CHAPTER 124
The Needle
Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of
mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed her on like
giants’ palms outspread. The strong unstaggering breeze abounded so, that
sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before
the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only
known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved
on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens,
reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that
bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time
the teetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye
the bright sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by
the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun’s rearward place, and how the
same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.
“Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of
the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye! Yoke
on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”
But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards
the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.
“East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.
“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist.
“Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”
Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very
blinding palpableness must have been the cause.
Thrusting his head half-way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse
of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost
seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two
compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old
man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened before.
Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses—that’s all.
Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.”
“Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate,
gloomily.
Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than one
case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as developed
in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity
beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things
should be. In instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so
as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle
has at times been still more fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated,
so that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife’s
knitting needle. But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers
the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be
affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even
were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.
Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the
precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly
inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be changed
accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her
undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only
been juggling her.
Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said
nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—
who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings—likewise
unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly
rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as ever
before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if
impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial
hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.
For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing
to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the
quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.
“Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked
thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But
Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance without the
pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker’s needles. Quick!”
Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about
to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to
revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a matter so
wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man well
knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was
not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors, without some
shudderings and evil portents.
“Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him
the things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old Ahab’s
needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will
point as true as any.”
Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this
was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might
follow. But Starbuck looked away.
With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the
lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him
hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after
repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted
needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several
times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some
small strange motions with it—whether indispensable to the magnetizing of
the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain—
he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two
reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its
middle, over one of the compass cards. At first, the steel went round and
round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place,
when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly
back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it,
exclaimed,—”Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level
loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”
One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could
persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.
In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal
pride.
