CHAPTER 1

  Loomings

  Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely-

having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to

interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see

the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the

spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself

growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly

November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing

before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral

I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me,

that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from

deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking

people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as

soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a

philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly

take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but

knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish

very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

  There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by

wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs- commerce surrounds it with her

surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme

downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and

cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of

land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

  Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from

Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall,

northward. What do you see?- Posted like silent sentinels all around

the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in

ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon

the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China;

some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better

seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath

and plaster- tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.

How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

  But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water,

and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but

the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of

yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the

water as they possibly can without falling And there they stand- miles

of them- leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys,

streets avenues- north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all

unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the

compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

  Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes.

Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in

a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic

in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest

reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he

will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that

region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try

this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a

metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and

water are wedded for ever.

  But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest,

shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all

the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There

stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a

crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep

his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep

into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs

of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture

lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs

like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the

shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit

the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade

knee-deep among Tiger-lilies- what is the one charm wanting?- Water-

there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of

sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor

poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver,

deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest

his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost

every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some

time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a

passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first

told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the

old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a

separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not

without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of

Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image

he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same

image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of

the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

  Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I

begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of

my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a

passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a

purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides,

passengers get sea-sick- grow quarrelsome- don't sleep of nights- do

not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;- no, I never go as a

passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea

as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and

distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I

abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of

every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of

myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and

what not. And as for going as cook,- though I confess there is

considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on

ship-board- yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;- though once

broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and

peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say

reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the

idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and

roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in

their huge bakehouses the pyramids.

  No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the

mast, plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal

mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump

from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first,

this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of

honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the

land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more

than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot,

you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest

boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure

you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong

decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear

it. But even this wears off in time.

  What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a

broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to,

weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think

the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I

promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular

instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old

sea-captains may order me about- however they may thump and punch me

about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that

everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way- either

in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the

universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's

shoulder-blades, and be content.

  Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point

of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a

single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers

themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world

between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most

uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon

us. But being paid,- what will compare with it? The urbane activity

with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that

we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills,

and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how

cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

  Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome

exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world,

head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is,

if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part

the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand

from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first;

but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their

leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little

suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt

the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to

go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the

Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs

me, and influences me in some unaccountable way- he can better

answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling

voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was

drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude

and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part

of the bill must have run something like this:

  "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

  "WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."

  "BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

  Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers,

the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage,

when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and

short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces-

though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall

all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and

motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises,

induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me

into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own

unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

  Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great

whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all

my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his

island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these,

with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and

sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such

things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am

tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail

forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is

good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social

with it- would they let me- since it is but well to be on friendly

terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

  By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the

great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild

conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated

into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most

of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.