What

skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself

up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all

a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but

the deadliest ill.