CHAPTER 28
Ahab
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen
of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches,
and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the only
commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin with
orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they but
commanded vicariously.
Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by
any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly
gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea
became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by the
ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a
subtle energy I could not have before conceived of. But poorly could I
withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready to smile at the
solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the wharves. But
whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness—to call it so— which I
felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all
warranty to cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the
great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set
than any of the tame merchant-ship companies which my previous
experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed this—and rightly
ascribed it—to the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild
Scandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was
especially the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which
was most forcibly calculated to allay these colorless misgivings, and induce
confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three
better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way,
could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a
Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the
ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather,
though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every
degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that
merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of
those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the
transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water
with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted
to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my
glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me.
Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the
fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or
taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole
high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from
among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny
scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender
rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam
sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper
lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels
and grooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off into the soil,
leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born
with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one
could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or
no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego’s
senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted
that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded,
and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an
elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by
what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having
never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild
Ahab.
Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities,
popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of
discernment. So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he
said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out— which might
hardly come to pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do that last
office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid
brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that
not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg
upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg
had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw.
“Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but
like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for
it. He has a quiver of ’em.”
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was
an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg
steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain
Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow.
There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable
wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not
a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their
minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not
painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only
that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his
face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But
after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in
his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the
deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he
became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from
home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him
so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually
in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last
sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the
Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all
whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent
to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite
Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer
upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest
peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from
his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip
home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most
thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to
welcome such gladhearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond
to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth
the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon
flowered out in a smile.
