Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer't not thou St.
Vitus' imp —away, thou ague! Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full
before me. Well
..
done! Let me touch the axis. So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the
three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing,
suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from
Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some
nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same
fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.
The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect.
Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell
downright. In vain! cried Ahab; but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three
but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had
perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead.
Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye
three cup-bearers to my three pagan kinsmen there —yon three most honorable
gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when
the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my
sweet cardinals! your own condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not
order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!
Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached
iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him.
Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not
the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance.
The irons! take them; hold them while I fill! Forthwith, slowly going from
one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters
from the pewter. Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous
chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble
league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to
sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the
deathful whaleboat's bow — Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not
hunt Moby Dick to his death! The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted;
and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits
..
were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and
shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds
among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all
dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
..






.. < chapter xxxvii 7 SUNSET >
The cabin; by the stern windows;
Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out. I leave a white and turbid wake;
pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong
swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass. Yonder, by the
ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow
plumbs the blue. The diver sun —slow dived from noon, —goes down; my soul
mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy
that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem;
i, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that i wear that,
that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron —that I know—not gold. 'Tis split, too
—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against
the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the
most brain-battering fight! Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the
sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely
light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er
enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power;
damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!
Good night —good night! ( waving his hand, he moves from the window.)
'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at
..
the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and
they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all
stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the
match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and what
I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad —Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I
am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend
itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this
leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the
prophet and the fulfiller one. That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever
were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf
Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as school-boys do to bullies,
—Take some one of your own size; don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me
down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind
your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments
to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me,
else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my
fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.
Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under
torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle
to the iron way!
..






.. < chapter xxxviii 26 DUSK >
By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning
against it. My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a
madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field!
But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see
his impious end; but feel that
..
I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to
him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who's
over him, he cries; —aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he
lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office, —to obey,
rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read
some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and
tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the
small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may
wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock's
run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
[ A burst of revelry from the forecastle.] Oh, God! to sail with such a
heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped
somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark!
the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence
aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on
the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where
he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the
wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills
me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! 'tis in an
hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge, —as wild,
untutored things are forced to feed —Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the
latent horror in thee! but 'tis not me! that horror's out of me! and with
the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim,
phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!
..






.. < chapter xxxix 2 FIRST NIGHT-WATCH FORE-TOP >
( Stubb solus, and
mending a brace.) Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat! —I've been
thinking over it ever since, and that ha, ha's the final consequence. Why
so? Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and
come what will, one comfort's always left — that unfailing comfort is, it's
all predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor
eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure the
old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift,
might readily have prophesied it —for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I
saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb —that's my title —well, Stubb, what of it,
Stubb? Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what
it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your
horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra! What's my juicy little pear
at home doing now? Crying its eyes out? —Giving a party to the last arrived
harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate's pennant, and so am I—fa, la!
lirra, skirra! Oh— We'll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as
gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim, And break on the
lips while meeting. a brave stave that —who calls? mr. starbuck? Aye, aye,
sir — ( Aside) he's my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken. — Aye,
aye, sir, just through with this job —coming.
..






.. < chapter xl 2 MIDNIGHT, FORECASTLE HARPOONERS AND SAILORS >
( Foresail
rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and
lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.) Farewell and
adieu to you, Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain! Our
captain's commanded. — 1st Nantucket Sailor Oh, boys, don't be sentimental;
it's bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me! ( Sings, and all
follow.) Our captain stood upon the deck, A spy-glass in his hand, A
viewing of those gallant whales That blew at every strand. Oh, your tubs in
your boats, my boys, And by your braces stand, And we'll have one of those
fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand! So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts
never fail! While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale! Mate's Voice
from the Quarter-Deck Eight bells there, forward! 2nd Nantucket Sailor
Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear, bell-boy? Strike the bell
eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch. I've the sort
of mouth for that —the hogshead mouth. So, so, ( thrusts his head down the
scuttle,) Star—bo—l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells there below! Tumble
up! Dutch Sailor Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark
this in our old Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as
..
filliping to others. We sing; they sleep —aye, lie down there, like
ground-tier butts. At 'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail
'em through it. Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell 'em it's
the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment. That's
the way — that's it; thy throat ain't spoiled with eating Amsterdam butter.
French Sailor Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to anchor
in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by all
legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine! Pip ( Sulky and
sleepy.) Don't know where it is. French Sailor Beat thy belly, then, and
wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; merry's the word; hurrah! Damn me, won't
you dance? Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle?
Throw yourselves! Legs! Legs! Iceland Sailor I don't like your floor,
maty; it's too springy to my taste. I'm used to ice-floors. I'm sorry to
throw cold water on the subject; but excuse me. Maltese Sailor Me too;
where's your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right,
and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners! I must have partners! Sicilian
Sailor Aye; girls and a green! —then I'll hop with ye; yea, turn
grasshopper! Long-Island Sailor Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more
of us. Hoe corn when you may, I say. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here
comes the music; now for it! Azore Sailor ( Ascending, and pitching the
tambourine up the scuttle.)
..
Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now, boys!
( The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some
sleep or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.) Azore
Sailor ( Dancing.) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig
it, quig it, bell-boy; Make fire-flies; break the jinglers! Pip
Jinglers, you say? —there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so. China
Sailor Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.
French Sailor Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it!
split jibs! tear yourselves! Tashtego ( Quietly smoking.) That's a white
man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat. Old Manx Sailor I wonder
whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I'll
dance over your grave, I will —that's the bitterest threat of your
night-women, that beat head-winds round corners. O Christ! to think of the
green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the whole
world's a ball, as you scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one
ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once. 3d Nantucket
Sailor Spell oh! —whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm
—give us a whiff, Tash. ( They cease dancing, and gather in clusters.
Meantime the sky darkens — the wind rises.)
..
Lascar Sailor By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born,
high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
Maltese Sailor ( Reclining and shaking his cap.) It's the waves —the
snow's caps turn to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels soon. Now would
all the waves were women, then I'd go drown, and chassee with them evermore!
There's naught so sweet on earth —heaven may not match it! —as those swift
glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide
such ripe, bursting grapes. Sicilian Sailor ( Reclining.) Tell me not of
it! Hark ye, lad —fleet interlacings of the limbs —lithe swayings —coyings
—flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not
taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? ( Nudging.) Tahitan
Sailor ( Reclining on a mat.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!
—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy
mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat!
green the first day i brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me!
—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon
sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee's peak of spears, when they
leap down the crags and drown the villages? —The blast! the blast! Up,
spine, and meet it! ( Leaps to his feet.) Portuguese Sailor How the sea
rolls swashing 'gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds
are just crossing swords, pell-mell they'll go lunging presently. Danish
Sailor Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! Well
done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more
..
afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with
storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes! 4th Nantucket Sailor He has
his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a
squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol —fire your ship
right into it! English Sailor Blood! but that old man's a grand old cove!
We are the lads to hunt him up his whale! All Aye! aye! Old Manx Sailor
How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when
shifted to any other soil, and here there's none but the crew's cursed clay.
Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap
ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birth-mark; look
yonder, boys, there's another in the sky —lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch
black. Daggoo What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm
quarried out of it! Spanish Sailor ( Aside.) He wants to bully, ah! —the
old grudge makes me touchy. ( Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the
undeniable dark side of mankind —devilish dark at that. No offence. Daggoo
( grimly) None. St. Jago's Sailor That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that
can't be, or else in his one case our old Mogul's fire-waters are somewhat
long in working. 5th Nantucket Sailor What's that I saw—lightning? Yes.
..
Spanish Sailor No; Daggoo showing his teeth. Daggoo ( springing) Swallow
thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver! Spanish Sailor ( meeting him)
Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit! All A row! a row! a row!
Tashtego ( with a whiff) A row a'low, and a row aloft —Gods and men —both
brawlers! Humph! Belfast Sailor A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed,
a row! Plunge in with ye! English Sailor Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard's
knife! A ring, a ring! Old Manx Sailor Ready formed. There! the ringed
horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why
then, God, mad'st thou the ring? Mate's Voice from the Quarter Deck Hands by
the halyards! in top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails! All The
squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! ( They scatter.) Pip ( shrinking
under the windlass) Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there
goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal
yard! It's worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year;
Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and
here I don't. Fine prospects to 'em; they're on the road to heaven. Hold on
hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet —they are
your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr!
..
shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale
—shirr! shirr! —but spoken of once! and only this evening — it makes me
jingle all over like my tambourine —that anaconda of an old man swore 'em in
to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness,
have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that
have no bowels to feel fear!
..






.. < chapter xli 9 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; only 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, had
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 ancles, 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
hearthstone, 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 widest 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. Not 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 fire-side interest and awe, to the wild, strange
tales of
..
Southern whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent 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 lance 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 suggestings 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
whaleman. 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
around 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
now 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 a 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 invulnerable 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.
..






.. < chapter xlii 6 THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE >
What the white whale was to
Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could
not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another
thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by
its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and
well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a
comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things
appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some
dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be
naught. Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances
beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised
a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings
of Pegu placing the title Lord of the White Elephants above all their other
magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling
the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag
bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian
Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color
the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the
human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky
tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been
..
even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked
a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this
same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things —the innocence of
brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving
of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many
climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge,
and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white
steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it
has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian
fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar;
and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself made incarnate in a
snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice
of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,
that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send
to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though
directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name
of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the
cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is
specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in
the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the
four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne,
and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these
accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime,
there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which
strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible
in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white
bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth,
flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly
whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even
..
more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that
not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the
white-shrouded bear or shark. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those
clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom
sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's
great, unflattering laureate, Nature.
..
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White
Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed,
small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in
his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of
wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky
Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it
like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The
flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him
with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have
furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen,
western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
bluff-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides
and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over
the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing
all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with
warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he
presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of
trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on
legendary record of
..
this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so
clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which,
though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless
terror. But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the
eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that
whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The
Albino is as well made as other men —has no substantive deformity —and yet
this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous
than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so? Nor, in quite other
aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious
agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the
terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas
has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has
the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it
heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy
symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their
bailiff in the market-place! Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary
experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this
hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of
the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there;
as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the
other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead,
we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even
in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our
phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog —Yea, while these terrors
seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the
evangelist, rides on his pallid horse. Therefore, in his other moods,
symbolize whatever grand or
..
gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest
idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul. But
though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for
it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of
some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness —though for the time
either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated
to impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us
the same sorcery, however modified; —can we thus hope to light upon some
chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek? Let us try. But in a
matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no
man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least
of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by
most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and
therefore may not be able to recall them now. Why to the man of untutored
ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar
character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the
fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims,
downcast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated
Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a
White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul? Or what
is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings (which
will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell so
much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American, than those
other storied structures, its neighbors —the Byward Tower, or even the
Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire,
whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at
the bare mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is
full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all
latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a
spectralness
..
over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of
long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet
sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely
addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central
Europe, does the tall pale man of the Hartz forests, whose changeless
pallor unrestingly glides through the green of the groves —why is this phantom
more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg? Nor is it,
altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the
stampedoes of her frantic seas: nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never
rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched
cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets);
and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a
tossed pack of cards; —it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima,
the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white
veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as
Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the
cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the
rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions. I know that, to
the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be
the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor
to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose
awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon,
especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or
universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively
elucidated by the following examples. First: The mariner, when drawing nigh
the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts
to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his
faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from
his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness
—as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming
round him, then he feels
..
a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is
horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off
soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water
is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, Sir, it was
not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous
whiteness that so stirred me? Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the
continual sight of the snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except,
perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at
such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would
be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to
break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the
scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of
legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
views what seems a boundless church-yard grinning upon him with its lean ice
monuments and splintered crosses. But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead
chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou
surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael. Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled
in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey —why
is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe
behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal
muskiness —why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in
phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild
creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells
cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former
perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of
distant oregon? no: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the
instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though
..
thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the
rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the
prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust. Thus, then,
the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned
frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of
prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to
the frightened colt! Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of
which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt,
somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible
world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. But
not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it
appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous
—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual
things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it
is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. Is it
that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought
of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it,
that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of
color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these
reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide
landscape of snows —a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all
other earthly hues —every stately or lovely emblazoning —the sweet tinges of
sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the
butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not
actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all
deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover
nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and
consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the
great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and
if
..
operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and
roses, with its own blank tinge —pondering all this, the palsied universe lies
before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear
colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes
himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect
around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder
ye then at the fiery hunt?
..
With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would
fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness,
separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that
brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only
arises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the
creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and
hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the
Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all
this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have
that intensified terror. As for the white shark, the white gliding
ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods,
strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This
peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon
that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with Requiem eternam
(eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any
other funereal music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of
death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French
call him Requin. I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a
prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon
watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the
main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast
archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and
throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some
king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange
eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings
so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable
warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy
of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me
then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this.
A goney, he replied. Goney! I never had heard that name before; is it
conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore!
never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman's name for
albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had
..
aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw
that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew
the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly
burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet. I
assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly
lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a
solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have
frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic
fowl. But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will
tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At
last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally
round its neck, with the ship's time and place; and then letting it escape.
But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in
Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and
adoring cherubim!
..






.. < chapter xliii 10 HARK >
! Hist! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?
It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a
cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the
scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to
fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts
of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet.
From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by
the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly
advancing keel. It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the
cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a
Cholo, the words above. Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco? Take the
bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean? There it is again —under the
hatches —don't you hear it —a cough—it sounded like a cough. Cough be
damned! Pass along that return bucket. There again —there it is! —it sounds
like two or three sleepers turning over, now! Caramba! have done,
shipmate, will ye? It's the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning
over inside of ye —nothing else. Look to the bucket!
..
Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears. Aye, you are the chap, ain't
ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at
sea from Nantucket; you're the chap. Grin away; we'll see what turns up.
Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet
been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I
heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that
sort in the wind. Tish! the bucket!
..






.. < chapter xliv 12 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. 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
hunted 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, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoom, 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 ear! 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 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.
..
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,
. 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.
..






.. < chapter xlv 24 THE AFFIDAVIT >
So far as what there may be of a
narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very
interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the
foregoing chapter, in its earliest part, is as important a one as will be
found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still
further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately
understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound
ignorance of the entire subject may
..
induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this
affair. I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall
be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items,
practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these citations,
I take it —the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself. First: I
have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a
harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one
instance of three years), has been again struck by the same hand, and slain;
when the two irons, both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken
from the body. In the instance where three years intervened between the
flinging of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more
than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a
trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery
party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period
of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous
miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart
of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on
its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with
its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this
whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other. I say I,
myself, have known three instances similar to this; that is in two of them I
saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with
the respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the
three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first
and last, and the last time distinctly recognized a peculiar sort of huge
mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three years previous.
I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are
three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard
of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no
good ground to impeach. secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale
Fishery,
..
however ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several
memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been
at distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became
thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar in
that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his
peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable
oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences of the
fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a whale as
there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen were
content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he would be
discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more
intimate acquaintance. Like some poor devils ashore that happen to know an
irascible great man, they make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the
street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a
summary thump for their presumption. But not only did each of these famous
whales enjoy great individual celebrity —nay, you may call it an ocean-wide
renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle
stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges,
and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar.
Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg,
who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was
oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack!
thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the
Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet
they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky?
Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old
tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are
four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or
Sylla to the classic scholar. But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don
Miguel, after at various times creating great havoc among the boats of
different
..
vessels, were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and
killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that
express object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narragansett
Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture that notorious
murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the Indian King Philip. I
do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of
one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form
establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the
White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those
disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error.
So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable
wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts,
historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a
monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and
intolerable allegory. First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas
of the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a
fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they
recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters
and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home,
however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose that
that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the whale-line off
the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the bottom of the sea by
the sounding leviathan —do you suppose that that poor fellow's name will
appear in the newspaper obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast?
No: because the mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea. In
fact, did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or indirect
from New Guinea? Yet I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made
to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one
of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three
that had each lost a boat's crew. For God's sake, be economical with your
lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's
blood was spilled for it.
..
Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an
enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when
narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness, they
have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I declare
upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses, when he wrote
the history of the plagues of Egypt. But fortunately the special point I here
seek can be established upon testimony entirely independent of my own. That
point is this: The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful,
knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in,
utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale has
done it. First: In the year
the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of
Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts,
lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long,
several of the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale
escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon
the ship. dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that
in less than ten minutes she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving
plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of the
crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain
Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the
gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers; for the second
time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has
never tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of
Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the
time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have
conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the
catastrophe.
..
Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year
totally
lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic particulars of
this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale
hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it. Thirdly: Some
eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J—- then commanding an American
sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of
whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich
Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be
sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional
gentlemen present. He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could
so smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a
thimbleful. Very good; but there is more coming. Some weeks after, the
commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was
stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments'
confidential business with him. that business consisted in fetching the
Commodore's craft
..
such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest
port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the
Commodore's interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus
converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will
stand no nonsense. I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little
circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof.
Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral
Krusenstern's famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present
century. Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter. By the
thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we were out in
the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine,
but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing. For
some days we had very little wind; it was not till the nineteenth that a
brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An uncommon large whale, the body
of which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the
water, but was not perceived by any one on board till the moment when the
ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was
impossible to prevent its striking against him. We were thus placed in the
most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its back,
raised the ship three feet at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and
the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon
the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we
saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain
D'Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel
had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily it had
escaped entirely uninjured. now, the captain d'wolf here alluded to as
commanding the ship in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life
of unusual adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of
Dorchester near Boston. I have the honor of being a nephew of his. I have
particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He
substantiates every word.
..
The ship, however, was by no means a large one: a Russian craft built on the
Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after bartering away the vessel in
which he sailed from home. In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned
adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders —the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one
of ancient Dampier's old chums —I found a little matter set down so like that
just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
corroborative example, if such be needed. Lionel, it seems, was on his way
to John Ferdinando, as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes. In our way
thither, he says, about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about
one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a
terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation that they could
hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare
for death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it
for granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a
little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. The
suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of
the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with his
head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin! Lionel then goes on to impute
the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by
stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do
great mischief along the spanish land. but i should not much wonder if, in the
darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by
an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath. I might proceed
with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of the great
power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more than one instance, he
has been known, not only to chase the assailing boats back to their ships,
but to pursue the ship itself, and long withstand all the lances hurled at
him from its decks. The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that
head; and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples
where the lines attached to
..
a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and
secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a
horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if the
sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so
often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to
his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his
character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and
retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes. But I must
be content with only one more and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and
most significant one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is
the most marvellous event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the
present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions
of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon —Verily
there is nothing new under the sun. In the sixth Christian century lived
Procopius, a Christian magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when
Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the
history of his own times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best
authorities, he has always been considered a most trustworthy and
unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all
affecting the matter presently to be mentioned. Now, in this history of his,
Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople,
a great sea-monster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of
Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a
period of more than fifty years. A fact thus set down in substantial history
cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what
precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed
ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am
strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a
long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the
Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain
that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present
constitution of
..
things, a place for his habitual gregarious resort. But further
investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times there have
been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the
Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a
Commodore Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now,
as a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm
whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the
Propontis. In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar
substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I
have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale —squid or
cuttle-fish —lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but
by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its surface. If,
then, you properly put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit,
you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning,
Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships of a Roman
Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale.
..
The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: Every fact seemed to
warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his
operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval
between them, both of which, according to their direction, were
calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby
..
combining the speed of the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the
exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His aspect was most horrible,
and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal
which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his
companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings. Again: At all
events, the whole circumstances taken together, all happening before my own
eyes, and producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided,
calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which impressions I
cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my