CHAPTER 44

  The Chart

  Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall

that took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of

his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in

the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea

charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating

himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the

various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow

but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before

were blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books

beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which,

on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been

captured or seen.

  While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains

over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for

ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled

brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out

lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was

also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his

forehead.

  But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his

cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they

were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced,

and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans

before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a

view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought

of his soul.

  Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the

leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out

one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not

so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents;

and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food;

and, also calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting

him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises,

almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to

be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.

  So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the

sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe

that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;

were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully

collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to

correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the

flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to

construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*

  *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out

by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National

Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that circular, it

appears that precisely such a chart is in course of completion; and

portions of it are presented in the circular. "This chart divides

the ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees

of longitude; perpendicularly through each of which districts are

twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of

which districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that

have been spent in each month in every district, and the two others to

show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been

seen."

  Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another,

the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct- say, rather,

secret intelligence from the Deity- mostly swim in veins, as they

are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such

undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any

chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these

cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a

surveyor's parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly

confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein

in which at these times he is said to swim, generally embraces some

few miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or

contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's

mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The

sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along

that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for.

  And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known

separate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but

in crossing the widest expanses of water between those grounds he

could, by his art, so place and time himself on his way, as even

then not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting.

  There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his

delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,

perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons

for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the

herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,

say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were

found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and

unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true.

In general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to

the solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So

that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example,

on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano

Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow that were the

Pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent

corresponding season, she would infallibly encounter him there. So,

too, with some other feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed

himself. But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and

ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And

where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object have hitherto been

spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever way-side,

antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set time or

place were attained, when all possibilities would become

probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next

thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were

conjoined in the one technical phrase- the Season-on-the-Line. For

there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been

periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the

sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any

one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly

encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the waves

were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the

monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in

the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which

Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would

not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact

above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes; nor in

the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his unquiet

heart as to postpone all intervening quest.

  Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of

the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her

commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn,

and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the

equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait

for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's

sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view

to this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three

hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval

which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a

miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his

vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds,

should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the

Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race.

So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Traders; any wind

but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious

zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.

  But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it

not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one

solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of

individual recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded

Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the

peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump,

could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale,

Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till

long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries- tallied

him, and shall he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped

out like a lost sheep's are! And here, his mad mind would run on in

a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came

over him! and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his

strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who

is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with

clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.

  Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably

vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts

through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and

whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till

the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and

when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him

heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in

him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed

fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself

yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and

with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though

escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of

being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright

at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity.

For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast

hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was

not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The

latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep,

being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which

at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it

spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the

frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral.

But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore

it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts

and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer

inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a

kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could

grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was

conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered

birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes,

when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a

vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light,

to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a

blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created

a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a

Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the

very creature he creates.