CHAPTER 111
The Pacific
When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great
South Sea; were it not for other things I could have greeted my dear Pacific
with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was
answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of
blue.
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
awful stirrings seems to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John.
And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and
Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb
and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows,
drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls,
lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-
rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must
ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the
world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves
wash the moles of the new-built California towns, but yesterday planted by
the recentest race of men and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of
Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of
coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and
impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s
whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating
heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the
seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing, like an iron
statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril he
unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose
sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously
inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated
White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length upon these
almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese cruising-ground, the
old man’s purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice;
the Delta of his forehead’s veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very
sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White
Whale spouts thick blood!”
