CHAPTER 44
The Chart
Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that
took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with
his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and
bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them
before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you
would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which
there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses
over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of
old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in
which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been
captured or seen.
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over
his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw
shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost
seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the
wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses
upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin,
Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought
out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were
substituted.
For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a
maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain
accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it
might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature
in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who
knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings
of the sperm whale’s food; and, also calling to mind the regular, ascertained
seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable
surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to
be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm
whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could he
be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for one
voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of
the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of
the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have
been made to construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*
*Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an
official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory,
Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that circular, it appears that precisely
such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented in
the circular.
“This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by
five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of which districts
are twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of
which districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that have
been spent in each month in every district, and the two others to show the
number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.”
Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the
sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret
intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in veins, as they are called;
continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating
exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe
of such marvellous precision.
Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight
as a surveyor’s parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly confined
to its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at
these times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width
(more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never
exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads, when
circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at particular
seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating whales may with
great confidence be looked for.
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the
widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so
place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly without
prospect of a meeting.
There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps.
Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for
particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which
haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn out to
be identically the same with those that were found there the preceding
season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances where the
contrary of this has proved true. In general, the same remark, only within a
less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured,
aged sperm whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been
seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian
ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow that were
the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding
season, she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other
feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.
But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so
to speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s chances of
accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only
been made to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a
particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would
become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the
next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined
in the one technical phrase—the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for
several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried,
lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters
for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that
most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there
the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where
the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But
in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which
Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not
permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above
mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes; nor in the
sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his unquiet heart as to
postpone all intervening quest.
Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her
commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and
then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific
in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.
Yet the premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had, perhaps, been correctly
selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. Because,
an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him;
an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend
in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his
vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn
up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China
Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons,
Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and
Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of
the Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.
But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but
a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even
if encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his
hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of
Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and
his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied
the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till
long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries—tallied him,
and shall he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost
sheep’s 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 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.
