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.
