CHAPTER 41
Moby Dick
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my
oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I
hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild,
mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed
mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster
against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and
revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his
existence; 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, has completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair
presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than
Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by
various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice
in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident
ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most
part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to
the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.
In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale
had hitherto been popularly regarded.
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of
them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other
whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these
assaults— not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or
devouring amputations—but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those
repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon
Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave
hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more
horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising
terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime
life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever
there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses
the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of
maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which
sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt
from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all
sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with
whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye
its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such
remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a
thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled hearth-stone, or
aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and
longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped
by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty
birth. No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit
over the wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale
did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and
half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually
invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that
visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that
few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of
those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.
But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Nor
even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as
fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died out of
the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among them,
who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to the
Greenland or Right whale, would perhaps—either from professional
inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm
Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those
whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have never
hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the
leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the
North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish
fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor
is the preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more
feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary
times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists— Olassen
and Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a consternation to
every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly ferocious as
continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor even down to so late a time
as Cuvier’s, were these or almost similar impressions effaced. For in his
Natural History, the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale,
all fish (sharks included) are “struck with the most lively terrors,” and
“often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks
with such violence as to cause instantaneous death.” And however the
general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in
their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the
superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation,
revived in the minds of the hunters.
So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few
of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the
Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised
Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare;
such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully
pursued, yet to chase and point lances at such an apparition as the Sperm
Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be
torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable
documents that may be consulted.
Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were
ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing
only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any
certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments were
sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.
One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked
with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the
unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been
encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether
without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of
the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most
erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the
surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time
to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations
regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after
sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to
the most widely distant points.
It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and
as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that
some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies
have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is
it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared that the
interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very
many days. Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen,
that the Nor’
West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the
whale. So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the
prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal
(near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships
floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the
Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come
from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations
are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.
Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing
that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it
cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still
further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but
immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of
spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed;
or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would
be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of
leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.
But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in
the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the
imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon
bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was
elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a
high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features; the
tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his
identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.
The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the
same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive
appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his
vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea,
leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden
gleamings.
Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as
that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific
accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all,
his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For,
when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom
of alarm, he had several times been known to turn 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.
