Adapted from Moby-Dick (structural adaptation)
The Parallax of the White Leviathan and the Axis of the Void
The Voyage Oath, the Whiteness of the Abyss, the Three-Day Chase
Call Me Ishmael: The Gravitational Pull and the Mirage of the Sea
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.
Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like sweet leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.
Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?
Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don't sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.
I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverently, of a broiled fowl than I will.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you.
The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that.
Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content. Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle.
He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago.
It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this: 'Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.' Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about playing the part I did.
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
The transition from the solid land unto the liquid deep is a metaphysical transformation that strips the traveler of his terrestrial illusions. Gathering my sparse possessions into a rough canvas bag—a worn woolen jacket, two coarse shirts, and a few dog-eared volumes of ancient philosophy—I stepped forth into the freezing Manhattan dawn, feeling the fragile bonds of property and municipal law dissolve behind my heels like morning mist upon the bay.
December had frozen the cobblestones of the harbor into jagged iron ridges, and the north wind blew down from the Canadian forests with razor-sharp malice, swirling dead leaves and harbor dust into the gray sky. Chunks of jagged ice floated down the Hudson River, grinding against the wooden pilings of the wharves with cold, hollow murmurs; I thrust my hands deep into my pockets, pulling my collar close about my throat, walking with resolute strides toward the New Bedford ferry terminal.
My destination was the ancient port of New Bedford in Massachusetts, the historic cradle and pulsing heart of the American whaling industry; there the adventurous barques gathered from the corners of the globe, and hardy mariners prepared their gear to hunt the monarch of the abyss across uncharted meridians. I sought a berth upon a ship that possessed sufficient gravity to match the dark yearning of my soul, prepared to confront whatever terrors awaited beyond the horizon.
The ferry horn sounded a deep, melancholic blast across the icy water, its paddle-wheels crushing the floating floes as the vessel moved outward into the bay; standing solitary upon the stern deck, watching the receding spires of the city fade into a smudge of gray smoke, I breathed deep the salty gale that carried the untamed promise of the deep ocean, welcoming the austere baptism of spray that dashed against my brow.
This was to be no ordinary voyage of commerce or profit, but an existential expedition into the uncharted wilderness of human consciousness; upon that trackless plain of blue water, I was destined to witness a titanic conflict between mortal hubris and the indifferent omnipotence of nature, recording with the faithful pen of an outcast the fatal voyage of a doom-laden ship racing toward the void.
The morning sun broke through the leaden clouds, casting a shivering highway of amber light across the turbulent sea; my heart leaped forward with silent exultation, the melancholy of November consumed within the fiery crucible of anticipation. Call me Ishmael, for my long pilgrimage upon the waters of destiny was commenced at last beneath the cold, indifferent stars.
Call me Ishmael. ... Whenever my mouth grows grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; ... then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship!
The Spouter-Inn, the Maori Tattoo, and the Coffin of Destiny
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn on that bitter December night, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. The ancient port of New Bedford, renowned throughout the civilized globe for its intrepid whalemen, lay frozen beneath a pall of darkness; the razor-edged northeast gale howled along the deserted cobblestone thoroughfares, scouring the frost into brittle ridges, while the oil street-lamps flickered faintly through the freezing harbor mist. The very houses seemed to huddle together against the nocturnal fury of the Atlantic, their weathered shingles stained with salt spray and the soot of ancient hearths, presenting a grim barrier unto the wandering stranger.
Groping my way through the labyrinthine alleys with a handful of copper coins rattling in my frozen purse, I sought a shelter humble enough to accommodate my penury. Rounding a dismal corner reeking of pitch and decomposing cod, a swinging signboard creaked mournfully in the blast; it portrayed an exasperated whale stranded upon a reef of rocks, bearing the ominous inscription: 'The Spouter-Inn:—Peter Coffin.' The signboard hung like a scaffold over the icy sidewalk, its hinges groaning like a rusty windlass beneath the steady pressure of the gale that blew directly from the frozen banks of Newfoundland.
'Peter Coffin?' thought I, as that sepulchral patronymic smote my shivering breast with a sudden chill of mortal foreboding. To seek hospitality at an inn designated by a coffin on such an arctic midnight seemed an unvarnished summons unto the tomb; yet the wind pierced my garments like icy needles, and dragging my stiffened limbs across the threshold, I thrust open the heavy oak door, tumbling into the smoky gloom of the public room. In such an arctic squall, a man cannot afford to dispute about ominous portents or sepulchral nomenclature; the animal instinct for shelter silences the fastidious warnings of the intellect.
The interior of the hostelry resembled the cavernous ribs of some stranded leviathan that had decayed through generations upon the beach. Low ponderous ceiling beams, blackened by century-old whale-oil smoke, sagged above the uneven planking; while upon the dusky wall opposite the chimney hung a colossal, enigmatic oil-painting, so thoroughly besmoked and defaced by tobacco-stains that you almost fancied some ambitious artist had endeavoured to delineate primeval chaos bewitched. The vast canvas seemed to have been executed in pitch and tar, depicting the primeval collision of elemental forces before the creation of the terrestrial continents, freezing the observer with mysterious awe.
Upon the adjoining wall hung an appalling armory of cannibalistic whaling weapons: rusty, elbowed lances that had pierced fifty whales between sunrise and sunset; twisted harpoons retrieved from foreign blubber; and towering slabs of sperm-whale bone that formed an archaic screen beside the hearth. The very chamber seemed a pagan altar erected from the skeletal spoils of the untamed deep, breathing the salty odor of primeval slaughter. Every rusty barb had its own bloody history inscribed in blubber and bone, having crossed the line of the equator and explored the uncharted depths of the Pacific in the hands of iron-hearted men.
Behind the dark bar stood the landlord, Peter Coffin, a frosty, weather-beaten personage with cynical eyes, measuring out tot after tot of scorching rum unto noisy crews of boat-steerers. Approaching the counter, I inquired for a bed; wherefore the host scratched his grizzled head, declaring with indifferent candor that every berth was choked with guests, save one solitary garret containing an immense double bed, which I must needs consent to share with a harpooner who had not yet returned from town. The taproom was crowded with harpooners, cooper-boys, and green hands recently arrived from the Vermont farms, all shouting, smoking, and drowning the memory of past voyages in burning liquor.
'I'd rather not sleep with another man,' said I, 'unless he's a very quiet and decent person.' 'Oh,' chuckled the landlord with a broad grin, 'he's a very respectable chap; only he's just arrived from the South Seas, and spends his days peddling a pair of embalmed New Zealand heads through the town; but don't be alarmed; keep your own side of the bed, and he won't take a fancy to your scalp!' 'A harpooner is a dangerous guest when his blood is up,' thought I, 'and to be locked in a dark garret with a wild barbarian armed with New Zealand heads is no pleasant prospect for a civilized man!'
Having no alternative between that dubious accommodation and freezing upon the icy pavements, I accepted the smoking tallow candle and mounted the crooked stairs unto the attic. The chamber was cold as an iceberg, containing a vast pine bedstead draped with an odd patchwork quilt of diverse triangles, a sea-chest in the corner, and frosted window-panes that groaned in the gale like dying sailors. The candlelight flickered wildly in the draft that whistled through the keyhole, casting dancing shadows upon the bare pine walls that resembled the ribs of a dismantled vessel stranded on a reef.
Sitting upon the mattress, I pulled off my boots in shivering hesitation; midnight sounded from the distant belfry, yet the mysterious harpooner appeared not. Flattering myself that the cannibal had found shelter elsewhere, I blew out the candle and crept beneath the heavy counterpane, striving to find warmth within the frigid linen. The sheets were cold as the shroud of a drowned sailor, and pulling the patchwork quilt up to my chin, I lay shivering in the darkness, listening unto the rhythmic beating of the distant surf upon the bar.
Scarcely had my eyelids closed when a heavy, rhythmic footstep mounted the creaking stairway; the latch clicked, the door swung wide, and a colossal figure enveloped in a dark poncho strode into the room, holding a polished harpoon in one hand and a mysterious bundle in the other, bringing with him a blast of freezing harbor air. The intruder moved with heavy, deliberate authority, oblivious to the lateness of the hour, his dark silhouette blotting out the dim gray light that filtered through the frosted window-panes.
Crouching breathless beneath the coverlet, I watched the intruder ignite a candle upon the table. Merciful heavens! What a sight presented itself unto my astonished gaze! The man's face was completely covered with dark, purplish-blue tattooing in strange, intricate spirals and geometric symbols; his skull was shaven smooth save for a solitary scalp-lock knotted with a bone pin; while his skin possessed a deep bronze hue that spoke of tropical suns and cannibal feasts in uncharted archipelagos! It was the countenance of a man who had looked into the blazing crater of active volcanoes and hunted the horned shark in subterranean grottos, utterly estranged from the timid vanities of European towns.
He stripped off his beaver vest, revealing a chest and arms covered with the same primeval hieroglyphs, resembling a living pagan idol carved from ancient mahogany. He moved with the unhurried grace of an untamed tiger, oblivious to civilized proprieties, his massive limbs solid as oak trunks seasoned in salt spray. The muscles of his shoulders stood out like coiled hawser ropes upon a capstan, displaying a physical potency that made mortal combat appear child's play before his primeval vigor.
Untying the coarse parcel, he drew forth a shrunken human head, dried and blackened by ancient herbs, its eyelids sewn shut with fibrous thread. Setting this macabre relic upon the table, he produced a miniature ebony idol—a grotesque, misshapen divinity named Yojo—placing it reverently between the hearth-stones. The withered head possessed a dreadful, sardonic grin, as though the deceased warrior yet remembered the clash of spears upon his native beach and mocked the passing vanity of the living.
Kneeling upon the bare floor, he made a tiny altar of wood shavings, igniting them with a match. Offering roasted biscuits unto the little god, he chanted a series of low, rhythmic prayers with guttural solemnity, his forehead touching the frozen boards, transforming the squalid garret into an ancient pagan sanctuary. The odor of burning camphor and resin filled the cold chamber, mingling with the tobacco smoke to create an unearthly atmosphere of pagan sacrifice and subterranean magic.
His devotions concluded, he extinguished the candle with a sudden pinch of his fingers, and in the pitch darkness, bounded into the bed! His tattooed arm brushed against my shoulder; the clammy touch and the wild odor of the barbarian overwhelmed my senses; wherefore, unable to endure the horror a moment longer, I uttered a piercing shriek of terror that resounded through the rafters of the inn! To be gripped in the dark by a muscular cannibal who had just concluded his cannibalistic devotions was more than my fragile landsman's nerves could endure without an outcry of mortal desperation!
'Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels save me!' I yelled, thrashing wildly within the tangled sheets. The astonished savage sprang up with equal alarm, seizing his harpoon from the corner, his guttural voice barking through the gloom: 'Who-e debel you?—You no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e!' His eyes flashed in the gloom like the lamps of an enraged tiger, and I fully expected the razor-edged steel of the harpoon to pin my shivering ribs unto the pine wainscot!
The door burst open, and landlord Peter Coffin entered with a lighted candle and a poker, roaring with laughter at the spectacle of a pale landsman in his shirt cowering before a naked cannibal warrior brandishing an iron harpoon. 'Don't be afraid, Ishmael,' chuckled the host; 'this is Queequeg, a noble harpooner from Kokovoko; he wouldn't hurt a fly! Queequeg, put down thy iron; this youth has paid for half the bed!' The landlord's laughter shook the timbers of the ancient inn, dispersing the sudden tragedy of the encounter into an absurd comedy of errors that left me blushing for my foolish terror.
The savage looked from the landlord unto me, his large dark eyes exhibiting neither ferocity nor guile, but only the calm, dignified perplexity of a magnanimous spirit. Lowering his harpoon beneath the bedstead, he displayed his white teeth in a reassuring smile, courteously motioning that half the counterpane was entirely at my disposal. The pagan warrior recognized the common bond of mortal vulnerability, laying aside his deadly weapon with an easy magnanimity that would have adorned the court of an emperor.
Beholding that tranquil, noble demeanour, a profound sense of shame smote my heart. Why should a civilized man shrink from a fellow mortal merely because of his complexion or pagan markings? The landlord spoke the truth: better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian! Here was a soul untainted by the corrupt hypocrisies of modern commerce and sectarian dogmas, possessing an innate chivalry that shamed my petty terrors. Civilized men frequently cover their predatory greed with polite hypocrisies and theological pretenses, whereas this barbarian wore his primeval heart upon his tattooed sleeve without deceit or shame.
Nodding my head in respectful greeting, I crept back beneath the heavy patchwork quilt. Queequeg tucked the blankets carefully about my shoulders, and placing his tobacco-pouch beneath the bolster, stretched his colossal frame beside mine, his untroubled, rhythmic breathing soon filling the chamber with the calm dignity of undisturbed repose. His enormous arm thrown across the counterpane seemed a fortress of steadfast protection against the bitter squalls that rattled the shingles of New Bedford through the midnight hours.
Through the long hours of the frosty darkness, while the north gale battered the ancient gables of New Bedford, we lay peacefully together like brothers of one blood beneath that colorful counterpane. The unnatural chill of the December night vanished before the quiet warmth of human communion, proving that universal brotherhood flourishes best where civilized vanity is discarded. In that mutual warmth we found a sanctuary that surpassed the gilded pavilions of kings, united by the universal law of fellowship that binds all lonely travelers beneath the stars.
The intricate tattoos upon his skin were the sacred hieroglyphs of an uncorrupted cosmology, carved upon his flesh by a dying prophet of his native isle, preserving the secrets of heaven and earth in living characters that defied the fleeting vanities of European erudition, a walking scripture of elemental truth. The prophet who had traced those intricate lines upon his flesh had died without an interpreter, leaving the warrior to bear through the oceans of the world an unread bible of absolute truth.
Contemplating the rough pine rafters and the silent warrior beside me, I perceived that an unseen providence had orchestrated this strange encounter. Queequeg was the faithful shield and loyal brother assigned by fate to accompany me across the wilderness of waters, a steadfast comrade with whom I was destined to confront the white leviathan of the deep. We were two complementary halves of divided mankind, brought together by an irresistible destiny to balance intellect and instinct upon the deck of the doomed ship.
A tranquil slumber stole over my exhausted senses as the gale subsided outside the frost-encrusted window. In that humble garret of the Spouter-Inn, beneath the sign of the coffin, an outcast philosopher and an untamed pagan prince sealed their covenant of eternal fellowship, writing with quiet affection the opening measures of their tragic oceanic quest. The cold dawn broke in gray splendor across the mastheads of the harbor, while within our attic, peace reigned supreme, sealing an unbreakable covenant of life and death between my soul and the cannibal.
The bed was big enough for two harpooners! ... The landlord spoke the truth: better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian! ... In that freezing winter night, all narrow prejudice dissolved like hoarfrost before the quiet dignity of a noble heathen soul!
Father Mapple's Sermon and the Belly of the Leviathan
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. 'Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!' There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again, every eye on the preacher. He was an elderly man, but endowed with that sort of athletic robustness which has sprung up in the hardy soil of a whaling life. He had been a sailor and a harpooner in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his stern, salt-seasoned eloquence unto the spiritual guidance of this maritime flock.
The pulpit was shaped like the prow of a ship, adorned on either flank with carved scrolls depicting white sea-birds and crossing harpoons. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and casting a dignified 'looking-round' upon his congregation, the old man slowly mounted the rungs, ascending into his high pulpit of spiritual authority. But what was my astonishment, when upon gaining the platform, Father Mapple turned deliberately round, and stooping over the bulwarks of the pulpit, dragged up the rope-ladder step by step, till the whole was neatly coiled within the breastwork of the ship's prow!
I pondered some time upon this strange proceeding. It seemed to say: 'Mortal men, I am severed from your terrestrial level; I have withdrawn into the solitary crow's-nest of the spirit, whence neither temporal flattery nor secular menace can reach my soul; here upon this suspended deck I stand solitary between the tempest of heaven and the devouring deep, commissioned only to speak the absolute truth of God!' Yes, that ship-pulpit was a self-containing stronghold, preaching unto the congregation that the minister of heaven must look down upon the world with unbending independence.
Opening the great leather-bound Bible upon the velvet cushion, the preacher paused a moment, gazing with deep, affectionate solemnity across the sea of upturned countenances. Then kneeling down, he offered up a silent prayer of profound intensity, his hands clasped firmly upon the sacred volume; after which, rising with majestic dignity, he led the congregation in a traditional whaleman's hymn, pitching his deep, resonant voice to a simple, mournful air that rolled through the stone chapel like the surge of distant breakers.
'The ribs and terrors in the whale, / Arched over me a dismal gloom, / While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by, / And lift me deepening down to doom! / I saw the openened maw of hell, / With endless pains and sorrows there; / Which none but they that feel can tell— / Oh, I was plunging to despair! / In black distress, I called my God, / When I could scarce believe him mine, / He bowed his ear unto my voice, / And brought me from the boiling brine!'
The final notes of the hymn died away in a hollow whisper among the marble monuments along the walls, leaving an unearthly stillness within the chapel. Placing his hands upon the carved prow of his pulpit, Father Mapple leaned forward, his gray hair whipping slightly in the cold draft from the gallery, his piercing dark eyes sweeping across the assembly like twin beacons shining through a midnight fog.
'Beloved shipmates,' said Father Mapple, in accents that penetrated the deepest recesses of the soul, 'if you turn unto the sacred book of Jonah, you will find there recorded the most solemn and terrifying lesson that can be addressed unto a mariner's conscience. For this book, containing only four brief chapters, is an inspired sea-drama depicting the eternal conflict between the rebellious self-will of mortal man and the sovereign, inescapable commandments of the Almighty Creator!'
'Look at Jonah!' cried the preacher, his hand descending with the weight of an anchor upon the open page. 'When the divine summons commanded him to go forth unto Nineveh—that great and sinful metropolis—and prophesy against its abominations, what did this frail prophet do? Did he gird up his loins like a faithful messenger? No! He shrank from the peril and the shame; he feared the scorn of worldly princes; and like a miserable coward, he sought to flee from the presence of the Lord!'
'He ran down unto the seaport of Joppa, seeking a passage unto Tarshish; he paid the fare thereof, and went down into the vessel to go with them unto that remote haven! Mark now, shipmates, the unutterable madness of the fugitive! He imagined that a few pieces of silver could purchase an exemption from moral duty; he imagined that four walls of oak and the trackless waste of waters could hide him from that eye which slumbereth not nor sleepeth! But God had prepared a tempest upon the deep, and the ship was like to be broken asunder beneath the assault of the howling billows!'
'The terrified mariners cried every man unto his god, casting their rich cargo into the sea to lighten the vessel; but where was Jonah all this while? Down in the lowest holds of the ship, fast asleep! Yes, wrapped in the cold lethargy of sin, the fugitive slumbered while innocent men labored for their lives! But the captain awoke him with a voice of thunder: "What meanest thou, O sleeper? Arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not!"'
'They cast lots to determine on whose account this dreadful tempest had fallen upon their vessel; and the lot fell upon Jonah! Then they demanded of him his country, his occupation, and his crime; and in that hour of naked truth, the prophet stood unmasked before the world. He confessed his disobedience; he confessed that he had dared to flee from the Creator of the sea and the dry land; and knowing that his life was forfeit unto justice, he said unto them: "Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you; for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you!"'
'With trembling hands the sailors lifted the prophet and hurled him into the boiling surges; and instantly, the fury of the sea ceased its roaring! But did the fugitive find peace in the cold embrace of the waves? Nay! For God had prepared a great fish—a mighty leviathan of the deep—to swallow up Jonah; and plunging downward into the abyss, the rebellious prophet was engulfed within that living tomb of blackness and suffocation!'
'Think of it, shipmates!' Father Mapple whispered in thrilling, confidential accents that made the blood run cold. 'Down into the belly of the whale was Jonah hurled! Into the midst of the seas, where the floods compassed him about, and all the billows passed over his head! The weeds were wrapped about his head; the earth with her bars was about him forever; shut up within the foul, steaming interior of a monster of the deep, surrounded by the rotting bones of ancient prey, Jonah dwelt in the blackness of darkness for three days and three nights!'
'There, stripped of all worldly pride, severed from the light of the sun, tasting the bitterness of eternal despair, Jonah came unto himself! He did not rage against the divine decree; he did not curse the leviathan that held him fast; but out of the belly of hell he cried unto the Lord with tears of genuine repentance, acknowledging that salvation belongeth unto God alone! And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land!'
'Jonah was delivered!' Father Mapple shouted, his voice ringing like a clarion through the vaulted chapel. 'Delivered from the jaws of death, transfigured by the discipline of the deep, and sent forth anew to accomplish his divine mission in the streets of Nineveh! He had tasted the full bitterness of rebellion, and through that bitter baptism, had learned the supreme glory of obedience!'
'Now, shipmates, what is the two-fold lesson of this inspired history?' The preacher paused, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, leaning his breast against the ship's prow with passionate intensity. 'First, it warns us of the fatal folly of fleeing from our highest moral obligations. Whosoever seeks to evade the divine call will find that the universe itself conspireth against his flight; the tempest will pursue him, the lot will point him out, and the abyss will open wide its jaws to receive his fallen soul!'
'And second, it proclaims the glorious gospel of spiritual redemption through suffering. In the deepest belly of the leviathan, when all hope seems extinguished, sincere repentance can yet reach the throne of heaven! True greatness consists not in defying the sovereign laws of the cosmos with petty mortal arrogance, but in bowing before the divine majesty, accepting the stroke of righteous chastisement, and praising the eternal order even while we are crushed beneath its wheels!'
'Woe unto him who seeks to please rather than to appal!' Father Mapple continued, his brow dark with prophetic wrath. 'Woe unto him whose good name is more unto him than goodness! Woe unto him who will not tell the truth, though it cost him his life! But delight is unto him who stands against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, declaring the unvarnished truth unto a crooked generation!'
'Delight is unto him who acknowledges no law save the eternal law of righteousness; delight is unto him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this world sinks down beneath him into the black void; delight top-gallant delight is unto him who acknowledges his absolute nothingness before the majesty of God, and dies praising the glory of the infinite!'
The old man ceased speaking, dropping his arms upon the cushion, his head bowed low in silent exhaustion; the congregation sat motionless, awed by the sublime power of that sea-sermon, which seemed to strip mortal life of its petty pretexts and expose the raw, naked soul before the eternal deep. After a long space of reverent silence, the people rose softly from their benches, moving down the aisles with hushed footsteps.
Queequeg and I walked forth into the freezing harbor mist, the thunder of the sermon yet vibrating within our breasts. The pagan warrior maintained a dignified silence, his dark eyes fixed upon the distant horizon where the grey Atlantic surged against the rocks; while within my own heart, the image of Jonah within the belly of the whale had become the terrible, prophetic symbol of our approaching voyage.
The lesson of the sermon was clear: upon the trackless waters of existence, there is no escape from the sovereign destiny that claims us; we must plunge into the stormy deep, confront the devouring leviathan, and either perish in our rebellion or achieve through trial our ultimate spiritual transfiguration.
Returning unto the Spouter-Inn, we packed our meager sea-bags, resolved to delay our departure no longer; our destination was the legendary sand-bar of Nantucket, the ancestral home of the American whaling fleet, where our true ship of destiny awaited our arrival.
Leaving the cobbled streets of New Bedford behind us, we embarked upon the packet schooner that was to bear us across the sound toward the misty shores of Nantucket, our eyes set steadfastly toward the horizon, prepared to confront whatever monsters the unknown deep might yield unto our quest.
Every step whereby mortal man striveth to flee the divine summons doth but plunge him deeper into the devouring abyss! ... Behold Jonah in the belly of the whale, within that living tomb of suffocation and despair; there at last he acknowledges his absolute nothingness! ... Though crushed and rent asunder by the almighty hand, still in his brokenness let him magnify the eternal majesty of the cosmos!
Nantucket, Queequeg's Divination, and the Ribs of the Pequod
A sullen, freezing sea mist hung like a funeral shroud over the granite headlands of Nantucket as the packet schooner rounded the low sand-spit after a perilous passage through the northern shoals. This insular, barren sand-ridge, rising naked from the gray amphitheater of the Atlantic, occupied an almost mythical pre-eminence in the annals of global navigation; possessing neither timber, coal, nor arable loam, its hardy inhabitants had turned their entire existence waterward from primeval generations, conquering the distant oceans with spade and harpoon till they annexed the globe unto their sandy bar. The very name of Nantucket sounded like a wild sea-cry echoing over the breakers, evoking images of lonely horizons where solitary whale-boats challenged the monarchs of the abyss beneath indifferent northern heavens.
Queequeg and I disembarked upon the frosted wharf, the bitter sea wind cutting through our rough garments, carrying the arctic chill of Labrador and the remote currents of Cape Horn. We found lodging at a quaint hostelry near the fish-market known as 'The Try-Pots', kept by Hosea Hussey, cousin unto Peter Coffin of New Bedford. Two immense cast-iron try-pots hung from a wooden gallows above the door like giant instruments of martyrdom, swinging mournfully in the gale; yet Mrs. Hussey's steaming bowl of clam and cod chowder, enriched with ship-biscuits and savory butter, provided a welcome sanctuary from the freezing squalls. The interior of the tavern smelled richly of chowder, tarred hemp, and dry pine chips, while the roaring fire in the central grate crackled with cheerful defiance against the freezing squalls that rattled the windows.
Having secured our lodging, I proposed an immediate visit unto the docks to inspect the whaling vessels preparing for sea; but the Polynesian prince laid his firm hand upon my shoulder, checking my haste with grave authority. Drawing from his bosom the little ebony idol Yojo, he placed it reverently upon the table, and producing several polished knuckle-bones and carved cowrie shells, prepared to consult his ancestral oracles according to the dark rituals of his native archipelago. His tattooed fingers handled the primitive relics with absolute reverence, demonstrating that in the heart of this untamed islander, spiritual devotion was an essential reality rather than a superficial Sunday formality.
Kneeling upon the sanded floor, he chanted a series of guttural incantations, repeatedly casting the divining bones into the candle-light; till after an hour of profound contemplation, the tattooed warrior arose, returning the idol unto his pouch, announcing with majestic gravity that the supreme Yojo had delivered his divine decree: the entire responsibility of selecting the vessel for our voyage was laid upon my shoulders alone, and Queequeg was forbidden by his god from setting foot upon the docks until the articles were signed! The responsibility weighed heavily upon my unseasoned shoulders, yet I recognized that in the strange geometry of our fellowship, the barbarian's instinct had discerned some hidden affinity between my soul and the vessel of our doom.
'Yojo say,' murmured the savage in his broken, expressive accents, 'you pick-ee ship, we get-ee plenty blubber, plenty oil; you pick-ee bad, we go drown-ee in whale belly! Yojo trust-ee you; go, brother, find-ee good craft!' Awed by this extraordinary manifestation of heathen faith, I accepted the solemn charge, and buttoning my coat against the gale, strode solitary through the frozen lanes of Nantucket toward the shipping wharves. The cold cobblestones of the wharves were slippery with frozen brine, and the masts of the fleet rocked in unison against the gray sky like a barren winter forest swaying before an approaching gale.
Walking along the crowded waterfront, I beheld a remarkable gathering of whaling barques and schooners from every port of New England: some bright with fresh paint and modern copper fittings; others clumsy, apple-bowed tubs built for patient blubber-boiling; but passing these ordinary craft with indifferent eyes, my gaze was suddenly arrested by an ancient, formidable vessel lying in the most secluded berth of the harbor—a craft that breathed the untamed ferocity of a prehistoric leviathan! She sat upon the freezing water like some formidable pirate craft of the Spanish Main, her dark bulwarks bristling with the trophies of a hundred successful voyages across the tempestuous meridians of the globe.
It was the famous Pequod! Named after that celebrated and exterminated tribe of Massachusetts red men, she presented the appearance of a dark, weathered veteran of a hundred oceanic campaigns. Her hull was blackened by fifty years of tropic suns and polar blizzards, her timbers scarred by collisions with icebergs and coral reefs; around her bulwarks ran a continuous barbaric fretwork of polished sperm-whale teeth, gleaming in the winter sunset like the ivory jaws of an open trap! Her open quarter-deck seemed a barbarian throne-room designed for some solitary monarch of the sea, where ivory and iron took the place of gold and velvet in proclaiming the ruthless sovereignty of mortal courage.
Still more appalling were the details of her deck: her pins and bitts were carved from the dense bone of the sea-unicorn; her planks were darkened by decades of unctuous blubber-stains; while in place of an ordinary brass steering wheel, she carried at her stern an enormous tiller fashioned from the solid lower jawbone of a sperm whale! Polished smooth by the grip of forgotten helmsmen, this ivory beam required the steersman to clasp the very bone of the monster while directing her course through the tempest! To stand upon that quarter-deck and grasp that colossal jawbone tiller was to feel the primeval pulse of the ocean transmitted directly through the skeletal relics of its mightiest denizen.
She was a cannibal of a craft, tricked out in the barbaric spoils of the leviathan! Her heavy spars seemed to groan beneath the weight of an unearthly destiny, casting vast shadows across the ice-rimmed water. Mounting the gangway with a tremor of awe, I descended the companionway unto the after-cabin, where two elderly Quakers sat beside a glowing stove in grave conference. Every knee and timber of her hull was saturated with the oil of captured leviathans, until the vessel seemed less a creation of human carpentry than a reanimated sea-monster obeying the commands of an invisible master.
These were Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad, the principal retired owners and managing directors of the vessel. Both were members of that austere religious society which preaches non-violence unto men; yet both were hardened whalemen who had pursued the leviathan through blood and slaughter across forty oceans. Captain Peleg was a fiery, blustering old salt, given to volcanic oaths and furious gestures; while Captain Bildad was a gaunt, mummified figure in a broad-brimmed beaver, holding an open Bible upon his knees, combining pious scripture-reading with an insatiable appetite for secular profits. The two retired captains presented a striking contrast of maritime character: Peleg embodying the volcanic ferocity of the chase, and Bildad the icy precision of commercial ledger-books sanctified by pious texts.
'Come along, young man!' shouted Captain Peleg, blowing a cloud of pungent tobacco smoke from his clay pipe. 'Dost thou want to ship aboard the Pequod? What dost thou know of whaling? Hast ever clapt an eye upon a live sperm whale, or felt the boat spun round by a sixty-foot tail in the middle of the Pacific?'
'I have served several voyages in merchantmen, sir,' I replied respectfully, 'and know my duty aloft as well as any sailor before the mast; and though I have not yet darted an iron into a whale, I have a stout heart and fear no storm that blows!'
'Merchant service!' roared Peleg with a scornful laugh, pacing the cabin with his hands behind his back. 'A merchant sailor aboard a whaleman is like a dancing-master in a wrestling ring! In a merchantman thou hast but to pull ropes and furl canvas; but in a blubber-hunter thy soul is staked upon the dart of the harpoon! Hast thou seen our commander, Captain Ahab?'
'No, sir,' said I, 'I have not yet seen him.'
'He is a grand, ungodly, god-like man, lad!' Peleg whispered, his voice dropping into a solemn, almost fearful cadence. 'He hath been in colleges and among cannibals; he hath been struck by lightning, and walked through the furnace of affliction! On his last voyage, a monstrous whale reaped away his leg, as a mower a blade of grass; and now he paces the quarter-deck upon an ivory heel carved from a whale's jaw! A moody, desperate man, but a peerless sea-captain whose word commands the ocean!' The mention of that dreadful name sent a thrill of awe through my veins, evoking the vision of an iron-willed titan pacing his quarter-deck upon a whalebone limb beneath the lonely constellations of the south.
At this juncture, Captain Bildad looked up from his scripture, his hollow voice croaking like a raven from the chimney-corner: 'Yea, affliction is the lot of mortal clay; but brother Peleg, in discussing the spiritual hazards of our venture, let us not neglect the temporal ledger. This inexperienced youth hath never darted a lance; wherefore, in accordance with the prudence of our Society, what lay dost thou propose to grant him? Methinks the seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay is an ample portion for a novice!'
'The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay?!' thought I, recalling that this fractional share would scarcely purchase my sea-boots after a three-years' voyage through the tropics! The pious Quaker's generosity would have starved a mouse upon the ballast-stones!
'Get out with thy seven hundred and seventy-seventh, Bildad!' shouted Peleg, his face turning purple with indignation. 'Dost thou want to murder the boy before he sets foot aboard? Look here, Ishmael; I'll give thee the three-hundredth lay! It is a fair wage for a stout lad, and if thou dost pull a good oar, thou wilt not repent the bargain!' The generous indignation of Captain Peleg redeemed the mercenary atmosphere of the cabin, proving that beneath his blustering exterior there beat the courageous heart of a genuine South-Sea sailor.
Bildad groaned in holy distress, recording the figure in his ledger while murmuring a text concerning the deceitfulness of earthly riches; after which the articles were spread upon the table, and taking up the quill, I signed my name unto the rolls of the Pequod, binding my mortal existence unto that barbaric craft for an indefinite pilgrimage across the globe. As the ink soaked into the yellow parchment, I felt that I had severed the last link that bound my conscience unto the safe commonplaces of Christian land, embarking upon an irreversible trajectory of fate.
I then informed the owners that I possessed a comrade—a peerless Polynesian harpooner named Queequeg—who desired to ship as a boat-steerer. Bildad at first recoiled in pious horror at the thought of admitting an unbaptized cannibal aboard a Quaker craft; but Peleg cut him short with characteristic bluntness: 'Tush, Bildad! The Lord cares naught for catechisms when a whale is sounding! A man who can hit a porpoise with a harpoon at thirty yards is Christian enough for the Pequod! Bring him aboard tomorrow, and if his eye is true, he shall have the best lay in the ship!'
Ascending unto the deserted deck, I stood beneath the towering masts that swayed against the frosty stars. A cold sea wind whistled through the frozen rigging, rattling the ivory pins along the rails with the dry clatter of human bones; while far beyond the harbor mouth, the dark surges of the Atlantic rolled inward like midnight battalions advancing unto war. The winter wind sang through the rigging of the three masts like a chorus of unquiet spirits, mourning for the brave souls who had perished in the southern latitudes and warning of the dark perils to come.
The Pequod seemed already a phantom vessel, severed from the peaceful commonwealth of Christian shores, waiting in her icy berth to receive the doomed crew that fate was assembling from the four corners of the globe. Groping my way down the icy gangway, I hurried through the dark streets toward the Try-Pots, eager to communicate unto my sleeping brother the solemn covenant we had sealed with the deep.
The stars shone with sharp, glacial brilliance through the rifts of the northern clouds, illuminating the lonely rooftops of Nantucket; while far away beneath the equator, within the boundless solitude of the Pacific, the white leviathan breached through the glittering foam, unaware that its mortal antagonists had set their hand unto the fatal parchment.
The die was cast; my soul was pledged unto the voyage, and turning my back upon the lights of the town, I welcomed the austere shadow of the coming storm, prepared to follow the ivory-heeled monarch across the trackless waste unto the end of all things. The lights of Nantucket faded into the cold obscurity behind my footsteps, as I hastened through the frosted lanes, bearing within my breast the secret covenant that pledged our lives unto the quest of the white leviathan.
She was no ordinary whaling craft; she was a cannibal of a craft, tricked out in the barbaric spoils of the leviathan! ... Behold her decks, dark with the stains of a thousand oceanic slaughters; look upon her tiller, carved from the massive ivory of a whale's jaw! ... Ishmael, thou hast set thy hand unto the articles, mortgaging thy mortal soul unto a voyage that races toward the abyss!
The Prophet Elijah and the Articles of the Void
On the following morning, a dense freezing fog lay like a leaden canopy over the frozen harbor of Nantucket, while the northeast gale swept across the cobblestones, driving clouds of sharp ice-pellets before its relentless fury. Queequeg and I issued forth from the Try-Pots, laden with our heavy sea-chests, bound for the berth where the Pequod lay moored; but as we traversed a narrow, deserted lane choked with discarded whalebones and empty oil-casks, a ragged, limping figure stepped suddenly from the shadow of an abandoned boat-shed, planting himself directly across our path with an air of sinister authority. On that fateful morning, the biting winter frost seemed to carry the breath of an ancient doom across the salt-encrusted cobbles of the deserted port.
He was a gaunt, weather-worn veteran of the seas, enveloped in a threadbare pilot-cloth jacket encrusted with salt and grease, his grizzled hair streaming wild and tangled in the wind like a mass of dried kelp cast up by a storm. His withered countenance was mottled with leprous white spots where frostbite had scathed the flesh; while from beneath his shaggy brows, a pair of deep-set eyes smoldered with a strange, unearthly phosphorescence. Pointing a bony claw toward my breast, he demanded in accents that sounded like the grinding of pebbles beneath the surf: 'Shipmates, have ye shipped in that craft yonder?' His spectral appearance was like an unquiet phantom from the lower depths, bearing upon his wasted person the indelible marks of countless maritime shipwrecks.
'Yes, friend,' said I, somewhat startled by his sudden appearance, but determined not to be intimidated by a wandering beggar; 'we signed the articles yesterday, and are now part of the company of the Pequod; pray, what is that to thee?'
At these words, the old man burst into a dry, mocking laugh that resounded hollowly between the wooden gables of the lane, startling a flock of gulls perched upon the eaves. 'Shipped! Ha, ha! Shipped in the Pequod!' he chuckled, slapping his knee with bitter merriment, leaning forward to whisper into my ear: 'Tell me, young man, when thou didst set thy name unto that yellow parchment, didst thou sign away thy mortal soul as well?! Knowest thou who Captain Ahab truly is, or unto what dark master his spirit was mortgaged long ago?!' His shrill laughter grated upon the raw air like rusty hinges on a neglected crypt, echoing down the bleak alleys of Nantucket with harrowing mockery.
'Pshaw, old man!' I exclaimed, pushing aside his withered arm with indignant disgust. 'Keep thy foolish raving for those who care to listen! Captain Ahab lost a leg upon his last cruise, as any brave whaleman might; but Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad assure us that he is a grand, pious, and peerless commander! If thou art athirst for rum, here is a sixpence; but if thou art come to frighten greenhorns, thou hast mistaken thy customers!'
'Grand and peerless, eh?' The old sailor ceased his laughter, his mocking grimace transfigured into an expression of glacial solemnity and profound compassion. Lowering his finger, he gazed earnestly upon Queequeg's tattooed countenance, and in a thrilling whisper that chilled the blood within my veins, replied: 'The world imagines that Ahab lost only a limb of common flesh; but they know naught of the primeval horror that transpired upon the stormy banks of Japan! In that terrible encounter, his soul was torn up by the roots, surrendered forever unto the dark powers of the abyss!' The savage majesty of Queequeg remained unperturbed, yet even his stoicism seemed momentarily arrested by the terrible solemnity of the old man's whispered revelation.
'Hast thou heard the whisper that runs through the forecastles of the south?' he continued, glancing furtively up and down the empty thoroughfare. 'When the lightning struck his ship off the Cape of Good Hope, shriveling the mainmast unto a charred spar, Ahab stood solitary upon the quarter-deck, shedding his own blood upon the iron bitts to seal an unholy covenant with the fiend! He hath sworn to sacrifice the Pequod and every living soul aboard her upon the altar of his monomaniac revenge! The articles ye have signed are naught save an executioner's warrant issued by the pit!' He spoke of that tempestuous night with a fearful intimacy, as though his own eyes had beheld the forbidden compact upon the planks of the doomed vessel.
Though I strove to despise these terrible pronouncements as the delusions of a lunatic, the terrifying earnestness of his manner pierced my soul with an icy shudder of superstitious dread. Gazing upon the mysterious prophet, I demanded in troubled tones: 'Who art thou, old man? Why dost thou dog our steps with these monstrous prophecies? What is thy name?' A creeping chill invaded my veins, for despite his ragged misery, there dwelt within his withered frame an awful certainty that defied all rational skepticism.
'Men have called this wretched carcass by many names,' the stranger replied with a sardonic twitch of his lips; 'but along the docks they call me Elijah! Yes, Elijah, after that ancient seer who warned the wicked King Ahab that the dogs should lick his blood by the pool of Jezreel! I seek neither thy silver nor thy bread; I come only that thy soul may not plunge blindfold into the jaws of destruction without a final warning from old Elijah!' In the grim annals of ancient prophecy, no messenger ever delivered a more chilling summons unto doom than this frostbitten beggar standing upon the pier.
Turning his back upon us, the prophet hobbled away into the swirling fog; but pausing upon the corner of the lane, he turned once more, his hollow eyes burning through the mist with sepulchral intensity: 'Go then! Embark upon that craft of bones and blood! Spread your canvas unto the unpitying ocean! But remember old Elijah's parting word: when the final hurricane bursts upon the equator, not a soul of that ship's company shall see home again, save one solitary wanderer to tell the tale!' His gaunt silhouette seemed to lengthen against the pale sky, stamping upon our outbound souls the inescapable seal of that solitary survivor's destined testimony.
With that dreadful benediction, he vanished into the gray gloom, leaving his terrifying words ringing in our ears like a passing-bell. I stood motionless upon the icy cobblestones, my heart beating with suffocating violence; while Queequeg, calmly knocking the ashes from his pipe, laid his tattooed hand upon my shoulder, bidding me disregard the ravings of a crazy landsman, and press forward unto our vessel with an unshrinking heart.
Reaching the berth where the Pequod lay moored, we found the harbor wrapped in the deep silence that precedes the winter dawn. Thick vapors drifted across the black water, through which the towering masts of the ship rose like naked pines against the starry heavens, their rigging hung with heavy icicles that glittered in the starlight like suspended daggers awaiting their victims. The ancient hull rested upon the black tide like an elemental fortress of oak and iron, waiting to cleave the wilderness of waters toward her fatal rendezvous.
Shouldering our chests, we mounted the frosted gangway. The deck was deserted, save for second mate Stubb, who slumbered in his heavy watch-coat beneath the shelter of the galley; all was quiet, save for the rhythmic creaking of the timbers as the hull swayed gently with the tide. But as we advanced toward the forecastle scuttle, an extraordinary movement near the stern arrested my attention!
Through the rifts of the morning vapor, I distinctly perceived several dark, agile forms gliding from the shadow of the wharf aboard the ship! They moved with the noiseless dexterity of apparitions, wrapped in dark oriental cloaks, their heads enveloped in voluminous turbans; in the twinkling of an eye, these mysterious figures slipped down the after-companionway into the locked steerage beneath the quarter-deck, the hatch closing softly behind them without a sound! They vanished into the dark steerage with uncanny swiftness, leaving behind them only a subtle fragrance of foreign spices and an atmosphere of brooding conspiracy.
'Didst thou see them, Queequeg?!' I whispered, clutching my comrade's arm in renewed amazement. 'Who are those shadowy phantoms that creep aboard like thieves in the night? Is our ship already haunted by secret stowaways before she hath weighed her anchor?!'
The savage whaleman gazed toward the silent hatchway, his keen dark eyes narrowing in thoughtful contemplation; but after a brief scrutiny, he shrugged his broad shoulders, replying with philosophical indifference: 'Big ship always have plenty ghost creeping in dark; so long they no steal our biscuit, we no care; the great ocean show everything when time come!'
Ere I could pursue the mystery further, the heavy tread of Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad sounded upon the gangway. Mounting the deck with lantern in hand, Captain Peleg roared his morning commands, arousing the sleeping watch and setting the whole ship in motion with tempestuous energy, inspecting every line and pulley with the experienced eye of an ancient salt. Captain Peleg's tempestuous vigor resounded across the frosted deck, driving every man unto his station with the unrelenting urgency of an ancient sea-captain.
Captain Bildad followed close upon his heels, Bible in hand, auditing the provisions with scrupulous and miserly precision. The pious Quaker warned the boatswain that not an ounce of salt-junk nor a single sea-biscuit must be squandered upon the voyage, reminding the crew that wastefulness was an abomination in the sight of heaven, while keeping a watchful eye upon the tallow candles and spare canvas. His scrupulous arithmetic weighed every pound of pork and biscuit, demonstrating how pious devotion and commercial ruthlessness walk hand in hand along the waterfront.
Observing that strange partnership between scripture-reading and commercial rapacity, I reflected upon the terrible prophecy of Elijah. In this miniature commonwealth of maritime enterprise, religious piety served not to soften the rigors of dangerous labor, but to sanctify the ruthless extraction of wealth from the perils of the deep; the owners remained in safety by their Nantucket hearths, while we were commissioned to venture our lives among the icebergs and sharks for their enrichment. It was the universal tragedy of human labor, where the humble sailor risks his life upon the tempestuous wave while the wealthy merchants reap the golden harvest in tranquility.
Beneath the relentless driving of the owners, the Pequod awoke unto turbulent life; thirty sailors of diverse nationalities and complexions tumbled down into the dark forecastle, slinging their hammocks beneath the low deck-beams amid the pungent odors of tar, wet wool, and cheap tobacco; a gathering of desperate outcasts assembled from the four quarters of the globe, unaware that their vessel was already marked for an extraordinary and tragic destiny. Thus was assembled the motley commonwealth of our outbound ship, thirty souls bound together by the invisible threads of a dark and inescapable catastrophe.
I secured my hammock in the darkest corner of the forecastle, while Queequeg suspended his harpoon above our sea-chests, placing the little black idol Yojo upon the lid to receive his morning prayers. Watching the savage perform his simple devotions, the lingering dread inspired by Elijah's prophecy subsided into a calm, unbending resolve to meet whatever fate awaited us upon the deep.
The articles were signed, the shore was left behind, and all retreat was cut off by the frozen Atlantic; in such an hour, fear is but a useless encumbrance unto the spirit. If our voyage was doomed to conclude in catastrophe, I resolved that my conscious soul should serve as an impartial mirror to record each magnificent and terrifying episode of the drama.
Toward noon, the pale winter sun dissolved the harbor fog, illuminating the crowded wharf where the citizens of Nantucket had gathered to witness our departure. Women wrapped in heavy woolen shawls stood with weeping eyes beside the capstan, while children shouted farewell unto their departing fathers and brothers, the ancient sorrow of seafaring communities casting its solemn shadow over the sparkling waves.
Chief Mate Starbuck appeared upon the quarter-deck, his silver whistle sounding the muster of the crew, issuing the stern command to clear the gangways and prepare for the supreme commander's boarding; as the mariners sprang unto the halyards with mingled dread and expectation, I climbed unto the high rigging of the foremast, casting one last look toward the distant boat-shed upon the shore, where the ragged silhouette of old Elijah yet lingered among the timbers, his hollow eyes burning through the mist with sepulchral fury, his phantom hand raised in silent, awful warning toward our outbound craft of doom. The great voyage had begun in earnest, and behind us the prophetic shadow of old Elijah merged forever into the fading contours of the frozen American continent.
Have ye shipped in that craft? ... Know ye who Captain Ahab truly is? His soul was mortgaged unto the dark fiend long ago! ... Go, embark if ye must; but remember old Elijah's words: not a soul of that ship's company shall see home again, save one solitary wanderer to tell the tale!
The Phantom Stowaways and the Winter Launch
It was a short, cold Christmas Day; a freezing gale held dominion over the gray ocean, while the harbor of Nantucket lay locked within a vast sheet of shore-ice under the assault of polar currents. Yet on this sacred anniversary, when landsmen gather about glowing hearths to feast upon roast fowl and sweet wines, the ancient and formidable hull of the Pequod prepared to burst through her frozen barriers and plunge headlong into the trackless wilderness of the Atlantic under the volcanic driving of Captain Peleg. The howling blast seemed to proclaim the eternal antagonism of the wintry elements against the frail ambitions of mortal men.
With long, rhythmic shouts that echoed against the wooden gables of the waterfront, thirty robust mariners threw their weight upon the windlass-bitts, heaving with united vigor upon the frosted handspikes. Link by frozen link, the massive anchor chain rose from the black harbor ooze, groaning beneath the strain with hollow metallic protests; while Captain Peleg, wrapped in his shaggy beaver coat, a clay pipe between his teeth, paced the deck like an enraged sea-lion, cursing the unpracticed green hands and shouting his furious commands unto the sailors aloft on the yardarms. His iron voice pierced through the tumult of the rigging, brooking no hesitation from the frostbitten hands.
Near the ivory tiller stood old Captain Bildad, his broad-brimmed beaver hat pulled low over his hollow temples, holding his open Bible before him in the gale. Pitching his cracked, melancholic voice unto a mournful psalm-tune, the pious Quaker chanted a solemn petition for those who go down to the sea in ships, his tremulous notes fluttering through the shrieking cordage like the cry of a wounded gull, mingling with Peleg's volcanic profanities in an extraordinary duet of New England maritime piety and unbridled worldly aggression. The mournful psalm floated out over the black water, an unheeded prayer offered up for souls already committed unto the deep.
When the vast sheets of canvas were sheeted home and the yards braced sharp unto the northern blast, the heavy timbers of the Pequod shuddered through all their ancient joints. Like a colossal battle-axe wielded by an ancient titan, her sharp prow struck the harbor ice, sundering the floes in thunderous detonations that threw showers of frozen spray high above the bowsprit; and leaping into the open roadstead, the dark vessel severed her last connection with the shore, racing headlong into the tossing gray billows of the open Atlantic. Her stout live-oak timbers groaned with elemental satisfaction as she surged outward toward the rolling wastes of the Atlantic.
The two veteran owners descended the ship's side into their pilot-boat; and as the little craft sheered off into the foam, old Bildad leaned over the gunwale, his eyes dimmed with tears, shouting his parting admonition unto Starbuck: 'Remember the Sabbath, Mr. Starbuck! Suffer not the men to take the name of the Lord in vain; and don't use the good sperm oil to burn in the cabin lamps of nights!' 'Never mind the lamps, boys!' roared Peleg, shaking his fist toward the crew; 'kill whales and fill her up to the scuppers, if ye split your timbers to do it!' The divergent commands of the two veteran owners reflected the contradictory spirit that animated the entire enterprise of Nantucket.
The pilot-boat diminished into a black speck against the surging horizon, and the sailors of the Pequod turned their countenances steadfastly toward the open ocean. The solitary white beacon of Nantucket sank beneath the swirling snow-squalls of the winter sky, and all the laws, institutions, and tender domesticities of civilized mankind were severed from our existence; we had launched our lives upon a liquid desert governed only by the primal laws of elemental strife. We were now adrift in the boundless solitude of the ocean, cut off from all terrestrial communion and ancestral sanctuary.
The North Atlantic winter assaulted our outbound barque with merciless fury; freezing gales scoured the barren decks, and the spray froze upon the bulwarks until the vessel seemed encased in an armor of solid ice. Masts, spars, and shrouds were coated with glittering sheaths of frost; icicles hung like daggers from the catheads; and aloft in the tops, the men worked with frost-bitten fingers, tearing their bleeding flesh from the frozen canvas, balancing upon icy footropes over the roaring abyss of black water. It was a baptism of ice and fury, testing the endurance of every soul aboard that outbound fortress of bone and timber.
Yet within that howling theater of storm and cold, the internal discipline of the Pequod began to manifest its formidable efficiency. The operational hierarchy of the ship was commanded by three mates of distinct and remarkable character—veteran whalemen who transformed that gathering of reckless outcasts into a unified, deadly engine of maritime conquest. From the chaos of the outbound crew arose the sharp, mechanical precision of seasoned discipline that commands the sea.
Chief among them was Chief Mate Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, thirty years of age, whose tall, slender frame possessed the unbending resilience of seasoned hickory. His noble, clean-shaven countenance was hardened by twenty years of oceanic exposure, yet illuminated by a quiet, intellectual gravity; the descendant of an ancient whaling lineage whose father and elder brother had been slain by the leviathan, Starbuck was endowed with that rare moral courage which combines absolute physical bravery with a prudent reverence for the sacred boundaries of nature. In his brooding gray eyes dwelt the quiet tragedy of a race that wrings its livelihood from the jaws of the leviathan.
Unshakably loyal unto his Quaker heritage, his thoughts turned constantly toward his youthful wife and infant son upon the sandy island of his birth. To him, the pursuit of the whale was a lawful and honorable livelihood, but an enterprise to be conducted within the limits of practical reason, free from superstitious madness or reckless bravado. 'I will have no man in my boat,' Starbuck was wont to say, 'who is not afraid of a whale; for a courage that is not founded upon the fear of God and the recognition of peril is but a blind and dangerous insanity.' His prudent soul abhorred the vain presumption that tempts the unreckoning fury of the primeval deep.
In striking contrast unto the reflective solemnity of the chief mate was Second Mate Stubb, a robust native of Cape Cod, whose round, cheerful face was never seen without a short clay pipe clenched between his teeth. Good-humored, easy-going, and completely indifferent unto peril, Stubb confronted the wildest hurricanes with the same nonchalant jocularity with which he smoked his pipe beside the try-works; to him, existence was an amusing comedy, and since fate holds the steering oar, fear was an absurd and unprofitable waste of breath. With his ever-burning pipe and cheerful countenance, he mocked the solemn pretenses of mortality with easy humor.
Third Mate Flask was a short, muscular youth from Martha's Vineyard, nicknamed 'King-Post' because of his squat and unyielding stature. Bellicose, stubborn, and devoid of fear, Flask seemed to regard the great sperm whale as a personal enemy that must be destroyed upon sight; to him, the whale-hunt possessed neither majesty nor mystery, but was simply a violent, bloody conflict in which he delighted to plant his lance with unrelenting fury. He pursued the sea-monsters with the blind, unreflecting ferocity of a terrier hunting down vermin in a cellar.
Subordinate unto these officers were the three savage harpooners—the chosen boat-steerers of the ship, gathered from the untamed frontiers of the globe. Queequeg, the tattooed cannibal prince from Kokovoko, pulled the harpoon-oar in Starbuck's boat, his silent dignity commanding the respect of every Christian sailor before the mast. His silent presence upon the forward thwart imparted a tower of barbaric strength unto the chief mate's crew.
In Stubb's boat stood Tashtego, an unmixed red Indian from Gay Head, the historic promontory of Martha's Vineyard; his long, raven hair, high cheekbones, and piercing dark eyes proclaimed his descent from aboriginal hunters. Inheriting the unerring instincts of his warrior ancestors who stalked the wild deer through primeval forests, Tashtego had converted that feral intuition into an unrivaled genius for discerning the faint vaporous spout of the sperm whale amid the turbulent foam of distant breakers.
Serving beside Flask was the gigantic African harpooner Daggoo, an imperial negro from the gold coast, who stood more than six feet five inches in his stocking feet. Moving with the massive deliberation of an elephant, his skin shining like polished obsidian, with heavy gold hoops suspended from his expansive earlobes, Daggoo resembled an indestructible war-god stepping forth from the equatorial jungle, whose colossal frame no tempestuous wave could cause to stagger. His towering stature and noble carriage made him appear like some barbaric emperor standing upon the thwart of a whaleboat.
This cosmopolitan company of white, red, brown, and black mariners began to coalesce into a formidable collective organism amid the relentless challenges of the voyage. In the forecastle, sailors gambled, told seafaring yarns, and dried their frosted garments; while Queequeg and I forged an indissoluble bond of mutual devotion; yet behind this outer harmony, a brooding mystery hung like a pall over the entire vessel—Captain Ahab had not yet appeared upon his quarter-deck! Yet amid this fellowship of hardy mariners, the invisible shadow of our absent commander cast its chilling influence over all.
Days elapsed since the Pequod had cast off her mooring-lines, yet not a single forecastle hand had caught a glimpse of our supreme commander. The door of the captain's cabin remained locked; only Starbuck entered at high noon, bearing the logbook and slate with somber reverence, emerging with a countenance more deeply troubled; the outbound vessel was navigated as though guided by an invisible, disembodied specter. His absence seemed more terrifying than any tyrannical presence, leaving the barque to navigate the wilderness like an orphan craft.
Furthermore, during the dead watches of the night, those stationed on the after-deck heard strange, muffled rumblings and guttural murmurs issuing from the steerage beneath the captain's quarters; these sounds were not the shifting of stone ballast, but the unmistakable movements of living men whispering in unknown oriental tongues; remembering the shadowy forms I had seen gliding aboard, my suspicions deepened into acute alarm. The nocturnal whispers grew more distinct with every passing watch, fueling the superstitious fears of the forecastle.
'What is the old man nursing down there?' the sailors muttered in the shadows of the windlass. 'Is he maddened by the pain of his severed bone, or is he brooding over some unholy purpose?' Wild rumors flourished: some swore that Ahab had lost his wits and was kept in chains; others whispered that he had concealed a crew of man-eating pagans in the steerage to serve his dark vengeance.
Against these turbulent murmurs, Starbuck maintained an unbending discipline, keeping the crew incessantly occupied with reefing, coiling harpoon lines into the cedar tubs, and grinding the lance-blades unto razor sharpness. Under his watchful eye, every whaleboat was equipped with oars, sails, drags, and water-breakers, prepared at an instant's notice to do battle with the monarchs of the abyss. The cold steel of the irons flashed in the winter sun, waiting for the blood of the leviathan to stain their polished barbs.
Steaming southward before the prevailing westerlies, the Pequod left behind the frozen shores of New England, entering the temperate currents of the Gulf Stream; the incrustations of ice vanished from her rigging, giving place unto mild oceanic breezes; the leaden skies opened into an azure vault, and shoals of flying fish skimmed across the sparkling swells like showers of silver blades. The sudden transition from arctic cold unto tropical warmth seemed to awaken all the latent passions of the crew.
Yet as the elements softened, the moral atmosphere aboard grew palpably heavier with impending storm; every mariner felt that beneath this serene surface, a spiritual tempest was gathering its wrath; the solitary monarch slumbering in the locked cabin was like a caged beast awaiting the appointed hour to spring forth and assert his terrible dominion. A strange premonition of crisis weighed upon our spirits as we watched the endless procession of azure billows.
On a tranquil evening, when the western sky was ablaze with purple and crimson fire, I slid down from the foretop after my watch. As I turned toward the forecastle scuttle, the loud, metallic snap of a lock resounded across the quarter-deck!
The busy decks were struck instantly with profound silence; every sailor froze in his tracks, turning his eyes toward the captain's doorway; a heavy, hollow concussion of ivory upon the weathered oak heralded the emergence of the mysterious commander from his subterranean seclusion. The solitary ruler of our floating world had stepped forth at last, bearing upon his brow the tragic destiny of us all.
It was the short, cold Christmas Day; a freezing gale held dominion over the gray ocean; ... like a colossal black battle-axe, the Pequod cleaved the icy surges of the North Atlantic! ... The last shoreline dissolved beneath the gray horizon; we had thrust our craft and thirty mortal souls into the uncharted wilderness of the abyss!
The Ivory Tread and the Scars of the Monomaniac
When the heavy door of dark oak swung slowly inward upon its hinges, the blinding glare of the tropical noon flooded the quarter-deck in sheets of liquid gold. In that sudden hush, all ordinary sounds of the ship seemed struck dead; the creaking of the cordage in the trade-wind, the rhythmic murmur of the long ocean swells against the hull—all dissolved into breathless suspense as a tall, commanding, and withered form stepped forth from the subterranean gloom of the cabin, planting himself in imperial silence before the terrified gaze of thirty mariners. His arrival altered the very nature of our voyage, casting an unearthly spell over the vessel.
It was Captain Ahab; yet he appeared not like an infirm veteran recovering from grievous sickness, but resembled rather some bronze effigy of an unrepentant martyr stepping from the tragic crucible of antiquity. Broad-chested, massive-boned, and erect as a pine-tree that hath survived a century of tempests, his entire person possessed the dark, scorched hue of seasoned hardwood; his weather-beaten countenance seemed hewn from gray granite by the iron chisel of sorrow, every furrowed line encrusted with the salt of distant voyages and unquenchable resentment that time could never soften.
Yet that which inspired the most profound superstitious shudder was the livid, whitish scar that disfigured his features. Emerging from beneath his grizzled locks, this slender streak traversed his right temple, furrowed his cheek, and plunged down beneath his stiff neck-cloth like the vertical fissure left in an ancient oak by a lightning bolt; the older forecastle salts whispered in the dog-watches that this dreadful seam was no mortal scar from steel, but the indelible brand burned into his flesh by celestial fire during an awful night of tempest on the high seas.
Beneath this towering and austere frame, his left leg was entirely missing from the knee downward; in place whereof he stood upon an artificial limb fashioned from the polished bone of a sperm whale's jaw. Polished smooth as marble by long friction with ocean salt, this ivory peg gleamed with sepulchral whiteness beneath the tropical sun; and when its unyielding heel struck the dry planks of the deck, it produced no dull thud of leather, but a hollow, metallic concussion that resounded through the timbers of the ship like an iron pestle pounding in a stone mortar. The dreadful sound was a continuous reminder that our commander was welded unto the skeleton of the very creature he had sworn to destroy.
Upon both sides of the quarter-deck, near the gunwales, several auger holes had been bored into the weathered planking to the depth of an inch; and into one of these sockets Ahab firmly planted the heel of his bone leg. Supported by this ingenious pivot, the monomaniac commander stood firm against the violent rolling of the barque without the aid of cane or lanyard, defying the tossing surges that leaped against the counter, his unbending spine remaining rigid while the Pequod pitched headlong into the blue abysses of the Atlantic.
With his hands clasped behind his back, Ahab maintained his solitary post beside the taffrail, his sunken gray eyes burning beneath heavy shaggy brows as they scoured the trackless horizon. In that unflinching gaze dwelt no commercial calculation of barrels of spermaceti, no tender recollection of wife or hearth; naught save an absolute, metaphysical hatred that plumbed deeper than the ocean abyss, regarding the vast deep only as a cosmic amphitheater wherein his private feud against the universe must be fought to the bitter end. His iron soul looked past the transient wonders of the deep, fixed only upon the white nemesis that swam beneath the tropic waves.
From that memorable noon forward, the captain surrendered himself unto an unceasing vigil, abandoning his berth and the sanctuary of his cabin. In blazing sunshine or beneath the cold glitter of midnight constellations, his restless ivory tread paced the quarter-deck without remission; every step reverberated through the deck-beams into the forecastle below in a monotonous, hollow cadence—thump, thump, thump—tormenting the troubled sleep of the sailors like the perpetual stroke of a funeral bell. It was the heavy rhythm of inexorable destiny beating against the timbered fortress of our floating commonwealth.
At length, during a sweltering night when that pacing had grown intolerable unto the watch below, Second Mate Stubb ventured upon the quarter-deck to remonstrate. Assuming his customary air of good-natured nonchalance, the merry officer approached his commander with an easy smile: 'Captain Ahab, sir, the men have been standing double watches, and find it hard to catch their sleep; would it please your honor to wrap a strip of canvas round that bone heel? It would save the planks and let the poor fellows rest in their hammocks.'
Ere the words were well out of his mouth, Ahab whirled upon him with the sudden fury of a wounded panther, his eyes blazing with sulfurous fire! Thrusting his scarred visage within an inch of Stubb's face, he roared in accents that curdled the blood: 'Down to thy kennel, thou dog! Down, and sleep with the swine! Who gave thee license to measure the steps of thy commander?! If my bone tread awakens thy cowardly slumbers, chew thy nails and sweat it out; but utter another syllable of impudence, and I will strike my harpoon through thy gullet!'
Terrified by this sudden explosion of demonic wrath, Stubb beat a hasty retreat to the main deck; and there, wiping the cold sweat from his temples beside the mast, he confessed unto Flask that Ahab was no ordinary human mortal with an irritable temper, but a being whose spirit was entirely possessed by some supernatural and unappeasable fury, against which all appeals to reason or common decency were as futile as throwing feathers against a hurricane.
From my station in the waist of the ship, I contemplated that terrible commander with awe and trembling reverence. Framed against the boundless majesty of the starry heavens, his solitary figure assumed the tragic grandeur of an ancient titan defying the unreckoning decrees of fate; he stood like a solitary heathen pillar in a desolate wilderness, daring to assert the supremacy of mortal intellect against the blind, mechanical tyranny of cosmic necessity with unwavering resolve.
The nights upon the line were silent as the grave, the Southern Cross burning like diamonds upon the black mantle of the sky; and while the exhausted crew slept, Ahab would seat himself upon his ivory stool near the mizzen-mast, his gray locks stirred by the trade-wind. Sleep rarely visited his eyelids; he sat motionless as an Egyptian monument, his eyes fixed upon the phosphorescent wake that boiled behind the rudder, as though watching for the apparition of the monster that had mangled his flesh. He kept company only with the stars and the eternal shadows that rose from the bottomless caverns of the ocean.
Upon a breathless midnight, when the barque drifted smoothly across the tranquil deep, Ahab drew from his pocket a well-worn brier pipe that had shared forty years of ocean wandering. With trembling fingers the old mariner filled the bowl with dark tobacco, striking a sulfur match that flared up in the darkness, illuminating his bronze features with an unearthly glow as the first blue puff of smoke curled into the night.
Yet after a few brief inhalations, his countenance contorted with bitter self-loathing and disdain. Looking upon the glowing bowl in his hand, he perceived with sudden disgust the mocking vanity of that terrestrial indulgence; how could that sweet, narcotic vapor bring peace unto a breast consumed by the unquenchable fires of revenge?!
'Trivial solace of weaklings!' Ahab muttered in tones of biting scorn. 'This soothing pipe belongs unto contented landsmen who sit by their hearthstones in tranquil dotage; but my spirit is a live coal from the bottomless pit, burning with eternal fury! Away with thee, miserable comforter of slaves! Ahab's wrath needs no counterfeit tranquilizer from mortal weed!'
With a gesture of majestic rage, the monomaniac captain hurled the burning pipe far into the foaming Atlantic! The glowing red bowl described a fiery arc through the midnight air, striking the dark swells with a sharp, hissing extinction, and vanishing forever beneath the black waters that roll above the drowned navies of the world, extinguishing the last spark of human comfort.
I watched that fiery spark expire in the ocean with an inward shudder; the quenching of that pipe was no trivial renunciation of tobacco, but a sacramental divorce from all the gentle affections, consolations, and peaceful domesticities of mortal existence! In that deliberate act, Ahab cast aside the last link that bound his humanity unto his fellow men, consecrating his soul entirely unto the solitary, merciless altar of destruction.
Chief Mate Starbuck observed these ominous developments with mounting anguish and apprehension. The prudent Nantucket officer perceived that the Pequod was being steered upon no lawful commercial cruise; Ahab paid no heed unto the scattered pods of whales that crossed our track, but drove the outbound vessel southward with frantic velocity toward the stormy convergence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The shadow of that unholy purpose hung over the ship like a thundercloud, poisoning the clean air of the trade-winds.
In the forecastle, beneath the smoky light of the swinging oil-lamp, the veterans of Ahab's former voyage began to whisper the terrible particulars of that disaster. It had occurred upon the stormy cruising grounds off Japan, where, in a furious conflict with a gigantic bull sperm whale exceeding eighty feet in length, Ahab's boat had been smashed like an eggshell beneath the onslaught of an intelligence that seemed more than beast.
The creature was known throughout the fisheries as Moby Dick—a colossal white bull whale with a high, wrinkled forehead of dazzling whiteness, and a deformed, sickle-shaped jaw encrusted with rusted irons! In the climax of that bloody struggle, the monster had breached directly beneath Ahab's boat, severing his leg with its shears of ivory, leaving him weltering in his blood upon the crimson foam.
During the harrowing homeward passage of thousands of leagues, while Ahab lay raving in his hammock in the agonies of fever, that physical mutilation was transfigured into a cosmic obsession; his torn flesh became identified with the secret, malignant malice that pervades all creation; and Moby Dick was no longer a dumb brute of the deep, but the visible, living incarnation of every intangible woe and cosmic insult that tortures the soul of man!
Unto Ahab's monomaniac vision, the White Whale was the impenetrable wall shoved near unto humanity's prison-house; to strike that monster was to strike through the mask of appearances and avenge the outraged dignity of the human race! So long as that white leviathan swam victorious through the oceans, Ahab's existence was an intolerable degradation that could be purged only in the blood of the beast. In that magnificent madness, the wounded captain elevated his personal feud into a sacred rebellion against the primeval malice of the universe.
In the dead hours of the night, a lamp burned unceasingly within the captain's state-room; peering through the louvers, I beheld him bending over his charts, with compass and dividers in hand, tracing the seasonal migrations of the sperm whale through all oceans. He recorded every recorded encounter, calculating temperatures, currents, and moon-phases with terrible mathematical rigour, weaving an inescapable web of destruction across the wilderness of the deep.
The barque flew before the trade-winds; high in the mastheads, the three savage harpooners maintained their ceaseless lookout over the shimmering plains of water; and the thirty mariners of the Pequod, magnetized by the overwhelming volition of their commander, were drawn inexorably toward that fateful meridian where the white phantom of the deep awaited their arrival in oceanic wrath.
It was no mortal tread of human bone upon the planks, but the dull, hollow concussion of polished sperm-whale ivory ... Ahab's visage seemed cast in bronze like an unrepentant martyr, while a livid, whitish scar ran from crown to heel, marking his eternal feud against the heavens and the deep!
The Doubloon, the Pasteboard Mask, and the Blood Oath
It was a tranquil afternoon, with a mild breeze blowing across the ocean, while the barque glided smoothly along the northern boundary of the equatorial doldrums. The watch on deck were engaged in their customary tasks, splicing ropes and mending canvas upon the forecastle, when a shrill blast of the silver whistle arrested their attention; Chief Mate Starbuck stepped forth from the cabin gangway with a countenance of uncommon solemnity, summoning the entire ship's company to the quarter-deck in accents that admitted of no delay: 'All hands aft! Tumble up, every mother's son of ye, and muster by the mainmast!'
Surprised by this unprecedented summons, the sailors cast aside their tools and hurried aft from every quarter of the vessel; the harpooners descended swiftly from their dizzy perches aloft; the sleepers tumbled out of their hammocks in the dark forecastle, rubbing their eyes as they emerged into the blinding glare of the afternoon sun. There, before the mainmast, stood Captain Ahab in majestic silence, clutching a heavy iron top-maul in his right hand, while his left fingers held aloft a broad golden disk that glittered brilliantly in the tropic rays. Every mariner felt the heavy oppression of an impending crisis, reading in the commander's iron features the dark prelude unto an unprecedented revelation of will.
Ahab uttered no word until every mariner stood assembled before him in breathless expectation; then, raising his left arm toward the azure heavens, he displayed the glittering coin unto the gaze of thirty men. It was a broad Spanish sixteen-dollar doubloon of pure Ecuador gold, minted in the shadow of the Andes; upon its burnished face were stamped three towering mountain peaks vomiting forth elemental fire, encircled by the curious symbols of the twelve signs of the zodiac. Those three volcanic summits—Pichincha, Chimborazo, and Cotopaxi—seemed to belch forth subterranean fires from the heart of the Andes; while the encircling signs of the zodiac mirrored the mysterious revolutions of human destiny upon the wheel of fate.
'Look ye here, my hearties!' Ahab shouted in accents that rang across the water like the blare of a trumpet. 'This gold is a sixteen-dollar piece, minted from the virgin ore of equatorial volcanoes! Whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw, this Spanish gold shall be his!' With these words, swinging the heavy hammer above his head with titanic force, he drove the golden disk deep into the seasoned wood of the mainmast! Each stroke of the heavy iron hammer sent a deep, shuddering groan through the live-oak heart of the ship, sounding like the driving of iron nails into the lid of a colossal coffin destined to bear thirty mortal souls into the deep.
Three thunderous strokes resounded through the ship as the steel nail bit into the live-oak timber, leaving the golden doubloon firmly anchored to the mast, blazing in the sunlight like the central eye of the cosmos. Ahab cast the hammer unto the deck, and pointing with his trembling finger toward the glittering prize, repeated his imperial proclamation: 'Hearken unto me, all ye that sail in the Pequod! Whosoever of ye first raises me that white whale—the whale known across all oceans as Moby Dick—this gold is his own lawful prize!'
'Moby Dick!' cried the three savage harpooners with instantaneous recognition. Tashtego, the Gay Head Indian, sprang forward with blazing eyes: 'Captain! Was that the great white whale that had three holes punctured through his starboard fluke?!'
'And did he not carry half a dozen twisted irons rusted deep within his towering white hump?!' roared Daggoo, waving his colossal arms like black spars in the gale; while Queequeg, touching his tattooed jaw with his fingers, cried in his broken English: 'Him jaw all crooked like old sickle, eh, Cap'n?!'
'Aye, aye!' shouted Ahab, his scarred face illuminated with demonic ecstasy, stamping his ivory heel until the oak planks groaned beneath his weight. 'It was Moby Dick that dismasted me! It was that unpitying fiend that reaped away my leg like a mower's scythe! Aye, ye know him well, my brave lads; and it is to hunt down that white monster that ye have shipped aboard this barque!' Beating upon his breast with his clenched fist, Ahab laughed with terrifying abandon, his pale lightning scar flushing crimson with demonic blood; to him, this was no private injury of mortal flesh, but a cosmic crusade waged on behalf of all mutilated humanity.
His voice rose unto a tempestuous fury that shook the very canvas aloft: 'Aye, to chase that white fiend round the Horn, round the Cape of Good Hope, round the Maelstrom, and round the eternal fires of perdition ere he escapes our vengeance! For this did ye embark, and for this shall we pursue him across the waste of waters until he spouts his heart's black blood upon the crimson waves!'
A wild, responsive fever ran through the veins of the listening crew, their shouts echoing across the lonely deep; but from that chorus of madness, Chief Mate Starbuck stepped forth, his clean-shaven countenance pale as ashes, his voice trembling with solemn horror: 'Captain Ahab! I came here to hunt whales for oil, to bring home lawful freight for the owners who trusted us with their vessel! I did not ship here to participate in my commander's private feud against a dumb brute! To nurse vengeance against a mindless creature that struck thee only by blind instinct is blasphemy against heaven!' Starbuck's solitary plea sounded mournfully across the silent decks; the pious Quaker strove with all his moral power to reassert the sovereignty of divine law and commercial duty, yet his voice was swallowed up in the tempest of Ahab's consuming wrath.
'Blasphemy, man?!' cried Ahab, stepping within arm's length of his officer, the lightning scar upon his features burning with incandescent rage. 'Talk not to me of blasphemy! I'd strike the sun if it insulted me! For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations!' In that terrible defiance of the elements, Ahab asserted the unyielding majesty of the human intellect, refusing to bow before any celestial power that inflicts wanton torture and degradation upon the spirit of man.
Drawing himself up unto his full height, the monomaniac captain delivered his immortal metaphysical manifesto: 'All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks! But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near unto my soul! Sometimes I think there's naught beyond; but 'tis enough! He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him!' 'Aye, the wall must be breached!' the monomaniac shouted, his words echoing through the rigging like the blast of doom. 'That white leviathan is the tangible bulwark of our cosmic dungeon; and though my limbs be ground to powder, I will plunge my steel through that impenetrable barrier or perish in the noble attempt!'
Starbuck shuddered before that awful avalanche of titanic rebellion, bowing his head in silent, agonized defeat; the noble Quaker realized that reason and piety were powerless against the unchained frenzy of his commander's monomania, and that all aboard were being drawn into an inescapable vortex of destruction. Starbuck bowed his head in hopeless resignation, feeling that the ship was now cut adrift from all moral anchorage, driven by an unholy impulse toward a catastrophe that no mortal hand could avert.
Ahab turned swiftly toward the cabin steward: 'Bring forth the flagon! Fetch the fiery rum that burns like brimstone!' The steward brought forth a massive pewter flagon, from which the captain filled the cups of the shouting seamen. The fiery spirit, swallowed in burning gulps, ignited the last embers of caution within their breasts, until the entire company surged with frantic, unreflecting bloodlust. The pungent fumes of the fiery liquor mounted to the sailors' brains, dissolving their last lingering fears of the deep, and binding their diverse spirits into a single engine of destruction.
The sailors tossed their empty cups unto the deck, raising their clenched fists in wild enthusiasm; Portuguese, Tahitian, Manxman, and American joined in one discordant chorus of defiance, swearing to pursue the White Whale unto the gates of death under the banner of their scarred king.
'Silence!' commanded Ahab, holding up his hand to quell the uproar; his burning eyes singled out the three pagan harpooners who stood motionless beneath the mast. 'Advance, ye harpooners! Step forward, Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo! Ye are the three iron spears of my soul, and upon your barbed steel rests the weight of my vow!'
The three savages stepped forth, encircling the mainmast with barbaric gravity. 'Unship your harpoons!' commanded the captain; 'unlace the wood, and unship the harpoon irons!' The harpooners obeyed without a murmur, detaching the heavy barbed steel blades from their long wooden shafts.
Ahab seized the three cold weapons, and inverting their hollow sockets, converted them into three deep, conical steel chalices, the polished sockets reflecting the dying sunlight like instruments of some unholy sacrifice. The cold steel barbs, fashioned for slaughter, glittered in the dying rays of the sun like the sacrificial chalices of some ancient druidical rite celebrated upon the lonely plains of the Atlantic.
Raising the rum flagon once more, Ahab poured the burning liquor into the three inverted harpoon sockets, the spirit foaming against the polished steel. Handing the weapons back unto the savages, he commanded them to cross their blades before his breast, forming an unholy tripod of pointed steel.
'Drink, ye harpooners!' Ahab proclaimed in accents of sepulchral authority. 'Drink from your own iron weapons, ye who pull the oars of slaughter! Swear by the steel of your harpoons, swear by the dark blood of the deep, that ye will hunt the White Whale unto death! Swear it, ye messengers of the void!' 'By the deep waters of the abyss! By the iron of your souls!' Ahab cried in awful benediction. 'Let this steel be your judge and your executioner if ye falter in the pursuit of the white fiend!'
With wild, exultant shouts that resounded across the peaceful sea, the three pagans raised the steel chalices to their lips, draining the fiery draught unto the dregs! The rum trickled down their tattooed cheeks like sacrificial wine; and thirty sailors roared their approval in a frenzy of shared delirium, sealing that terrible compact that bound every soul aboard unto Ahab's fatal destiny.
The quarter-deck had been transfigured into a pagan sanctuary of doom; mariners danced, shouted, and sang their barbarous songs beneath the golden eye of the doubloon, their separate wills submerged completely within the volcanic purpose of their leader. Shouts, wild laughter, and heathen chants mingled in a tumultuous storm of delirium; the French mariner leaped upon the scuttle in frantic dance, while the old Manxman muttered dark prophecies unto the wind.
Far aft, near the solitary taffrail, Starbuck stood alone, the cold sweat streaming from his brow as he gazed up into the indifferent heavens, murmuring in hopeless anguish: 'God keep me—keep us all! His madness hath entered every breast aboard! We are bound unto the wheel of his demonic frenzy, racing blindfold toward the abyss!' The golden face of the doubloon looked down upon that unholy covenant, reflecting the dying sun like the impassive eye of destiny witnessing the consecration of a floating holocaust.
And I, Ishmael, felt the electric contagion of that terrible oath coursing through my own marrow; Ahab's magnificent and blasphemous rebellion against the cosmic mask had seized upon my soul with hypnotic power; and as the Pequod surged southward beneath the glittering stars, our hull cleaved the trackless waters toward the final reckoning that awaited us upon the equator.
Ahab drove the sixteen-dollar doubloon into the seasoned wood of the mainmast with a heavy top-maul! ... 'Whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw, this Spanish gold shall be his!' ... 'All visible objects are but as pasteboard masks! ... If man will strike, strike through the mask!'
The Phantom Crew, Fedallah, and the Midnight Emergence
A few days after entering the sultry waters of the equatorial belt, the ocean settled into a state of drowsy, suffocating tranquility. Not a breath of wind ruffled the vast mercurial expanse, which reflected the blinding glare of the tropic heavens like an immense plate of polished steel; Queequeg and I sat together in the shadow of the bulwarks, diligently occupied in weaving a heavy sword-mat destined for the protection of our whaleboat. The stiff wooden warp was stretched upon the loom, while the savage harpooner plunged his heavy wooden sword between the threads, and I cast the loose shuttle to and fro through the open shed; watching the mechanical repetition of that primitive industry, I seemed to discern the mysterious operations of the cosmic Loom of Time—where necessity is the unyielding warp, mortal free-will the wavering woof, and sudden chance the erratic blow of the unsparing sword. The rhythm of our hands moved in harmony with the great pulsations of the sea, unconscious of the dark drama that was about to unfold.
While my spirit was submerged in these metaphysical musings, a wild, electrifying shout from the mainmast-head shattered the dreamy silence of the noon: 'There she blows! There! There! A hump like a snow-hill on the lee-beam!' That sudden cry ran like an electric shock through every timber of the ship, awakening the slumbering barque in the twinkling of an eye from peaceful lethargy into a tempestuous engine of marine warfare. It was the trumpet-call of destiny, arousing thirty mortal souls to confront the terrible denizens of the deep.
Sailors leaped toward their respective stations with impetuous ardour, while halyards, falls, and tackle shrieked through the blocks under the frantic driving of the mates; according to the ancient usage of the fisheries, three boats were designated to lower under Chief Mate Starbuck, Second Mate Stubb, and Third Mate Flask. But in the very instant when the officers laid their hands upon the davits to swing the craft outboard, the low hatchway leading unto the locked steerage beneath the quarter-deck was violently thrust open from within! The sudden disruption of our ancient routine was accompanied by an inexplicable dread that seized every breast upon the deck.
Every mariner upon deck paused in motionless astonishment; for forth from that subterranean darkness leaped five agile, dark-complexioned phantoms wrapped in flowing oriental garments! They were neither native white mariners of Nantucket nor the familiar black laborers of the coast; their temples were tightly enveloped in voluminous white turbans of linen, their features gaunt and expressionless, their skin burned unto the hue of dark bronze by the fierce suns of Asiatic deserts; moving with noiseless, spectral celerity, these mysterious apparitions formed their ranks in instant obedience behind Captain Ahab. Their appearance was like an unhallowed resurrection from the deep, defying all the ordinary laws of nature and society.
Conspicuous among them was their elderly leader—Fedallah the Parsee; a mysterious disciple of Zoroaster whose withered countenance resembled an ancient parchment mummy, from whose sunken eye-sockets smoldered two embers of cold, unholy luminescence; his clean-shaven visage was devoid of mortal emotion, save that a single, white, fractured canine tooth protruded from between his thin lips, imparting an expression of serpentine menace unto his countenance. Enveloped in a robe of black Chinese silk girt with a crimson sash, he diffused through the surrounding air a subtle, pungent odor of myrrh and brimstone. He seemed less a man than an ancient sorcerer from the shores of the Persian Gulf, bound unto Ahab by an unholy sacrament.
The four Asiatic mariners who accompanied him were equally silent and impassive as statues of black marble; their long arms were corded with sinews of steel, their dark orbs reflecting an unhesitating, mechanical obedience unto their master. These were the very spectres whose nocturnal embarkation I had witnessed through the freezing fog of Nantucket; now, dragged from the womb of the ship, that brooding secret was unveiled before the terrified eyes of the entire crew.
'Down with the captain's boat!' thundered Ahab in accents that brooked no question! The crew perceived with renewed amazement that beside the spare black whaleboat on the quarter-deck stood their monomaniac commander; Fedallah and his four phantom rowers sprang into the craft, grasping their heavy ash sweeps, while Ahab firmly wedged the heel of his ivory bone into the socket of the steering thwart, appearing like a nocturnal emperor embarking upon a voyage of destruction! His grim visage was hardened by twenty years of demonic resolution, brooking no opposition from man or element.
This extraordinary violation of maritime custom struck the officers with consternation; Starbuck's noble countenance turned pale with moral indignation. The pious Quaker perceived that this clandestine introduction of heathen mercenaries, harbored solely to execute the captain's private feud, subverted all the lawful compacts of the voyage, turning the property of the Nantucket owners into the personal weapon of an unhinged tyrant. The silent protest in Starbuck's eyes was met only by the icy indifference of our possessed commander.
Yet against the terrible ascendancy of Ahab's will, none dared utter a syllable of remonstrance; in a single moment, the four boats struck the rolling water together! The long oars cleaved the turquoise swell with furious rhythm; and Ahab's black craft, propelled by the unnatural endurance of the phantom crew, darted forward like an arrow from a bow, outstripping the other boats with terrifying ease, leading the outbound chase across the trackless wastes toward the distant spout. The furious speed of the black boat seemed powered by demonic agencies that laughed at the weary labor of mortal flesh.
The atmosphere grew suffocating in that headlong pursuit; standing erect at the steering-oar, with his gray hair streaming wild in the wind, Ahab shouted his frantic exhortations unto his rowers: 'Pull! Pull, my hearties! Pull, ye demons of the pit! Break your backbones upon the sweeps! Drive her through the white water! Dash through the spray and seize the white fiend by his throat!' His words were like sparks struck from an anvil, setting the souls of his savage crew ablaze with unquenchable fire.
Yet the ocean rarely suffers the unchastised insolence of mortal pride; for scarcely had the boats drawn within half a mile of the blowing leviathan, when a dense, ink-black wall of clouds rose with appalling rapidity along the southwestern horizon! It was no common shower, but one of those sudden, destructive squalls that burst upon the equatorial latitudes with the ferocity of a tornado! Within thirty seconds, the gentle swell was churned into a boiling cauldron of white foam, and driving sheets of rain swept the ocean, blotting out all sight of heaven and earth!
Mountainous swells hurled themselves against our fragile cedar craft; in Starbuck's boat, where Queequeg and I manned the thwarts, the water poured incessantly over the gunwales. Through the roaring cataract of spray, we caught fleeting glimpses of the colossal sperm whale thrashing through the foam, his colossal flukes sweeping the ocean like an iron blade, creating whirlpools of destruction around his churning bulk! The majestic sea had transformed in a single moment into an open sepulchre yawning to receive our frail mortality.
'Stand up, Queequeg!' shouted Starbuck through the tempestuous uproar! The savage prince rose like a pillar of bronze upon the plunging head-sheets, balancing his barbed iron with steady hands, his piercing black eyes fixed upon the glistening ridge of blubber that appeared through the breakers! With a barbaric yell that pierced the howling squall, he drove the harpoon deep into the monster's flank!
The steel iron buried itself to the socket in the creature's side! Maddened by the sudden agony, the leviathan sounded with torrential speed; the heavy hemp line hissed through the smoking chocks with such fearful velocity that the chief mate was forced to pour water from the piggin over the tub to prevent the dry cordage from bursting into flame beneath the friction! The boiling vortex threatened to swallow our frail craft as the wounded monarch fought for his life in the dark ocean.
In that supreme crisis, the wounded monster suddenly breached beneath our keelson; his enormous flukes struck the fragile timbers with the force of an avalanche! The whaleboat was sundered and capsized in the twinkling of an eye, hurling officers and men into the black, boiling abyss of the ocean amid their scattered oars and trailing lines! We were cast out like worthless flotsam upon the roaring waves, stripped of all human pride and maritime mastery.
The shock of that icy submersion drove the breath from my lungs, and for an agonizing moment I felt myself dragged down into the suffocating depths; struggling back to the tempestuous surface, I found myself enveloped in blinding spray and howling darkness. Starbuck, Queequeg, and the remaining rowers clung unto the slippery, upturned keel of our boat, which rolled uncontrollably upon the crested seas. The endless wilderness of water seemed to mock our desperate struggle with cold, impersonal indifference.
Night descended with terrifying swiftness, blotting out the last crimson embers of the western sky; we were left alone in the boundless wilderness of waters, clinging with frozen fingers to a frail piece of floating timber, while the wind howled through our saturated garments and the cold Atlantic drained the vital warmth from our limbs. That solitary spark was our only link to the living world, an emblem of human defiance burning in the void.
In that awful hour, when all mortal hope seemed extinguished, Queequeg's unbending savage fortitude shone forth with radiant majesty. Securing a floating oar that drifted past, the tattooed harpooner lashed his lantern unto the upright blade; striking a phosphorus match within the hollow of his hands, he ignited the wick, holding that solitary spark aloft like a sacred torch over the howling waste of waters!
That feeble yellow flame flickered valiantly in the blackness of the tempest; it was a sublime and heart-rending spectacle—six shivering outcasts, marooned upon an upturned boat in the center of the Atlantic, holding forth a tiny spark of mortal light against the immense, unpitying darkness of the universe! Death had never appeared so close and so palpable as in that midnight hour upon the trackless waters.
Hours drifted by in that freezing torment; our teeth chattered, our senses grew numb, and one by one the exhausted sailors began to lose their grip upon the slippery keel. But just as despair was preparing to drag our souls into the deep, a colossal black apparition sundered the rain-curtain, surging through the breakers directly toward our position!
It was the Pequod! Guided by no human eyes, but drifting blindly through the squall, the towering hull of our ship bore down upon us like a floating mountain of live-oak; her copper-sheathed prow cleaved the white surges with deafening thunder, advancing within a few fathoms of our upturned boat, threatening to crush us into atoms beneath her unyielding counter! The towering barque seemed like an instrument of blind fate, unconscious of the fragile lives that clung beneath her bows.
'Jump! Jump for your lives!' shrieked Starbuck in desperate terror! With the last convulsive effort of our exhausted muscles, we threw ourselves into the waves to clear the crushing keel; in that same second, the massive prow of the ship struck our capsized boat, grinding the cedar planking into splinters beneath her iron stem!
Yet mercifully, Queequeg's uplifted lantern had been discerned by the lookout on the forecastle! Loud shouts arose from the bulwarks, and life-buoys and knotted ropes were flung over the side into the foaming surge; grasping the hempen lines with our dying strength, we were hauled up the ship's side unto the solid security of the deck. We were snatched from the very jaws of the grave by the watchful mercy of our brothers upon the deck.
I fell exhausted upon the drenched planking, coughing out the bitter brine that filled my chest. Wiping the stinging salt from my eyes, I looked aft toward the mainmast; and there, framed against the sulfurous lightning that illuminated the horizon, stood Captain Ahab with the sinister figure of Fedallah whispering in his ear, their united shadows falling like an omen of doom across the outbound ship. That unholy alliance between Ahab and his Parsee shadow cast its fatal pall over every heart aboard the outbound vessel.
Amid that sudden burst of squall, five dark apparitions in white turbans leaped forth from the steerage! ... Fedallah stood like an erect serpent of the desert beside Ahab; ... these were no ordinary whalemen of mortal blood, but phantom rowers borrowed from the infernal deep!
The Whiteness of the Leviathan and the Cosmic Horror of Blankness
After that harrowing deliverance from our capsized whaleboat, as the Pequod resumed her solitary southward pilgrimage across the undulating prairies of the Pacific, a metaphysical enigma that had long haunted my secret soul began to torment my waking consciousness with uncontrollable urgency. What was it in the White Whale that above all things appalled me? It was not merely his colossal bulk, though that exceeded eighty feet of unyielding muscle and bone; nor was it the murderous cunning of his crooked jaw, which had sheared the limbs and boats of so many veteran mariners; but rather that unearthly, all-enfolding pallor which clothed his titanic frame—that supreme dimension of dread known as the Whiteness of the Leviathan!
In the elaborate symbolism of human civilization, whiteness hath ever been consecrated unto the highest and most sacred attributes of existence. It is the chosen emblem of virgin purity, the spotless robe of innocence, the royal insignia of antique monarchs, and the celestial vesture wherein the redeemed are clothed before the great white throne of divine revelation. Yet beneath this benign and polished surface of terrestrial piety, whiteness exerts an uncanny, instinctive horror upon the human soul—a dread far more profound and unappeasable than the terror inspired by the fiercest of scarlet carnages or the gloomiest of midnight shadows.
Consider the sinister manifestation of albinism throughout animated nature. Whether it be an albino stag gliding like a ghost through the primeval forests, or an albino crocodile lurking within the stagnant shadows of a tropical morass, let any creature be stripped of its natural pigmentation and clothed in this unnatural shroud, and mortal man recoils from its presence with instinctive loathing. Such albinism is not an elevation of life, but a leprous brand burnt into the flesh by some malignant defect in the creative energy—a spectral deformity that robs the living organism of its warmth, transfiguring it into an ambulatory phantom.
Upon the vast and trackless prairies of the western continent, the indigenous tribes preserve the legendary memory of the White Steed of the Plains. A magnificent wild stallion of unblemished purity, with flowing mane and hooves of wind, he coursed the wilderness in solitary majesty, surpassing all mortal steeds in fleetness and beauty; yet no savage hunter dared cast his lasso over those milk-white shoulders; the red warriors gazed upon him from afar with superstitious trembling, recognizing in that uncaptured apparition no beast of burden, but the visible spirit of the wilderness itself, whose capture would bring down the consuming fires of the Great Spirit upon their race.
Contemplate likewise the terrible polar bear of the arctic ice-floes. That colossal predator, shrouded in a coat of impenetrable white, ranges across the frozen wilderness of the pole, hunting with mechanical and unpitying efficiency. His slaughter of his prey is unmarked by human malice or personal fury; it is the pure, mathematical application of physical power, consuming living flesh without a tremor of compassion; and it is that very whiteness, blending seamlessly into the vast desolation of snow and bergs, that imparts unto him his most appalling horror—he is a living tombstone hewn from the glacial heart of nature.
And what mariner hath ever looked upon the White Shark of the tropical deeps without an icy convulsion of the heart? When that pale, bloated, scarred monster glides noiselessly from the azure abysses toward the ship's counter, the boldest sailor turns away his eyes in sickening disgust. His ghastly white belly and lidless, staring eyes seem like the dreadful apparition of an unburied corpse cast up by the sea; his very whiteness proclaims that within his unfeeling frame dwells only the insatiable, primordial hunger of the void, untouched by the faintest glimmer of spirit or mercy.
Nor can we forget how intimately whiteness is wedded unto the finality of human dissolution. When the vital spark departs and the heart ceases its earthly throbbing, the warm hues of health vanish in an instant, leaving behind only the cold, marble pallor of the corpse; the shroud that envelops the dead, the linen pall that covers the bier, and the bleached bones that crumble within the sepulchre—all wear this terrible livery of absence. Whiteness is the official uniform of death, the hue of universal evacuation when life hath fled from matter.
In the universal folklore of ghosts, spectres, and nocturnal apparitions, why does the phantom invariably manifest himself in garments of chilling white? Why hath no spirit ever walked the earth in robes of crimson or gold? Because whiteness is the visible symbol of non-materiality, the dreadful signature of the disembodied soul returned from the shores of nothingness; and when that pale shadow glides through the darkness, our blood curdles with superstitious dread because it demonstrates the absolute sovereignty of the void over all fleshly reality.
When the Pequod drove through the dense, blinding fogs that hover over the Newfoundland Banks, this horror assumed an infinite and atmospheric dimension. All boundaries of sky and ocean dissolved into a single, smothering canopy of white; the mariners stood like blind sentinels upon the deck, unable to discern their own hands before their faces; enveloped in that vast, damp sheet of featureless vapor, the vessel was exiled from the living cosmos, marooned upon an island of absolute blankness where all human faculties were paralyzed.
Gaze likewise upon the towering icebergs that drift through the sub-antarctic seas like spectral cathedrals of the deep. Rising hundreds of feet above the leaden billows, their cold, blue-white walls glisten with sepulchral splendor beneath the pale rays of the southern sun; the spectator who approaches their towering flanks in an open boat is crushed not merely by their physical mass, but by their awful and impenetrable silence. They are monuments of frozen indifference, mocking the transient fever of human history with their ancient, unmelting apathy.
What then is the profound philosophical principle that makes whiteness the supreme emblem of cosmic terror? The revelations of modern optics furnish the most harrowing answer. Newton's prism revealed unto mortal intellect that all the radiant hues that enchant the human eye—the crimson of the rose, the azure of the summer sky, the gold of sunset—are not inherent properties of matter itself, but transient optical illusions created by the refraction and absorption of light; matter in its fundamental essence is totally devoid of color.
And whiteness is the universal medium wherein all these wavelengths are either totally blended or totally withheld! In other words, whiteness is not a color at all, but the blank, unpainted canvas of nature herself! All the beauty and emotional warmth of the terrestrial landscape are but painted deceptions laid over that underlying void; and the cosmos in its true physical reality is a colorless, leprous effigy, utterly indifferent unto the destinies and sorrows of mankind.
When man looks into the face of absolute whiteness, he gazes directly into the unpitying atheism of elemental nature! In that vast, colorless expanse, there is no Father in heaven, no moral purpose guiding the elements, no ultimate restitution for suffering; naught save the blind, mechanical grind of physical necessity. Nature is like an unrepentant albino monarch, wrapping all living things within a colossal shroud, unmoved by their agonizing supplications, indifferent whether they live or die.
This is the metaphysical horror concentrated within the body of Moby Dick! The White Whale was no ordinary brute of the ocean, but the visible, living symbol of this heartless universe swimming through the surges of the deep! His wrinkled, snow-white forehead was the blank wall of reality shoved near unto our souls; his crooked, destructive jaw was the iron mechanism of fate shattering the fragile ambitions of human reason; and whenever the whalemen caught sight of that white ridge rising from the waves, they beheld in miniature the inescapable blankness that must eventually engulf all created life.
Captain Ahab's monomaniac fury was nothing less than a titanic and desperate rebellion against this cosmic whiteness! Endowed with the tragic intuition of a prophet, the old commander perceived that behind the white mask of the beast lay the ultimate malice of an unapproachable void; he could not endure to be imprisoned by a blank wall, and rather than submit unto that colorless tyranny, he resolved to strike through the mask with his barbed steel, though the heavens should fall upon his head and bury him in the deep.
Starbuck, bounded by the orthodox pieties of his Quaker heritage, could never comprehend the deeper meaning of this unholy crusade. To the chief mate, the whale was merely a valuable commodity capable of yielding fifty barrels of commercial oil, and the ocean was an orderly highway established by divine providence for the enrichment of honest merchants; he wrapped himself in the comfortable vestments of conventional faith, deliberately closing his eyes to the abyss that yawned beneath his keel, knowing that to acknowledge that blankness would shatter his moral universe into dust.
Yet the three pagan harpooners understood the dread of that whiteness by primal instinct. Uncorrupted by the theological sophistries of civilization, Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo perceived that nature is an untamable, predatory beast, requiring blood and sacrifice; to them, Moby Dick was a demonic deity of the abyss, and the hunt was a sacred trial of strength wherein mortal man must either conquer the primeval monster or perish with honour beneath his flukes.
As for myself, Ishmael, that whiteness entered into my very bones like a fatal poison. During the midnight watches aloft in the mastheads, when the Pequod hovered between the starry heavens and the black sea, the phosphorescent crests of the waves appeared unto my eyes like the bones of all drowned navies rising to mock our voyage; every white feather of spray seemed a ghost from the primeval void, reminding me of our inevitable dissolution.
Whiteness is the alpha and the omega of cosmic existence—the primordial darkness from which light arose, and the frozen blankness into which all suns must eventually decay. When the last star expires in the heavens and the universe cools unto absolute zero, it will be this universal white pallor that reigns supreme over the empty cemetery of creation, where neither memory, nor hope, nor consciousness shall ever awaken again.
In the twilight hours upon the equator, a peculiar phenomenon frequently appears upon the surface of the deep—the whalemen call it the 'white water,' vast fields of luminous milky foam created by the death-throes of myriads of microscopic organisms; sailing through that unearthly radiance, the ship seems to float across an infinite lake of molten bone, severed from all earthly ties, drifting toward the shores of eternity.
I have often looked upon Queequeg's intricate tattoos, seeking in those barbaric geometries an antidote against the paralyzing influence of the white void; yet even those ancient signs, carved by the priests of Kokovoko, must perish with the flesh that bears them; while the eternal whiteness of the ocean rolls on unchanged, swallowing up all human inscriptions in its unpitying surges.
'If man will strike, strike through the mask!' Ahab's volcanic cry echoed incessantly through the caverns of my mind. Yes, there are only two paths open unto mortal intellect: either to retreat into the comforting illusions of conventional faith like Starbuck, awaiting destruction with folded hands; or to seize the harpoon like Ahab, hurling one's defiance against the blinding wall of universal indifference!
Between the cowardice of blind submission and the madness of blasphemous assault, I chose my own singular destiny: to serve as the uncorrupted witness and chronicler of the tragedy! With my pen dipped in the blackest ink of human thought, I would trace the contours of that white monster upon the enduring parchment of literature, opposing the blankness of the void with the structured immortality of human speech.
The night advanced, and the Pequod raced before the trade-wind, her prow throwing showers of glistening white foam into the moonlight. Clinging unto the stays of the bowsprit, with the cold spray wetting my brow, I peered into the black abyss; and there, far down in the dark caverns of the ocean, I seemed to see that colossal white forehead swimming in silent majesty, biding the appointed hour when our mortal paths must intersect in fire and blood.
What was it in the White Whale that above all things appalled me? ... It was not his colossal bulk, nor the deadly sweeps of his tail, but the unearthly whiteness that enfolded his form! ... For whiteness is the absolute absence of color, the vast and merciless shroud of a godless cosmos!
The System of Cetology: Folios, Octavos, and Duodecimos
While the tempestuous elements granted our vessel a transient interval of repose, and the Pequod glided majestically over the tranquil meadows of the equatorial Pacific, I accounted it my solemn obligation as the chronicler of this voyage to establish an unprecedented anatomical and philosophical system concerning the colossal inhabitants of the deep. It is an enterprise from which the most venerable naturalists of antiquity might well have recoiled with trembling dismay; for during the lapse of centuries, terrestrial luminaries such as Linnaeus, Buffon, and Cuvier, whenever their academic quills approached the sovereign form of the leviathan, floundered into a morass of ludicrous errors, contradictory measurements, and preposterous fables. Striving to compress the dynamic majesty of the ocean's monarchs within the dried classifications of four-footed land beasts, their elaborate treatises resemble naught save monuments of learned ignorance. The vastness of the subject demands an audacity of spirit that laughs at the cautious boundaries of academic scholasticism.
Confronted by creatures whose very vertebral columns might furnish rafters for imperial palaces, all conventional zoological nomenclatures appear dwarfed and impotent; wherefore, casting aside the sterile traditions of academic pedantry, I boldly propose to introduce a bibliographical system of classification—subdividing the diverse families of the leviathan into the grand, typographical orders of the Folio, the Octavo, and the Duodecimo! In this floating library of the trackless deep, every undulating monster swimming beneath the firmament constitutes a living, breathing volume, bound by the fingers of nature in seasoned blubber, and printed in the foaming characters of ocean spray. This typographical architecture provides the only sanctuary wherein mortal reason can contemplate the infinite diversity of the deep.
Upon the imperial throne of Book I—the Folio Whale—reigns our supreme antagonist, the Sperm Whale (or Cachalot); the most formidable, majestic, and philosophical monarch of the planetary waters. Attaining a magnitude that frequently exceeds eighty feet from snout to flukes, enveloped in an unyielding armor of blubber twelve inches in thickness, his most sublime characteristic resides in that colossal, truncated fortress of his head, which occupies fully one-third of his entire physical framework; within whose vaulted interior lies concealed that miraculous treasure of the fisheries—the spermaceti—a crystalline, aromatic, and incorruptible liquid nectar sought through all oceans by the cupidity of civilized mankind. In his noble contour, nature hath concentrated all the terrible majesty and destructive power of the primeval ocean.
Second among the Folios stands the ancient commercial patriarch—the Right Whale (or Greenland Whale); a massive, sluggish, and melancholy giant devoid of ivory teeth, whose upper jaw is furnished with an extensive sieve of hundreds of flexible black plates of baleen. Browsing serenely among the polar shoals of sea-butterflies, the Right Whale supplied the lamps of our ancestors with tallowy oils and furnished structural stays for the vanity of European courts; yet in metaphysical majesty, his blunt and docile visage cannot endure comparison with the austere, impenetrable wall that forms the brow of the Cachalot. The contrast between these two titans illustrates the profound dichotomy between active aggression and passive endurance.
The third Folio is the Fin-Back; the swift greyhound of the cetaceous tribe, slender and stream-lined, bearing upon his posterior ridge a sharp, scythe-shaped dorsal fin; coursing through the ocean depths like a bolt of black lightning, leaving behind long, arrow-straight wakes of white foam upon the surface. Moving with such prodigal velocity, and yielding so lean a cargo of oil, while his heavy carcass sinks like lead into the abyss when slain, prudent whalemen seldom waste their irons in his pursuit, suffering this untamed racer of the deep to course his watery circuits in unmolested freedom. He courses the wilderness of waters like an arrow of life, laughing at the slow machinations of mortal whalers.
Fourth among the Folios is the Hump-backed Whale; the playful acrobat of the tropical seas, weighing upwards of forty tons, adorned with enormous pectoral fins resembling the white wings of an aquatic archangel. On calm sunny afternoons, he delights to breach his colossal bulk completely out of the azure water, performing somersaults in mid-air before plunging back into the deep with thunderous detonations that send showers of glittering spray high into our rigging, mocking the sombre calculations of mortal voyagers with his spontaneous oceanic revelry. His immense bulk revels in the ecstasy of oceanic existence, unrestrained by the artificial moralities of the land.
Completing the Folio volume are the mysterious Razor-Back and the colossal Sulphur-Bottom; the latter frequently attaining a length of one hundred feet, bearing upon his belly a pale sulfurous tint, drifting through the polar seas like an unapproachable continent of living blubber, mocking the puny harpoons of mortal men with his unattainable magnitude. These oceanic warriors demonstrate that intelligence and predatory coordination are not the exclusive prerogative of terrestrial mammals.
Turning the parchment pages unto Book II—the Octavo Whales—we enter the dynamic middle realm of cetaceous existence. Chief among the Octavos is the ferocious Grampus (or Killer Whale); an armed freebooter of the sea, arrayed in contrasting colors of jet-black and milk-white, possessing formidable conical teeth, hunting in predatory packs with extraordinary tactical intelligence, daring to assault even the colossal Right Whale in coordinated naval warfare, tearing the blubber from their victims in tempestuous spectacles of slaughter. In their playful evolutions, they remind the weary voyager that even the trackless deep possesses its moments of innocent festivity.
Second among the Octavos is the Black Fish; a gregarious and docile species that frequents tropical bays in herds of hundreds. Clothed in a uniform coat of pitch-black blubber, with a blunt, melon-shaped forehead, his oil, though coarse and inferior in quality, frequently consoles the disappointed mariner when nobler quarry hath fled; the bustling labor of boiling his blubber upon the try-works serving to revive the drooping spirits of the crew after long weeks of unrewarded cruising upon the barren deep.
Among the rarest chapters of the Octavo volume stands the Narwhale (or Unicorn Whale); a secluded inhabitant of arctic ice-fields, whose male specimen carries protruding from his upper jaw a long, spirally twisted horn of solid ivory. In the dark centuries of medieval superstition, this miraculous weapon was celebrated as the horn of the mythical unicorn, purchased at immense prices by emperors and pontiffs, and incorporated into royal crowns and pastoral staffs as the physical embodiment of divine sovereignty. The Case remains one of the most enigmatic organs in the entire realm of comparative anatomy, defying all reductionist theories.
In Book III—the Duodecimos—we encounter the playful multitudes of smaller cetaceans and porpoises that skim the glittering surface of the sea. Chief among them is the Huzza Porpoise; leaping in joyous battalions before the ship's cutwater like sportive courtiers heralding the advance of an imperial fleet; their succulent livers frequently sizzling in the galley pans to furnish the crew with a savory banquet after long weeks of salt-junk.
Yet among all these diverse tribes, it is the anatomical architecture of the Sperm Whale that plunges the contemplative intellect into inexhaustible wonder. Behold that stupendous square head! It is an impenetrable citadel constructed of solid bone, cartilage, and elastic fibers; within whose upper half lies that marvelous reservoir designated by whalemen as 'The Case'—a natural cistern holding several hundred gallons of pure, fragrant spermaceti, which remains fluid at the creature's blood-temperature, but congeals into a pearly wax upon exposure to the atmosphere. No mortal chemist hath ever compounded an illuminating fluid so immaculate and free from smoke as this royal extract of the leviathan! This perceptual divergence creates a psychological reality wherein the creature lives simultaneously in two distinct dimensions.
Beneath the Case lies the 'Junk'—a cellular mass of dense, elastic blubber impregnated with oil, possessing the resilience of vulcanized rubber, capable of absorbing the crushing pressures of the deepest ocean abysses. It is this natural buffer that converts the whale's forehead into a living battering-ram, enabling the creature to strike the timbered hulls of warships without sustaining the slightest concussion to his cerebral seat! It is the supreme instrument of propulsion upon our planet, combining elemental mass with ethereal precision.
Equally astonishing is the singular arrangement of the monster's sensory apparatus. His countenance displays no central nasal cavity, his sole respiratory channel consisting of an S-shaped spiracle situated at the extreme forward corner of his snout; while his small, lidless eyes are positioned upon opposite sides of his head, twenty feet apart, devoid of binocular convergence! Thus his consciousness must continuously reconcile two separate, panoramic hemispheres of perception—a dual visual parallax that elevates his awareness into a realm entirely incomprehensible unto the unitary vision of man!
And what mechanical language can describe the transcendent engineering displayed in the whale's flukes?! Forty square feet of horizontal muscle, totally devoid of bony framework, composed of millions of interwoven, sinewy cords possessing the tensile strength of tempered steel; a miraculous instrument that can shatter an ash whaleboat into kindling with a single stroke, yet capable of sweeping through the surges with the delicate grace of a butterfly's wing, leaving behind smooth, circular vortices upon the surface of the sea. Nature had reclaimed the bones of her fallen monarch, clothing his mortal remains in the living vesture of tropical life.
Contemplating these wonders, my memory transports me back to an idyllic island in the Arsacides, where, within the virgin groves of Tranque, I once beheld the complete skeleton of a colossal sperm whale consecrated as an unholy heathen temple by a barbaric monarch. The monster had stranded upon the coral reefs during a great hurricane, and after the flesh had been consumed by the sun and sea-birds, his enormous bones were transported into the sacred interior of the forest.
Amid the luxuriant foliage of bread-fruit trees, palms, and trailing vines, the aboriginal craftsmen had reconstructed the colossal ribs and vertebrae of the leviathan; his massive skull formed the portal of the sanctuary, while forty curving ribs arched overhead like the nave of a ruined Gothic cathedral! Green mosses and scarlet orchids climbed through the porous textures of the bleached ivory, transforming that monument of mortality into a vibrant sanctuary of primeval nature. That sacred grove was a revelation of how barbaric reverence often surpasses the sterile curiosity of civilized science.
I walked through that labyrinth of bone in solemn contemplation; overhead, the mighty spine stretched like an aqueduct across the jungle sky, while the smoke of consecrated hearths curled through the hollow cavities of the ribs. Standing within that vaulted chest, mortal man feels his infinitesimal insignificance, imagining himself entombed within the primeval womb of some unremembered deity whose slumbering pulse yet shakes the earth. The living spirit of the beast evaporates with his last breath, leaving behind only an empty shell of ivory and lime.
Armed with a bone knife and a measuring tape of wild hemp, I spent a solitary week measuring every curvature and dimension of that titanic framework. I inscribed the exact coordinates upon the skin of my own arm with an ivory needle; yet when I sought to translate those mathematical ratios into the formal language of scientific prose, a profound despair overwhelmed my spirit.
For measurements may record the dimension of dead bone, but the living, breathing majesty of that leviathan as he courses through the Pacific deeps remains forever uncaptured by mortal mathematics! A bleached skeleton in an anatomical museum is but a mocking parody of the living god that once commanded the ocean; to imagine that one knows the whale by inspecting his dry bones is as futile as attempting to comprehend the glory of the sun by analyzing a handful of cold ashes! The living leviathan belongs unto the boundless wilderness of waters, inaccessible unto the tame representations of terrestrial art.
The whale is the solitary creature in the universe of whom no authentic portrait hath ever been drawn by the hand of man! The illustrations that disfigure the volumes of natural history are monstrous caricatures; representing the Cachalot as a bloated porpoise with a snout like a swine, or depicting the Right Whale as a mountainous mass of lard spouting fountains of water like an ornamental garden pond; no artist can plant his easel upon the tossing breakers to capture the furious, dying convulsions of the leviathan!
To understand him, ye must embark upon the doomed barque that tracks his migration through the abyss; ye must stand upon the swaying cross-trees at the masthead, enduring the blinding glare of the tropic noon, watching for that solitary diagonal plume of vapor that rises upon the horizon; ye must pull an ash oar within thirty feet of those thundering flukes, feeling the electric shock of mortal peril as the barbed steel bites into his blubber! In that unwritten volume, the tragic destiny of our outbound ship was already inscribed in characters of blood and fire.
Within this typographical temple of Cetology, the White Whale, Moby Dick, remains the unwritten, uncatalogued Apocalypse of the deep! He is the solitary volume that defies the binding of human reason; and any presumptuous scholar who seeks to classify that albino phantom will find himself crushed beneath the thunderous closure of his ivory jaws!
As I conclude this solemn survey of the leviathan's domain, the setting sun casts the shadows of our spars across the darkening ocean. I close my logbook, looking aloft at the Spanish doubloon that glitters upon the mainmast, conscious that these anatomical dissertations are but the intellectual prelude unto that tragic encounter that approaches with every turn of the wheel; the Pequod is entering the perilous feeding-grounds of the Line, where the living text of the white leviathan awaits our fatal reading.
I divide the leviathans of the deep into the majestic volumes of a bibliographical library! ... The Folios are the sovereign Sperm and Right Whales; the Octavos are the fierce Grampus and Humpback; the Duodecimos are the playful Porpoises! ... Yet no human system of classification can ever comprehend the living, breathing contour of the oceanic monarch!
The Spectral Gams: The Albatross and the Plague of the Jeroboam
In the course of a multi-year whaling voyage, which exiles thirty men from all terrestrial communion, no incident awakens such profound emotion within the sailor's breast as the oceanic encounter known as the Gam. It is a social sacrament evolved by the solitary fisheries to alleviate the crushing weight of marine isolation; when two wandering barques chance to meet upon the trackless waste, hundreds of leagues from the nearest continent, boats are lowered, and the commanders exchange visits; while one captain inspects charts within the cabin, the respective crews mingle upon the deck, exchanging news from home, tobacco, and wild seafaring yarns. Unto hearts withered by years of silence, a Gam is like a cup of living water found in the arid center of the Sahara, refreshing the weary spirit with memories of peaceful firesides. In that vast liquid solitude, the sight of a sister ship is an oasis of fellowship amidst the desert of waters, reminding the lonely voyager that he still belongs unto the great family of mortal men.
Yet when the Pequod celebrated her first encounter off the stormy promontory of Good Hope, destiny offered no feast of fraternal affection, but rather an appalling omen of mortality. The vessel was the Albatross (or Goney), hailing from Martha's Vineyard; an antique craft that had kept the seas for four long years, her lower hold freighted with oil, now turning her bleached timbers homeward; her weathered hull, bleached by salt and equatorial suns, possessed the ghastly pallor of an unburied skull, while down her clinker-built sides ran long, rusty tears that looked like dried gore upon the planks, transforming the vessel into a floating sepulchre upon the water. Her weathered timbers seemed to carry the accumulated sorrows of all unreturning voyages upon the deep, preaching a sermon of desolation unto every watching eye.
Still more terrifying was the spectral company that lined her bulwarks. Thirty gaunt, bearded men, enveloped in tattered rags, leaned over the rails in absolute silence, gazing down upon our advancing barque with sunken, lifeless eyes that seemed to have forgotten the speech of living mortals; not a cheer arose, not a hand was waved; naught was heard save the hollow mourn of the wind through her bleached cordage, making her appear less like a craft of mortal timber than some Flying Dutchman emerging from the underworld, frozen in eternal despair. They stood like enchanted statues upon the verge of dissolution, robbed of all earthly vitality by the unceasing terrors of the southern ocean.
Ahab mounted the quarter-deck bulwarks, his ivory bone planted firmly in its auger hole; raising his brass speaking-trumpet to his lips, he shouted across the water that terrible inquiry that consumed his existence: 'Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?!' The fierce urgency of his question cut through the cold air like the blade of an executioner's axe, demanding satisfaction from the silence of the sea.
That monomaniac summons echoed across the rolling waves; the veteran captain of the Albatross stepped unto his taffrail, raising his own green-encrusted trumpet to reply. But in the very second when his lips parted to frame his answer, a strange, malignant gust of wind swept the sea, striking the instrument from his hand! The brass trumpet flashed in the air, plunging with a sullen splash into the black depths of the Atlantic!
Deprived of his trumpet, the gaunt commander seemed to shout his reply with his unassisted voice; but the roaring gale instantly smothered his words, and we saw only the convulsive movement of his lips, like an actor gesturing upon a silent stage. The two barques sheered apart before the rising sea, and the bleached sails of the Albatross melted into the driving spray, vanishing forever beneath the horizon without imparting a single syllable unto our listening ears! The lost trumpet sank down into the primeval ooze, an eternal silence sealing the lips of the departing ship as she faded into the white surges.
'Dumb dogs! Blind ocean!' roared Ahab, stamping his bone leg upon the planks in impotent rage. The older forecastle salts crossed their breasts in superstitious dread; for in the ancient lore of the sea, an interrupted Gam, where the trumpet falls into the deep and no word is spoken, is the supreme omen of disaster, signaling that both vessels have been marked by death for destruction. A heavy foreboding settled upon our company, as though the ocean itself had forbidden all communion between our vessels, warning us back from our fatal course.
A few days later, while crossing the northern boundary of the Line, the masthead raised another sail. This was the Jeroboam, another Nantucket barque; but her condition was far more harrowing than that of the silent Albatross! While yet half a mile distant, her commander hoisted the yellow flag of quarantine, warning our boats not to approach his contaminated hull! The yellow emblem of contagion warned us that we were approaching a floating theater of pestilence and despair, where death had already established his dominion.
A malignant and contagious epidemic, resembling the Asiatic plague, was raging through the forecastle of the Jeroboam; several mariners, including the chief mate, had already perished in delirium; wherefore Captain Mayhew, lowering a whaleboat to communicate with the Pequod, commanded his rowers to lay on their oars twenty paces from our counter, conversing across the rolling water to prevent the transmission of the pestilence.
Yet all eyes were arrested by the extraordinary figure standing erect upon the cuddy of the Jeroboam's boat. He was an emaciated youth whose hollow eyes burned with the unholy fires of religious delirium; clothed in an uncouth robe of coarse woolen fabric girt with a hempen rope, his bare feet balanced upon the pitching gunwale; this was the notorious fanatic known throughout the fisheries as the prophet Gabriel! His wild appearance was like that of an ancient anchorite stepping forth from the burning sands of Egypt to proclaim the judgment of the ungodly.
Originally an apprentice among the Shakers of New York, he had succumbed to religious monomania, announcing himself as the incarnate Archangel Gabriel, commissioned to declare the apocalyptic doom of the ungodly. The ignorant crew of the Jeroboam, paralyzed by the sudden outbreak of the plague, fell completely under his hypnotic dominion; even Captain Mayhew, terrorized by the fulfillment of several of his predictions, had become the helpless vassal of this wandering lunatic. In his twisted intellect, the madness of the sea had coalesced with the dark fanaticism of terrestrial heresy, forging a tyranny of superstitious terror.
'Ahab! Thou wicked king!' shrieked the prophet, waving his bony arms like a screech-owl from the boat; 'touch not the White Whale! Moby Dick is no creature of common blubber, but the incarnate Shaker God of retribution! Whosoever seeks his life shall be consumed by the fire that never shall be quenched!'
Ahab looked upon the raving youth with unbending disdain: 'Hold thy peace, thou barking cur! I care naught for thy theological ravings! Speak, Captain Mayhew: where didst thou encounter the White Whale?! How was thy chief mate slain?!' Ahab looked upon the prophet as an eagle might look upon a screaming vulture, with unbending disdain, refusing to acknowledge any boundary to his sovereign will.
Amid the frantic shrieks of Gabriel, Captain Mayhew delivered his melancholy narration. Several months previous, off the coast of New Zealand, a magnificent white spout had been raised; whereat Chief Mate Harry Macy, a brave young Nantucketer, had lowered his boat in defiance of Gabriel's curses, vowing to plant his irons in the monster's side.
In that fatal struggle, Moby Dick had displayed his terrible tactical intelligence; diving beneath the boat, the leviathan had sundered the surface with his colossal flukes, striking the craft with seismic force, hurling the unfortunate officer forty feet into the air! Macy's shattered body struck the waves and sank like lead, disappearing forever into the trackless depths without a single cry for help! The colossal flukes had descended like the hammer of Thor, crushing all human bravery into sudden dust, demonstrating the puny impotence of mortal weapons.
That tragedy had established Gabriel's absolute sovereignty over the doomed barque; the crew believed that Macy had been struck down by divine lightning for defying the angel; and from that hour, the Jeroboam drifted like a floating bedlam, abandoned unto the ravings of a madman and the horrors of the plague. That terrible spectacle had frozen the marrow of the crew, delivering their souls into the keeping of the fanatic who claimed communion with the monster.
'We have a letter for Harry Macy!' shouted Starbuck from our deck. The noble mate held aloft a letter written by Macy's young wife in Nantucket, fragrant with the tender domesticities of the shore; the poor woman knew not that her husband was already food for the sharks of the Pacific.
Starbuck fastened the letter unto the end of a long boathook, extending it toward Mayhew's craft. But ere the captain could receive it, Gabriel sprang forward with a shriek of unholy laughter! Seizing a razor-sharp whale-lance, he transfixed the envelope upon its barbed steel point with ferocious agility! The sacred words of affection were treated as worthless straw by the possessed emissary of the Shaker god, who recognized only the gospel of slaughter.
'A letter for a corpse?! Ha, ha!' screamed Gabriel, waving the impaled letter over the sea; 'send it down to the pit where the worms await him! And thou, Ahab, hear the word of the angel: thy wooden coffin is already launched upon the deep! Beware the White Whale!'
With a convulsive gesture, Gabriel hurled the impaled letter far into the foaming sea! We watched the white envelope, inscribed with the tender characters of human love, sink into the black surges, swallowed up by the unpitying ocean that rolls above all mortal affections. The ocean accepted the paper offering with cold indifference, burying the wife's love beneath five miles of water, where no human eye shall ever read it again.
Mayhew's boat pulled away into the gather gloom, while the frantic curses of Gabriel drifted back upon the wind like the screaming of demons. Ahab stood motionless upon his ivory limb, his granite countenance unmoved by the tragedy, giving the harsh command to fill the main-yard and resume our solitary pursuit of the monster. His iron soul rejected all warnings, pressing forward with the blind obstinacy of an unrepentant titan who defies the lightning even as it strikes his brow.
Watching the water close over that discarded letter, a profound metaphysical sorrow weighed upon my heart. How frail, how insignificant are the tenderest devotions of human love when confronted by the unsparing cruelty of the oceanic void! The sinking of that letter was the symbolic severance of our last emotional tie unto the world of living men. In that cruel act, the last bridge connecting our vessel with the domestic warmth of the land was broken, leaving us alone with the white demon of the deep.
The night advanced, and the Southern Cross glittered with icy brilliance over the tumbling waters. Far upon the horizon, the solitary lantern of the plague-stricken Jeroboam flickered like a dying star upon the verge of the abyss. The faint glimmer of that distant light served only to emphasize the immense, unpitying darkness that enfolded our outbound barque.
The rhythmic concussion of Ahab's ivory peg resounded across the deck—thump, thump, thump—beating out the uncompromising measure of his vengeance; neither the silence of the dead nor the warnings of the mad could alter the trajectory of that solitary soul bound unto his eternal feud with the white leviathan. The solitary ruler of our vessel continued his nocturnal watch, deaf unto all prayers and blind unto all portents, welded unto the iron axis of his doom.
When two solitary whaling ships encounter upon the trackless deep, it is no mere salutation of landsmen, but a solemn convocation of souls! ... Yet the speaking-trumpet of the Albatross dropped into the dead water without a word, while the Jeroboam was consumed by pestilence and the frenzied curses of Gabriel! ... 'Touch not the White Whale!' shrieked the prophet; 'Moby Dick is the incarnate God of the Shakers!'
The Two Heads: The Equilibrium of Kant and Hegel
Following that spectral encounter with the plague-ship Jeroboam, the Pequod achieved an unprecedented triumph of oceanic slaughter. Within the space of thirty-six hours, driven by the furious energy of our officers, the crew succeeded in slaying two immense leviathans in the same quadrant of the deep—a venerable bull Sperm Whale measuring nearly seventy feet in length, and an equally colossal Right Whale gorged with fat; their gigantic carcasses were lashed with heavy chains unto the port and starboard channels, transforming our barque into a floating butcher-block adrift upon a crimson sea. The slaughter had transformed our vessel into a floating slaughterhouse, adrift upon the lonely waters of the equator.
In accordance with the ancient traditions of the fishery and the esoteric counsels of Fedallah, Captain Ahab issued an extraordinary command: the colossal heads of both monsters, each weighing upward of thirty tons, were severed from the bodies by the long cutting-spades, and hoisted by the massive cutting-tackles to hang suspended against the outer bulwarks! On the larboard side hung the square, geometrical fortress of the Sperm Whale's head; while on the starboard hung the crescent, drooping skull of the Right Whale, with its dark curtain of flexible baleen; between these two suspended mountains of bone and blubber, the vessel rolled heavily in the ocean swells in a state of precarious physical equilibrium. Those two mountainous trophies seemed like mythological guardians stationed upon our flanks, warding off the perils of the sea.
In forecastle mythology, the head of a Right Whale is reputed to possess a talismanic virtue against capsizing; the old salts asserting that no vessel can ever turn turtle so long as that baleen-fringed counterpoise hangs from her side. Yet unto my contemplative intellect, those two suspended heads assumed a significance far transcending the vulgar superstitions of the sea; they appeared rather as two opposing monuments of metaphysical philosophy erected by nature upon the rolling deck of our mortal enterprise. In that precarious posture, our ship mirrored the unstable equilibrium of human life, poised between the abyss of thought and the abyss of matter.
Laden with that enormous burden of thirty tons upon either beam, the Pequod's waterline was depressed by several feet, her scuppers almost kissing the white surge of the Pacific. The barque labored through the ocean swells like a chained titan, every timber groaning beneath the immense strain as the rolling billows swept beneath her keel; the mariners moved with cautious steps upon the tilted deck, conscious that a sudden lurch of the sea might sunder the tackles and plunge the vessel into the abyss. Every roll of the ship was an agonizing struggle against gravity, testing the seasoned oak of our ancient barque.
At midnight, when a dead calm held dominion over the water, Ahab emerged from his cabin, dragging his ivory heel across the quiet deck until he reached the larboard rail. The ship was wrapped in slumber, save for the rhythmic dripping of thick blood into the foam beneath; there, rising and falling with the swell, hung the colossal head of the Cachalot, its vast, wrinkled forehead gleaming like polished slate beneath the stars—a silent and venerable Sphynx of the Atlantic abyss. His solitary silhouette seemed welded unto the rail, an emblem of human defiance confronting the inscrutable countenance of nature.
Leaning over the bulwarks, his scarred features brought within a few inches of that titanic brow, the monomaniac captain gazed into the dead, unblinking eyes of the beast. In that solitary vigil, the burning torment of his soul found utterance in a passionate, despairing apostrophe, his harsh voice whispering across the water like wind escaping from a subterranean tomb. The silence of the dead was a heavier rebuke than any tempest that ever tore our sails from their bolt-ropes.
'Speak, thou vast and venerable head!' murmured Ahab, his lips trembling with suppressed emotion; 'speak, thou uncomplaining titan of the deep! Of all created things, thou alone hast plumbed the lowest foundations of the abyss! Thou hast dived into dark caverns where the diver never plunged; thou hast slept beside sunken galleons laden with forgotten gold, and rested thy brow against the bleaching skeletons of drowned navies!'
'Tell me what thou hast beheld in those bottomless caverns!' cried the old man, his accents rising in desperate supplication; 'thou hast seen human prayers extinguished beneath the surges, and beheld the unpitying malice that presides over the birth and death of worlds! Yet not a syllable escapes thy stony lips! Thou art silent as the void that bore thee, mocking my mortal agony with thine eternal peace!' The void made no answer unto his agonized plea, preserving that unbroken secrecy which mocks all mortal questioning.
The severed head swung gently with the swell, its black blood trickling drop by drop into the phosphorescent sea; no miraculous utterance answered his prayer; naught was heard save the hollow surge against the ship's counter, laughing at the impotence of human intellect. Nature, in her profoundest silence, returned only a cold, impassive stare unto the frantic questionings of mortal reason.
With a groan of bitter despair, Ahab turned away, retreating into the black sanctuary of the quarter-deck. The heavy, hollow cadence of his ivory limb resounded across the planks like the footsteps of a chained Prometheus pacing the granite cliffs of the Caucasus, abandoned unto his solitary torment by an unanswering universe. He walked alone with his demons, alienated from all terrestrial companionship, a prisoner of his own unbending will.
From my station near the windlass, I contemplated those two suspended titans with wonder. In their anatomical antithesis, they presented a living, material allegory of the two supreme systems of modern European philosophy—the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, and the dialectical absolute idealism of G.W.F. Hegel!
Behold the head of the Sperm Whale upon the larboard side! It is the perfect embodiment of the Kantian system! Square, austere, self-contained, and devoid of external apertures, its upper citadel contains the Case—that vast reservoir of pure, translucent spermaceti, uncontaminated by the grosser sediments of animal existence; representing those a priori forms of intuition and categories of pure reason that dwell within the transcendental intellect, untouched by the deceptive phenomena of sensory experience. In that serene cistern dwelt the pure light of reason, elevated high above the muddy currents of sensory illusion.
And upon the starboard side hangs the skull of the Right Whale—the living symbol of Hegelian dialectics! That monstrous mouth, curved like an enormous shoe, possesses no teeth, but is furnished with an all-absorbing sieve of baleen; swimming through the turbid seas, the Right Whale opens his jaws to swallow all shoals, mud, and flotsam, filtering the absolute truth through the historical dialectic of his flexible plates!
Does he not resemble that encyclopedic philosophy that absorbs all terrestrial contradictions into the evolutionary march of the Absolute Idea?! Hegel's dialectical apparatus, like the whalebone sieve of the Greenland whale, refuses no muddy sediment of human tragedy, transforming the darkest horrors of history into the necessary steps of cosmic self-realization; yet in its colossal bulk, it threatens to suffocate the fragile spirit beneath its weight. The dialectical monster absorbed all contradictions into his massive maw, transforming the flotsam of the sea into living tissue.
'Behold the Pequod, balanced between Kant and Hegel!' I whispered unto myself with philosophical amusement. If she heels too far unto the larboard, Kant's abstract transcendentalism threatens to capsize her into the void of pure reason; while if she lists too heavily unto the starboard, Hegel's colossal historical ballast drags her down into the muddy depths of terrestrial necessity! Thus fares the voyage of human intellect, balancing between two monstrous abstractions over the rolling surges of eternity! Thus does mortal philosophy navigate the boundless deep, seeking stability between opposing systems that threaten to capsize the soul.
Yet this philosophical reverie was abruptly shattered by the brutal realities of the deep. Within a few hours of the decapitation, hundreds of voracious sharks, scenting the blood across leagues of ocean, converged upon the Pequod's hull; the water boiled with ravenous fins, tearing at the suspended blubber with blind, mechanical ferocity. The foaming water was churned into an unholy cauldron of gore, revealing the absolute absence of mercy in the primal law of the deep.
Armed with long cutting-spades, Queequeg and the mariners stood upon the staging, plunging their sharp blades into the thrashing swarm; yet even when sundered in twain, those mindless predators continued their convulsive feeding, snapping at their own entrails in an ecstasy of primordial greed that demonstrated the pitiless savagery of the natural order.
Queequeg balanced himself upon the slippery staging, thrusting his iron blade into the churning mass with savage precision, laughing aloud at the insatiable voracity of the brutes; unto the pagan philosopher, these aquatic scavengers differed not a whit from the Christian merchants of the shore, who slaughter their brethren for dividends of gold. The cannibal prince perceived the universal tragedy of existence, where life feeds upon life without remission or remorse.
For eighteen hours the crew labored without remission; the pure spermaceti was baled from the Case into cedar tubs, while the flexible baleen was stripped from the Right Whale's jaw and stowed away upon the forward deck.
When the last gallon of oil and the final sheet of bone had been secured, the severed heads were stripped of all commercial utility, reduced to hollow, bleached monuments of mortality. Chief Mate Starbuck gave the signal; two axes severed the heavy falls, and with a thunderous plunge that threw white water over the bulwarks, the colossal skulls of the Cachalot and the Right Whale descended into the deep! The great voyage demanded the extraction of every drop of commercial wealth ere the carcasses were surrendered unto the sea.
It was a magnificent oceanic funeral; air bubbled from their vacant cavities as the two philosophical monuments sank through the clear depths, returning unto that primeval oblivion where all human nomenclatures and metaphysical distinctions are drowned forever in eternal night. They sank like lead into the abyss, leaving the ocean as barren and silent as it was upon the morning of creation.
Relieved of that stupendous burden, the Pequod righted herself with an elastic leap, her canvas filling before the freshening trades as she bounded southward across the equatorial swells, leaving behind only a fading trail of crimson foam upon the rolling Pacific.
Under Starbuck's command, buckets of seawater were dashed over the slippery planking, cleansing the ship of her greasy stains; the exhausted mariners rested against the capstan, their faces blackened with grime, having tasted the bitter labor that fuels the lamps of civilization. The cleanse was but superficial; the deep stain of blood had penetrated the heart of our timber, never to be washed away.
I stood beside the taffrail, watching the vortices where the two heads had disappeared, conscious that all human philosophy is but a temporary counterpoise slung across the bulwarks of a doomed craft, destined to be cut adrift when the final hurricane of destiny sweeps the ocean. The white nemesis still swam before us in the uncharted waters, drawing our souls into the vortex of his unyielding fate.
Behold! Suspended upon opposite sides of the Pequod hang the square brow of the Sperm Whale and the crescent skull of the Right Whale! ... Ahab interrogates the bleeding Sphynx of the deep; ... while Ishmael perceives in those two suspended heads the sublime equilibrium between Kant's transcendental idealism and Hegel's dialectical colossal architecture!
The Try-Works: The Midnight Furnaces and the Hallucination at the Helm
Among all the industrial operations of pelagic navigation, none presents so harrowing a spectacle of terrestrial mechanics transplanted unto the tossing deep as the apparatus designated by whalemen as the Try-Works. It is a massive brick furnace erected upon the fore-deck of the Pequod, between the foremast and mainmast, heavily cased in iron hoops and braces, resembling some Cyclopean forge torn from the Black Country of England and bolted unto the rolling timbers of our wooden citadel; upon its masonry hearth are embedded two colossal cast-iron kettles, each possessing a capacity of several hundred gallons, whose yawning black lips look down into the fiery depths of twin furnace-doors below. It stands upon the forecastle like an altar of unholy sacrifice, dedicated unto the dark gods of commercial exploitation.
To preserve the unseasoned wooden planking from the devouring heat of those perpetual fires, the naval architects had ingeniously constructed a shallow reservoir beneath the masonry foundation, into which several hundred gallons of sea-water were pumped ere the fires were kindled. It is this perpetual sheet of cold brine, flowing between the scorching bricks and the dry live-oak deck, that prevents our floating fortress from being consumed by her own internal combustion; the outbound barque maintaining her precarious existence between a furnace of liquid fire above and an ocean of freezing water beneath. This ingenious contrivance illustrates the paradoxical relationship between the domestic comfort of the ship and the destructive elements she carries.
Ere the flames are ignited, a stupendous preparation of dismemberment occupies the entire company upon the forward deck. Great sheets of blubber, termed 'blanket-pieces,' weighing upwards of two tons apiece, are hoisted aloft by the heavy tackles, lowered unto the deck, and sundered into manageable cubes designated as 'horse-pieces'; whereupon the mincing-knife, wielded by veteran hands, rapidly scores the fat into thin, connected leaves resembling the leaves of a book, termed 'minced-books,' calculated to melt with maximum celerity within the boiling cauldrons. The preparation of the blubber is conducted with the methodical precision of an executioner preparing the instruments of torment.
Twilight descended over the Pacific, and the last pale embers of day were extinguished beneath the western horizon; Chief Mate Starbuck sounded his silver whistle, giving the order to kindle the furnaces. The boatswain thrust a handful of resinous pine-shavings into the grate, igniting the first spark with a sulfur match; for half an hour the pale flame crackled amid the dry wood, throwing thin coils of blue vapor from the iron smokestacks; but scarcely had the first batch of blubber melted into boiling oil, when the try-works revealed the terrifying, self-consuming miracle of its operational economy! The smell of that unctuous vapor clings unto the garments of the sailors, impregnating their flesh with the essence of slaughter.
It is the singular and appalling distinction of this marine furnace that, once ignited, it requires no terrestrial fuel from the land! Those crisp, despoiled fragments of blubber from which every drop of oil hath been boiled away—termed by the whalemen 'cracklings' or 'fritters'—constitute an unctuous, fiercely combustible fuel of extraordinary caloric power! Armed with long-handled skimmers, the mariners ladle these hissing, golden wafers from the boiling pots, hurling them directly into the roaring grates below; where they ignite with ferocious detonations, feeding the flames with the despoiled remnants of the very monarch they are boiling!
It is a cannibal feast of elemental nature! The leviathan is butchered to provide the oil of commerce, and his own dried flesh is cast into the furnace to boil the limbs of his brethren! In this closed, self-devouring circuit of slaughter and combustion, the industrial genius of mankind achieves its most terrifying material manifestation; transforming the majestic organism of the deep into liquid dividends of gold, while consuming the victim upon the altar of his own destruction. The tragedy of the leviathan is completed in his own incineration, where his mortal remains furnish the fuel for his dismemberment.
Midnight enveloped the ocean, and the floating inferno achieved the zenith of its unholy majesty. Dense cataracts of pitch-black smoke, heavy with unctuous soot, rolled in suffocating volumes from the twin smokestacks, blotting out the constellations and encrusting the rigging with a slippery film of greasy residue; the Pequod surged through the trackless wilderness of waters like some blazing fire-ship cast adrift from the bottomless pit, trailing a league of roaring sparks and boiling oil across her phosphorescent wake. It was the universal allegory of mortal labor, where the worker is consumed by the very machinery he is appointed to operate.
Illuminated by the demonic glare of the cauldrons, the fore-deck was transformed into a theater from Dante's Inferno! Naked to the waist, their bronze torsos glistening with sweat and boiling oil, stood the three pagan harpooners—Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo; the fierce heat of the furnace playing across their corded muscles until they resembled metallic fiends tending the subterranean boilers of hell! The ship plunged through the black water like an emissary of destruction, leaving behind a trail of greasy foam upon the waves.
Armed with long, two-pronged iron forks, the harpooners stirred the bubbling caldrons with frenzied agility, lifting the hissing fritters and dashing them into the open furnace doors. Behind them, shadowy figures of mariners hurried through the darkness, bearing buckets of blubber or rolling oil-casks across the slippery planks; their wild laughter, discordant sea-shanties, and polyglot profanities mingling with the roaring of the draught into a horrifying hymn of oceanic devastation. In their barbaric nudity, the harpooners appeared like the ministers of some primeval religion celebrating the rites of fire and blood.
The leaping flames cast the distorted silhouettes of the crew against the towering expanse of the sails, where they danced like gigantic spectres celebrating the unholy dismemberment of an ancient titan. The Pequod flew through the night under a press of canvas, her red wake illuminating the dark billows for miles around; she was no longer a lawful merchant vessel of New England, but an ambulatory volcano navigating the abyss, freighted with savage souls and consecrated unto universal doom.
At midnight the bell struck, summoning me unto the quarter-deck to relieve the man at the wheel. Mounting the steering-box and grasping the smooth mahogany spokes, the cold night wind smote my face; yet directly before my vision, forty yards distant across the waist of the ship, the twin furnaces of the try-works raged with unearthly brilliance, occupying my entire field of perception with their leaping tongues of fire! The furious energy of that midnight labor banished all mortal fatigue, sustaining the crew with the intoxicating frenzy of destruction.
The sacred duty of the helmsman is to maintain his unswerving gaze upon the luminous needle of the binnacle-compass, guiding the ship's course by that tiny trembling instrument of magnetism. But upon that night of soot and blood, the roaring furnace upon the fore-deck exerted an irresistible, hypnotic fascination over my weary senses, forcibly drawing my eyes away from the silent needle unto its dancing glare! The Pequod was no longer a vessel of peaceful commerce, but an unhallowed engine of war cruising against the sovereignty of the deep.
Exhausted by sixteen hours of unrelenting labor at the cutting-tackles, my physical system was reduced to the verge of collapse; the perpetual flickering of that crimson flame produced an insidious sensory paralysis within my brain. My eyelids burned with acrid soot, my consciousness drifted into a twilight state between waking reality and nocturnal delirium; the swirling smoke assumed monstrous shapes of drowning mariners and dying leviathans, until the boundary between the material ship and the phantom creations of my mind dissolved into air. The helm demanded an unswerving concentration of the spirit, but the spectacle of the flames proved too powerful for mortal endurance.
In that fatal trance of mental exhaustion, an appalling sensory inversion suddenly exploded within my brain! It was a terrifying disorientation of spatial consciousness—my optic nerves, paralyzed by the glare, suffered a complete reversal of perspective; in that waking nightmare, the roaring furnaces, which stood forty yards ahead of me, seemed suddenly to have shifted behind my back! The red light seemed to penetrate the chambers of the brain, dissolving all the rational boundaries of time and space.
'Merciful God! The fire is behind me! I am steering backward into the void!' That horrifying delusion seized upon my paralyzed intellect with the speed of lightning! In my madness, I believed the entire universe had been inverted—that our ship was rushing stern-foremost into an abyss of eternal night, pursued by the roaring flames of hell! In a convulsion of frantic terror, my hands gripped the wheel, and yielding unto that fatal hallucination, I wrenched the spokes with all my desperate strength in the opposite direction! In that twilight state, the soul loses its hold upon the material world, surrendering unto the chaotic phantoms of the abyss.
The Pequod yawed with violent, shuddering velocity! Her head fell off from the wind with appalling rapidity; the vast sheets of canvas aloft lost the blast, shivering with detonations that sounded like broadsides of artillery! The ship was taken aback—the supreme catastrophe of navigation upon the high seas!
Five seconds more of that fatal steering, and the towering masts would have snapped like pipe-stems at the deck, hurling the capsized barque into the boiling abyss, plunging thirty souls and thousands of gallons of scalding oil into the black Atlantic! The jaws of the grave yawned within six inches of our lives! That fatal inversion was a symptom of that spiritual blindness which overtakes the soul when it turns its back upon the truth.
'Hard down with the helm! What art thou doing, madman?!' thundered a voice of iron beside me! It was Starbuck! The vigilant chief mate had perceived the shiver of the sails, bounding unto the quarter-deck like a panther!
That shout and the stinging dash of icy spray upon my temples shattered the hypnotic spell like a glass sphere! The delusion vanished in an instant; my sanity returned with a rush of agonizing shame—the fire was still blazing ahead, the compass was still beneath my eyes, and my own criminal folly had almost delivered the ship unto destruction! The screaming of the canvas aloft was the voice of the ship lamenting her impending doom beneath the unreckoning waves.
With the frantic energy of resurrection, my feet braced against the deck, Starbuck and I threw our united weight upon the helm, forcing the heavy rudder across the surging waters! The timbers groaned, the cordage shrieked, but slowly, majestically, the vessel answered her helm, falling off until the wind filled her sails once more, bounding forward upon her lawful course.
Starbuck stood panting beside me in the binnacle-light, his noble countenance pale as marble, gazing upon my trembling hands with solemn compassion. He struck me not; he uttered no curse; but pointing with his finger unto the compass-card, he murmured in accents of thrilling gravity: 'Look unto the needle, Ishmael; gaze not upon the fire!' The deliverance was effected by that rare presence of mind which distinguishes the veteran seaman from the terrified greenhorn.
I sank against the binnacle, my limbs trembling with the reaction of that mortal terror, bathed in cold perspiration. That momentary descent into madness had engraved upon my soul an immortal sermon concerning the perils of the spiritual life; gazing upon the roaring furnace upon the fore-deck, I inscribed within the tablet of my heart that eternal warning unto all human wanderers: His gentle rebuke pierced deeper than any blow of steel, leaving me alone with the dreadful consciousness of my guilt.
'Gaze not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Suffer not the artificial glare of the pit to blind thine eyes unto the quiet guidance of the compass! For the fire is a deceptive sorceress that perverts the true geometry of the universe; and he who abandons the steady reckoning of his soul for the intoxicating ecstasy of the flame shall find his course inverted, rushing blindfold unto his own destruction!' That midnight experience was a microcosm of the entire cruise, wherein our commander had turned his back upon the compass of reason.
Dawn broke at last over the Pacific, painting the east in robes of pearl and azure. The fires of the try-works were quenched, and the exhausted mariners, armed with lye and sand, scrubbed the blackened decks until the oak planking shone with the spotless purity of bleached bone; yet that nocturnal inferno, and that momentary inversion of the cosmos at the helm, remained branded forever upon my living soul as the supreme emblem of our voyage. The clean deck was a hypocritical veneer, concealing the dark reality of blood and fire that animated our outbound voyage.
The red brick furnaces of the try-works blazed with the fires of the bottomless pit! ... Naked to the waist, the savage harpooners danced like fiends, feeding the flames with the crisp cracklings of the leviathan! ... And as Ishmael gazed too long into the glare at the helm, the entire cosmos inverted in a waking nightmare! ... 'Gaze not too long into the fire, O man!'
A Squeeze of the Hand: The Communion of Liquid Spermaceti
After the midnight tempest of the try-works had subsided into the cool pearl of dawn, the freshening trade wind carried away the dense black soot and pungent fumes that had enveloped the barque, revealing the vast expanse of sea and sky dyed in pale purple by the rising sun. The forward deck of the Pequod became the theater of an industrial operation of singular and unexpected tenderness, contrasting strangely with the midnight slaughter that had preceded it. Those precious deposits of spermaceti, baled from the Case of the Cachalot and temporarily secured within open cedar tubs, had begun to cool beneath the morning trades; the fluid oil, once transparent as crystal, congealing into soft, semi-transparent, milk-white lumps resembling fresh-fallen snow, gleaming softly upon the rolling water with pristine crystalline purity.
In accordance with the ancient etiquette of the fishery, these unctuous crystals, ere they are barreled for the hold, must be squeezed and massaged by human hands to reduce the mass into a uniform liquid state. Were these lumps permitted to solidify within the casks, the purity, fluidity, and commercial value of the precious oil would be irreparably impaired; consequently, this manual kneading, at once laborious and delightfully luxurious, was anticipated by the mariners as the gentlest restorative ceremony of the voyage, an unheralded baptism celebrated upon the lonely bosom of the deep with singular reverence, tactile pleasure, and fraternal joy.
A massive, shallow cooler of oak, five feet in diameter, was planted firmly upon the central deck, brimming with that aromatic and creamy substance. A dozen hardy mariners, having cleansed their limbs of soot and grime with lye and fresh water, gathered about the rim, turning up their woolen sleeves to expose their brawny, salt-bitten arms; and at a jovial signal from Second Mate Stubb, all inhaled the sweet sea air and plunged their hands together into that reservoir of liquid nectar, laughing aloud in youthful anticipation and good cheer!
It was an experience of physical sensation that transcends the vulgar vocabulary of terrestrial speech! As my fingers first closed upon those soft, yielding globules, an inexplicable wave of voluptuous ease and celestial comfort permeated every nerve of my weary frame. It possessed none of the gross, offensive stickiness that characterizes the oils of land beasts, but resembled rather the velvet softness of liquid silk, cooling the fever of my blood, soothing the raw lacerations carved by the frozen cordage, and bathing my spirit in an atmosphere of unutterable peace and crystalline clarity that banished every lingering trace of mortal weariness and terrestrial anxiety.
'Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long!' shouted Stubb, puffing contentedly upon his short clay pipe, his round face glowing with benevolent jocularity; 'knead those lumps into cream, my lads, and let all the spite and bitterness of your souls be dissolved in the sweet milk of the whale!' A chorus of merry laughter answered his summons; our hands plunged deeper into the tub, opening and closing in rhythmic unison, until the solid crystals melted away like snowflakes in spring, converting the vessel into an overflowing font of fragrant oil frothing with pearly bubbles under our persistent, affectionate touch.
'Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze!' through the long, sunlit hours of the morning our hands remained submerged in that aromatic reservoir. Every flexure and intercrossing of the fingers produced a soft, musical friction; the gentle unction caressed our calloused flesh like the hand of a mother soothing a weeping child, or the celestial breath of spring reviving a withered heath, transforming the rough, weather-beaten countenances of the whalemen into images of tranquil benignity and quiet reverence, melting away the ferocious habits and hardened enmities of the sea.
As the hours wore on in that unctuous bath, a marvelous psychological transfiguration was wrought within the company. In the sweet depths of that wooden cistern, our hands frequently collided and entwined; my fingers encountered the colossal, calloused palm of the West African giant Daggoo; touched the supple, sinewy joints of Tashtego the Gay Head hunter; and interlocked with the tattooed, affectionate fingers of my savage brother Queequeg, their geometric patterns shimmering faintly beneath the translucent fluid, communicating a strange, primitive fellowship that mocked all civilized divisions.
In that aromatic baptism, all the artificial barriers of nationality, race, creed, and caste dissolved into nothingness! Squeezing that spermaceti with my fellow men, I felt an electric current of universal brotherhood thrill through my veins; a divine amity flooded my soul, banishing every lingering spark of envy, malice, or terrestrial resentment; I felt myself divinely free from all ill-will, forgiving every wrong, every betrayal, every poverty, and every pang of mortal adversity that had ever embittered my earthly pilgrimage across the stormy highways of the world.
I experienced a mystical desire to remain forever seated beside that tub, holding hands with the wandering outcasts of the globe in an eternal communion of love! In the fragrant depths of that reservoir, articulate speech became superfluous and every suspicion vanished; we were no longer mercenary drudges bartering our blood for Spanish doubloons, but suffering brothers who had discovered our spiritual sanctuary, baptized together in the sweetest unction of universal charity and everlasting reunion against the cold, indifferent stars that watch over our fleeting mortal race.
Why must men harbor hatred in their hearts?! Why must the nations of the earth erect ramparts, forge artillery, and incarcerate their brethren in subterranean dungeons?! How petty, contemptible, and absurd appeared all terrestrial rivalries, imperial ambitions, and theological feuds before that humble tub of liquid benevolence! If humanity could but extend this tactile communion unto the circumference of the globe, would not the blood-stained earth blossom into an Eden of perpetual peace and fragrant amity, free from the scourge of fratricidal strife and unholy wars?!
If terrestrial happiness be indeed a phantom, then in that fleeting hour beside the oil-tub I touched the sublime reality of human redemption; comprehending the ecstasy of those ancient saints who dissolved their petty individualities in the ocean of divine charity, finding in universal brotherhood their only refuge from the tyranny of the void, beholding the divine totality reflected within the humblest sensation of touch, transcending all mortal limitations and chronological sorrows in a single radiant moment of grace.
Yet this poetic reverie upon the upper deck was but one half of the contradictory truth; for directly beneath our feet, in the subterranean gloom of the hull, the dark and bloody reality of the fishery pursued its unrelenting course. If the adventurous spectator dare descend the dark companionway into the hold, he will behold another world, reeking of gore, sweat, and unmitigated savagery, where human flesh groans beneath primeval burdens and unceasing mechanical toil in the service of worldly profit.
Descending into the 'Blubber-Room,' the spectator is confronted by a scene of subterranean horror. In that low-ceilinged vault beneath the waterline, where no beam of heaven ever penetrates, the atmosphere is suffocating with the rancid vapors of unwashed blubber; there, barefoot upon the slippery planking, several young sailors toil with sharp spades, slicing the sliding masses of fat as the barque rolls heavily in the surge, surrounded by mountains of steaming, decaying whale-meat that threaten their fragile limbs with crushing doom.
Their garments are saturated with clots of blackened blood; every downward stroke of the spade severs the heavy blubber with a hollow sound, while a misstep upon the tilting floor threatens to crush their limbs beneath sliding avalanches of whale-meat. Beneath the flickering glare of whale-oil lamps, those grim figures resemble tormented captives in the lowest pit of Tartarus, exposing the bloody, unromantic foundations upon which the luxurious commerce of the fishery is erected, devoid of all sentimental illusions and poetic raptures.
Still more grotesque is the vesture worn by the master-mincer who presides over the final preparation of the meat. Stationed before his massive oak block with a two-edged cleaver three feet in length, this experienced artisan slices the horse-pieces into thin 'bible-leaves' for the boiling pots, robed in a garment that would fill a terrestrial prelate with superstitious horror, turning the savage forces of procreation into protective gear for the workshop of slaughter and industrial dissection.
Following an ancient usage of the craft, the outer integument of the whale's colossal generative organ is flayed from the carcass in a single piece, cleansed, and dried until it assumes the consistency of flexible black leather, forming a seamless, ankle-length sacerdotal robe known unto whalemen as 'The Cassock.' This singular pelt defies both grease and brine, providing an impenetrable armor against the bloody spray of the mincing block and the scalding fluids of the fishery during the arduous trials of boiling upon the high seas.
Clothed in this phallic vestment, the mincer stands beside his block like an ancient pagan pontiff officiating at a primeval altar of blood! The dark skin of the leviathan swathes his limbs, imparting a terrible sacerdotal dignity unto his person as his knife descends upon the blubber; officiating at a perpetual sacrifice where life and death, reproduction and slaughter, are inextricably intertwined in the shadowy bowels of the ship with relentless mechanical precision and ritualistic horror.
The pure spermaceti of the upper deck and the generative skin of the hold coexisting in unholy harmony upon the same outbound craft! On the one hand, the crystal oil representing spiritual illumination and transcendent love; on the other, the dark integument embodying primeval procreation and anatomical carnage; nature's twin poles vibrating together within the wooden ribs of our wanderer upon the deep, revealing the dark duality of creation that mocks human moralities and transcendental philosophic ideals.
When the last gallon had been casked and struck below, the decks were cleansed with lye and sand; the mariners rinsed the fragrant grease from their hands; but with the departure of that unctuous film, the cold ocean wind returned with redoubled fury, bringing back the stinging realities of maritime labor, and dissolving that divine vision of brotherhood into the gray light of common day, piercing our weary flesh with icy needles of brine and unsparing reality.
The sailors rubbed their reddened fingers, their lips muttering the customary oaths of the forecastle; the salty wind parched their skin, encrusting their palms with brine; and the hard, unyielding necessities of mortal existence shattered our brief utopian dream like a fragile crystal beneath an iron hammer, driving every man back into the grim struggle of life where self-preservation reigns supreme over all sentimental affections.
The mariners resumed their sullen silences and suspicious glances; the brief millennium of the tub was past, and each man retreated once more into the solitary fortress of his own embattled ego. Human benevolence is so fragile a blossom, blooming only within the rare and miraculous greenhouse of circumstance, doomed to wither before the first frost of earthly struggle and cold commercial interest that govern the terrestrial sphere with an iron scepter.
The mortal spirit cannot long endure the unshielded radiance of absolute virtue, even as the mortal eye shrinks from the vertical glory of the noon-day sun. We yearn for the embrace of our fellows, yet recoil from the thorns of proximity; touching paradise for an hour in the oil-vat, only to buckle on our defensive armor and resume the blind warfare of mortal existence, drifting toward the inevitable silence that awaits all earthly striving beneath the rolling billows.
And aloft upon the quarter-deck, solitary and unbending, Captain Ahab maintained his relentless vigil; his granite heart proof against all domestic affections, his monomaniac purpose untouched by the gentle sacraments of human kindness; gazing only into the trackless waste where his white nemesis awaited the final encounter, harboring within his volcanic breast no room for mortal tenderness or earthly charity, severed from the human race by his demonic quest for metaphysical vengeance.
The evening closed in, and the Pequod flew southward before the freshening gale, her bows cleaving the dark surge that sparkled with phosphorescence beneath the rising moon; bringing my hands unto my face, I could still discern the faint, dying perfume of the spermaceti upon my skin—a melancholy reminder of that fleeting paradise of brotherhood that our doomed ship was leaving forever behind upon the rolling waste of the indifferent deep.
Let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness! ... Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort; ... as our fingers met in that aromatic nectar, all mortal alienation dissolved into a sublime communion of universal brotherhood!
The Colossal Squid, the Virgin, and the Parallax of the Compass
As the Pequod resumed her solitary southward passage through the languid reaches of the tropical Pacific, the vast expanse of that serene ocean manifested phenomena of such unearthly character as to confound the hardiest mariner. On a breathless noon, when the sea lay unruffled as an immense sheet of black mercury beneath a vertical sun, not a breath of air stirring between heaven and earth, the motionless ship resembling a vessel painted upon an eternal canvas of silence; Daggoo, stationed at the mainmast-head, suddenly shattered the oppressive silence with a wild, terrified cry: 'Look aloft! Look yonder on the lee-bow! A white thing! The White Whale rises from the deep!' That piercing shout echoed over the glassy waters, shattering the stillness of the Pacific and setting every pulse pounding with uncontrollable fury.
That electrifying summons threw the ship into instant tumult; the boats were lowered with desperate celerity, the oarsmen casting aside their tools and throwing their entire weight upon the ash sweeps, racing across the glassy surface toward that mysterious object that glistened like a mountain of snow beneath the blinding sun. But as our craft drew within striking distance of the floating wonder, the furious ardour of the chase congealed into an icy paralysis of superstitious dread and soul-sickening awe, our oars suspended motionless above the azure mirror as if enchanted by some spectral enchantment of the deep!
It was no mammalian leviathan of the deep! It was that rarest, most mysterious, and most appalling apparition of the oceanic abyss—the Colossal Squid! A vast, pulpy, undulating mass of jelly-like white flesh, measuring upwards of forty fathoms in circumference, floated upon the glassy surface; from whose formless circumference extended hundreds of long, snaky tentacles, armed with chitinous hooks and suckers, curling and uncurling in the azure water with a languid, serpentine menace that struck sickness unto the soul, resembling a bloated, albino titan resurrected from the primeval mud of Erebus.
That shapeless horror possessed neither bone nor face, save that from the center of its gelatinous bulk stared a solitary, lidless black eye, as large as a carriage-wheel, gazing through the clear water with a cold, unmeaning malignancy that seemed older than the foundations of the earth. Before that immense, formless mass of albino pulp, all human categories of understanding and physiological comprehension dissolved into chaotic terror, leaving the mortal soul utterly defenseless against the primeval void that had reigned supreme before the creation of light.
In the ancient folklore of the fisheries, the Great Squid is reputed to be the primeval food of the Cachalot, and the infallible harbinger of his presence; the old whalemen believing that whosoever looks upon this albino phantom hath received his summons from the pit, and that the White Whale himself is cruising within the shadow of its wake. The mariners held their breath, clutching their oars in rigid silence, dreading lest the slightest murmur disturb that messenger of the grave, while a suffocating pall of supernatural doom settled over the unrippled sea.
Not a harpooner dared raise his iron against that undulating mass; the mariners backed their oars in shuddering silence, suffering the phantom to descend without molestation; and after floating for a few moments beneath the blazing sun, the colossal jelly began to subside, sinking with imperceptible slowness into the unfathomable caverns of the ocean, leaving not a bubble nor a ripple behind, naught save an icy dread that chilled the blood within our veins, haunting our thoughts through all the subsequent watches of the voyage.
Several days subsequent to that harrowing apparition, a strange barque, displaying the commercial ensign of the Hanseatic League, was raised upon the serene horizon. This was the Jungfrau (or The Virgin), hailing from Bremen, commanded by Captain Derick De Deer; a vessel that had kept the tropical seas for a full twelvemonth without taking a single barrel of oil, designated in the expressive and unsparing vocabulary of whalemen as a 'clean ship,' bearing all the humiliation, squalor, and bitterness of prolonged maritime defeat and commercial bankruptcy.
Whose portly commander, descending into an open boat, boarded the Pequod holding an antique pewter coffee-pot, begging piteously of Chief Mate Starbuck for a small donation of sperm oil to illuminate his darkened cabin. Upon the trackless wastes of the Pacific, the prolonged darkness of oil-less nights constitutes an exquisite torment unto the spirit, and the German captain's disconsolate plight provoked the derisive amusement and mocking smiles of our hardy forecastle hands, who pointed with scorn at his beggarly, empty-tubbed vessel.
The generous and compassionate Nantucket mate filled the German's vessel from our private stores; but in the very instant when Captain Derick was preparing to express his gratitude, several towering white spouts were raised upon the distant horizon! A pod of sperm whales was browsing upon the surface! Forgetting his courtesy, his gratitude, and his oil, the German scrambled over our bulwarks like a starving vulture, leaping into his boat and shouting frantic orders unto his crew to pull for the quarry, displaying the naked, unvarnished rapacity of his brutal calling!
A furious international regatta ensued across the rolling Pacific; our three boats and the German craft cleaved the water in headlong pursuit; but the prize of the chase proved to be an extraordinary and tragic spectacle—an ancient, decrepit, and blind bull Cachalot, his vast hump covered with cancerous encrustations and barnacles, moving feebly upon the surface like a dying patriarch of the deep, abandoned by the pod to wander solitary and defenseless upon the wastes of the rolling sea, his milky, cataract-covered eyes perceiving neither the sun above nor the hunters below.
That blind sovereign of the ocean labored heavily in the swell, his breathing sounding like the wheeze of a broken forge-bellows, entirely destitute of the swift agility required to evade the encirclement of human predators. His battered flanks bore the scars of a hundred oceanic tempests and ancient combats; yet before the rapacity of two hunting vessels, the former monarch of the deep was reduced unto an unresisting victim, gasping in the rolling surge beneath the shadow of descending steel.
Though Derick's boat had seized the advance, the superior agility of the Pequod's savage rowers could not be denied; Flask's craft surged ahead of the clumsy Germans, and in the moment of closing, the little third mate drove his lance deep into the vitals of the blind giant, burying the iron barb to the socket within the pulsing center of his ancient life, while the rowers backed water with all their might to escape the shuddering, convulsive recoil of the dying monarch!
A torrent of crimson blood gushed from the creature's spiracle, staining the blue Pacific into an unholy shambles of gore! The dying monarch gave one last convulsive shudder, his blind head sinking into the crimson waves; while the disappointed Germans pulled away in sullen defeat, cursing the fortune that had robbed them of their prey, retreating with empty hands across the swell into the obscurity of the western horizon.
Yet justice was not mocked; for as the Pequod's crew attempted to secure the carcass unto the ship's side, the colossal skeleton proved too heavy for the falls, and with a sudden snap of the chains, the dead giant plunged straight down into the three-mile abyss, cheating both vessels of their expected dividends and mocking our rapacious hopes, leaving behind an empty, desolate sea where only bubble-tracks remained!
It was an impressive sermon upon the vanity of human rapacity; an ancient and majestic sovereign had been slaughtered for naught, leaving behind only a fading trail of crimson froth upon the indifferent waters, while the ocean rolled on unchanged above his unburied bones, leaving only the screaming sea-fowl to mark the scene of our futile, violent, and unhallowed ambition.
Shortly after our encounter with the Virgin, the Pequod entered the electrical storm-belts that hover over the equator. On a suffocating midnight, the black sky was suddenly sundered by cataracts of blinding lightning; the gale shrieked through our top-hamper, and an unearthly spectacle arrested the attention of every soul aboard—the apparition of the Corposants, or Saint Elmo's Fire, blazing upon the extremities of the doomed vessel with terrifying splendor!
Upon the three towering mastheads, and from the extreme copper points of every lightning-rod, three pallid, ghost-like flames blazed with unconsuming fury! They were no common terrestrial fires of wood, but silent, glowing balls of electrical plasma that clung unto the spars like luminous spirits from the grave; casting an unearthly greenish pallor over the drenched deck, illuminating the terrified countenances of the mariners with the light of the sepulchre, making them resemble walking phantoms of the abyss pacing a drowned sepulchre.
The sailors fell upon their knees in superstitious dread, crying unto heaven for mercy and crossing their breasts in terror, the polyglot crew of Christians, pagans, and savages united for once in abject terror of the supernatural light; but Ahab, stepping boldly unto the quarter-deck rail, grasped the copper lightning-chain in his bare hands, facing those three fiery altars with defiant majesty! Baring his scarred breast unto the electrical glare, the monomaniac captain shouted his blasphemous challenge unto the unseen powers of the universe, daring the celestial lightning to consume his mortal frame, but swearing never to surrender the sovereign autonomy of his spirit!
'Burn on!' roared Ahab in defiant frenzy; 'thy unconsuming fire hath scorched my visage, yet the fire within my mortal spirit is older and fiercer than thine! I challenge the inscrutable powers that rule the void: thou mayst shatter my mortal bones, but thou canst never bend my sovereign soul to worship thy mindless majesty!' His titanic defiance echoed through the roaring gale like the challenge of an ancient titan hurled against the throne of Jove, thrilling every soul with unholy awe.
The tempest subsided with the dawn, and Chief Mate Starbuck approached the binnacle to verify the ship's position; but upon inspecting the card beneath the glass, a sharp cry of horror escaped his lips, arresting the steps of every sailor upon the deck! 'The compass! Merciful God, the compass is inverted!'
The terrible truth was revealed: the intense electrical discharge that had coursed through the mastheads had reversed the polarity of the needles! The magnetic compass, which should have guided us southward toward the Line, pointed directly North! During the dark hours of the tempest, our vessel had been steering blindly in the opposite direction, rushing headlong toward unseen shoals under the fatal delusion of security, carrying thirty souls toward the brink of unrecorded destruction!
Panic threatened to overwhelm the forecastle; but Ahab, approaching the binnacle with haughty disdain, laughed aloud at the terrors of his crew. Ordering the carpenter to bring a sail-maker's needle, an unmagnetized rod of iron, and a heavy top-maul, he placed the needle upon the anvil, and with a single titanic stroke of the hammer, striking shower after shower of sparks from the cold metal, restructured the molecular magnetism of the steel, creating a new compass that pointed with unerring fidelity toward the true magnetic pole, bending natural law unto his imperial will with sovereign mastery!
'Behold!' roared Ahab in arrogant triumph; 'Ahab is not only your commander, but the master of the lodestone itself! The laws of heaven and earth bow before my hammer!' The ignorant mariners gazed upon him with awe, believing him possessed of divine powers, as the restored needle aligned faithfully with the true polar north, re-establishing his absolute dominion over the ship and over the superstitious souls of his crew.
Yet in the shadow of the mainmast, Fedallah the Parsee whispered that fatal prophecy of the Three Hearses—that Ahab must behold two hearses on the sea, the first of living whale-bone and the second of American timber, and that hemp alone could end his life; while the doomed barque, hailed by the delusion of triumph, surged headlong toward the fatal meridian of the equatorial abyss, churning the phosphorescent foam beneath her keel, where the white leviathan kept watch in the impenetrable darkness of the deep.
From the unruffled mirror of the deep rose that vast, pulpy, undulating mass of the Colossal Squid! ... The German barque Jungfrau begged piteously for a lamp-full of oil, only to be outstripped in the ruthless slaughter of an aged, blind leviathan! ... And when the fires of St. Elmo inverted the golden needle of the binnacle, Fedallah's prophecy of the three hearses sealed Ahab's doom upon the sea!
The Smashed Quadrant and the Forge: The Baptism of Blood
As the Pequod drifted slowly through the sweltering calms of the equatorial Line, the noon-day sun, resembling an immense disc of incandescent white gold, hung vertically above the cloudless, leaden vault of heaven. Not a ripple disturbed the glassy mirror of the sea, the oppressive atmosphere weighed heavy as molten lead upon the breast, and the black pitch boiled and bubbled from the parched seams of the oak planking; aloft on the quarter-deck, Captain Ahab stood solitary in the blinding optical glare, holding in his scarred hands an exquisite quadrant of burnished brass and colored glass, raising his eyes to shoot the midday sun at the exact celestial meridian of noon, determined to calculate his true physical latitude upon the rolling globe.
That costly navigational instrument constituted the supreme symbol of civilized humanity's intellectual conquest over the trackless oceanic abyss, enabling the mariner, by celestial triangulation of distant spheres, to calculate his exact physical latitude upon the curved bosom of the terrestrial earth with infallible geometric precision. But in the very second when Ahab narrowed his smoldering gray eyes to align the mirrors with the blinding luminary of heaven, a paroxysm of demonic rage, long festering within his bruised and vindictive soul, erupted with sudden volcanic fury, distorting his scarred features into an image of terrifying defiance that chilled the hearts of the silent steersmen standing at the helm!
'Foolish toy! Vain, mechanical, and contemptible cheat!' shouted Ahab, dashing the glittering instrument from his eye and glaring upon the polished brass with unmitigated scorn, his harsh voice trembling with volcanic passion across the quiet deck; 'thou canst tell me where the blind sun burns in the high heavens, but canst thou tell me where Moby Dick browses in the three-mile deep?! Thou canst calculate the latitude of this perishable clay, but canst thou sound the bottomless vortex of Ahab's eternal torment?! All mortal instruments of measurement are but childish trivialities before the oceanic tempests of the unconquered spirit!'
With a wild oath that rang across the silent decks, Ahab raised his arm aloft and dashed the glittering quadrant upon the hard oak planks with all his mortal strength! The delicate vernier, mirrors, and colored lenses shattered into a thousand glittering fragments that sparkled like frost beneath the vertical sun; yet his fury was unappeased; raising his heavy ivory heel, the monomaniac captain trampled the delicate mechanism beneath his weight, crushing the wheels, verniers, and pivots into twisted, shapeless scrap-metal that could never again serve mortal eyes upon the deep!
'Behold, thou unanswering sky!' roared Ahab, spreading his brawny arms toward heaven with titanic defiance; 'no longer will Ahab steer his craft by borrowing light from thy cold and haughty stars! No more will I beg of thy indifferent sun to bestow my coordinates upon the waste! Henceforth, the level log, the magnetic needle, and Ahab's unbending will alone shall guide the ship across the trackless waste! Smite me with thy lightning if thou wilt, but thou shalt never teach my sovereign purpose to kneel before thy celestial hierarchy! The autonomous will of mortal man defies the tyranny of the spheres!'
The crew observed this act of frantic impiety in paralyzed horror and superstitious dread; Starbuck crossed his breast in silent anguish, his pale face reflecting his inner despair, perceiving in this smashed quadrant the fatal blinding of the ship ere she plunged headlong into the jaws of destruction; yet not a soul dared challenge the sovereign authority of that terrible old man, whose dark will held thirty mortal beings in absolute thrall, marching inexorably toward their predetermined doom upon the rolling waste.
Leaving the ruined brass upon the deck without a backward glance, Ahab strode heavily toward the ship's waist, where the blacksmith's portable forge was sheltered beneath a temporary roof of sheet-iron. In the smoky gloom of that workshop, Perth the aged blacksmith, bowed by the weight of ancient sorrow, toiled over his glowing coals with patient, mechanical resignation, hammering away the ghosts of his ruined earthly existence with unceasing strokes of his heavy iron tongs amid the flying sparks of the anvil.
Perth's terrestrial history was a tragedy of domestic ruin and alcoholic despair. Once a prosperous and respected craftsman possessing a virtuous wife and two brawny sons, the cursed bottle had dissolved his fortune, laid his companion in a pauper's grave, and hurried his offspring unto premature death, leaving him a crippled outcast with frostbitten feet, seeking upon the watery waste of the Pacific to deaden his intolerable memories amid the clatter of the anvil and the hiss of the forge, deaf unto all earthly consolation and terrestrial hope.
As Ahab entered the shelter, the charcoal burned with blinding whiteness beneath the strokes of the leather bellows, pumped by the frantic arms of the little cabin-boy Pip; heavy drops of sweat streamed from the lad's dark forehead, falling like rain upon the hot cinders; clouds of glowing sparks leaped into the tropical twilight like a flight of fiery spirits escaping from the infernal pit, dancing in the suffocating gloom of the wooden barque with eerie radiance.
'Perth!' whispered Ahab, his voice hollow as the wind echoing through a granite tomb; 'cease thy petty repairs! I summon thee to forge me an iron such as no whale-hunter hath ever hurled—a barb that shall hold fast when the white leviathan dives to the lowest caverns of the deep! A spear capable of sustaining the entire weight of Ahab's concentrated hatred, piercing that wall of impenetrable whiteness that separates man from the inscrutable absolute!'
The old artisan slowly raised his soot-blackened countenance, gazing upon his commander with calm, sorrowful eyes: 'Captain, Perth can weld the stubbornest Swedish iron, but mortal steel hath its physical breaking point; can any weapon forged by mortal hands endure the supernatural fury of thy quest? Fire may melt the iron, but it cannot dissolve the intolerable burden of mortal obsession, nor heal the wounds of the bruised spirit.'
'Common iron cannot endure it, Perth!' laughed Ahab in bitter triumph; and drawing forth a heavy canvas bag, he emptied upon the anvil a mass of worn, rusted fragments of peculiar shape. They were hundreds of ancient horseshoe-stubs, gathered from the stony highways of the world; nails that had traversed the rocky roads of every terrestrial clime, trampled beneath the hoofs of thousands of galloping steeds, until every particle of brittle slag had been beaten out, leaving only the toughest fibrous sinew of pure steel.
'Behold!' cried Ahab, running his fingers through the cold iron with grim satisfaction; 'here is the true marrow of the earth! These stubs have borne the crushing burdens of mortal journeying, yet they never snapped! Cast them into the coals, Perth, and weld all the enduring agony and stubborn fortitude of the terrestrial globe into a single barbed javelin of destruction, an instrument worthy of a titanic duel against the leviathan!'
Perth nodded in silent comprehension, grasping the stubs with his long tongs and burying them deep within the roaring heart of the forge. The bellows roared with redoubled fury; the coal flared into dazzling radiance; and beneath that intense thermal energy, the separate fragments fused into a single glowing ingot of incandescent steel, bubbling like lava within the charcoal bed beneath the artisan's watchful gaze!
When the white-hot mass was swung unto the anvil, a titanic mechanical battering shook the barque from keel to truck! Clang! clang! clang! the heavy sledge rose and fell in rhythmic cadence; showers of fiery stars illumined the dusky deck, while Perth twisted and welded the metal, drawing it out into a long, supple rod that possessed the flexibility of a willow wand and the diamond hardness of tempered steel, banishing every internal imperfection from the glowing core.
In the final moments of shaping, Ahab himself seized the top-maul from Perth's grasp, throwing his whole mortal weight into the descending strokes, hammering his own volcanic fury into the molecular fabric of the weapon; until the barbed head, armed with two cruel, razor-edged flukes, gleamed with dark and lethal perfection, capable of cleaving the thickest blubber as though it were water, humming with latent violence beneath the smoky canopy.
The smith grasped the glowing harpoon with his tongs, turning toward the wooden tub of cool water to temper the heated metal; but in the very second when the iron hovered above the surface, Ahab's talon-like fingers locked around the old man's wrist with crushing force, his iron grip threatening to crush the artisan's bones like dry twigs!
'Hold! Not in water! Spurn the cowardly pump-water!' shouted Ahab in frantic ecstasy; 'a weapon destined to transfix the white god of the deep must never be tempered in common cistern-wash! Such steel must drink a fiercer and more noble liquor—it must be quenched in the living blood of unbaptized men, that it may crave the vitals of the white fiend through all the depths of the ocean!'
Turning toward the waist of the ship, Ahab summoned the three pagan harpooners who stood watching in the shadow of the bulwarks: 'Come hither, my brave savages! Lend me your blood! Your heathen, undaunted, and royal blood alone hath the virtue to temper Ahab's iron of vengeance, imparting unto the steel the unquenchable fury of the primordial wilderness and the unyielding strength of pagan kings!'
The three bronze giants stepped forward without a tremor of hesitation; to their wild and pagan sensibilities, this bloody baptism possessed an awful, sacramental majesty. Tashtego, drawing his keen jack-knife, drew the blade across his muscular forearm; Queequeg and Daggoo followed his example, and three streams of smoking, dark arterial gore flowed into a wooden trencher held between their hands, welling from the deep fountain of their untamed life!
A half-gallon of warm, steaming heathen blood filled the vessel; Ahab grasped the dish in his trembling hands, his face transfigured with unholy joy, and poured the dark crimson torrent directly over the white-hot barb held upon the anvil, basking in the terrible thermal radiation of the metal like a priest officiating at an ancient pagan altar of sacrifice!
A hideous, suffocating hiss shattered the silence of the tropical night! The boiling blood vaporized into thick, pungent, crimson steam, enveloping the forge and the figures of the mariners in an infernal shroud of reeking gore; while the steel, undergoing that instantaneous thermal shock, hardened into a terrible iridescent blackness that mirrored the fires of the pit, sealed forever with the indelible mark of demonic wrath!
In the heart of that steaming cloud, Ahab raised the blackened harpoon toward heaven, his scarred face illuminated by the dying coals, howling his supreme blasphemy across the sea: 'Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!' The terrible words resounded across the waters like the proclamation of an archangel fallen from celestial light, sealing the covenant of blood between mortal hatred and the abyss.
The unhallowed curse faded into the gathering darkness of the equatorial night; the Pequod plunged southward into the trackless waste, her captain clutching the blood-tempered iron to his breast like a scepter of doom, steering by the blind fury of his monomania toward the fatal meridian where his white nemesis awaited the final harvest, dragging thirty living souls toward the brink of eternal silence beneath the unpitying stars.
I smash thee, thou vain toy of brass and glass! ... No longer shall Ahab gaze upon the sun for light, nor beg of heaven his latitude! ... Dead reckoning and the sovereign will alone shall steer our course! ... Before the roaring coals of Perth's anvil, Ahab spurned the common water, demanding the life-blood of the pagan harpooners! ... Through the hissing clouds of gore, the old blasphemer cried: 'Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!'
The Life-Buoy and the Coffin: Queequeg's Mathematical Epiphany
As the Pequod continued her languid progress through the leaden calms of the equatorial Line, the oppressive silence of the Pacific was shattered by a sudden and heart-rending catastrophe. In the suffocating twilight of a breathless evening, a young seaman, aloft at the mainmast-head furling the light topgallant sail, overcome by the intense heat and sudden vertigo, uttered a piercing cry and plunged headlong through the air like a bird with a broken wing, striking the dark water beneath with a dull, hollow concussion, disappearing instantly beneath a fleeting circlet of foam into the hungry depths of the sea!
'Man overboard! Cut the life-buoy!' resounded across the startled deck. Chief Mate Starbuck, with commendable presence of mind, drew his sheath-knife and severed the lashing of the ship's solitary life-buoy suspended at the stern—a massive, hollow cask of white-painted oak, which, according to maritime usage, constituted the only earthly support for a struggling swimmer adrift upon the trackless waters, embodying all hope of salvation in the hour of peril.
Yet in the very instant when the heavy cask struck the surge, an ominous, splintering crash echoed over the waves! Long exposed unto the blistering rays of the tropical sun and the dry rot of prolonged voyages, the parched staves had shrunk and decayed; the ocean rushed through a dozen gaping fissures, and that vessel of salvation, absorbing the brine like a porous stone, sank straight down into the three-mile abyss, dragging the drowning mariner into the eternal darkness of the unfathomable deep without yielding him a single moment of earthly reprieve or a breath of hope!
That sudden disaster and the catastrophic failure of the life-buoy cast an impenetrable pall of superstitious gloom over the forecastle. To cruise the trackless reaches of the Pacific destitute of a life-buoy was accounted by all hands as sailing beneath the naked scythe of the Destroyer; yet a heavier affliction immediately supervened—Queequeg, our peerless Maori prince and harpooner, was suddenly prostrated by a virulent and consuming tropical fever, casting him into a profound delirium that threatened his very soul!
Within forty-eight hours, that colossal warrior, whose iron sinews had so often defied the fury of the sperm whale, wasted unto an appalling shadow of his former self; the raging fire within his veins parched his bronze skin unto an ashen pallor, his pulse galloped like an untamed courser, and his labored breath sounded through the gloomy forecastle like the rattle of departing life. The old medicine-chest was ransacked in vain, and the mates shook their heads in mournful resignation, concluding that the brave savage had reached his mortal haven beyond all earthly aid or medical skill.
Yet in the very hour when all surrendered hope, Queequeg, retaining possession of his unclouded faculties, opened his dark and luminous eyes, summoning the ship's carpenter unto his hammock. He calmly declared that he had no desire to be stitched into a rotting canvas hammock with a rusty cannon-shot at his heels and pitched unto the ravenous sharks; but requested that a proper 'canoe-coffin' of seasoned oak be constructed for his burial, after the ancient etiquette of his native island to honor his royal lineage and warrior renown.
In his far-off home of Kokovoko, high-born chieftains and consecrated whalemen, when their mortal voyages are concluded, are laid within decorated canoes, surrounded by their arms, and launched upon the rolling sea to float toward the tranquil havens of their ancestral gods. Queequeg desired to embark upon eternity within a similar wooden craft, committing his bones unto an ark capable of surviving the storms of the void, navigating fearlessly into the unknown hereafter across the unmapped reaches of eternity.
The gruff old carpenter, grumbling at this strange diversion of the ship's timber, yet awed by the dying warrior's serene majesty, produced his chalk and rule, measuring the prostrate form of the savage from scalp to heel; and repairing unto his bench upon the central deck, selected the soundest planks of dark oak, sawing and planing them into a long, narrow chest with sloping ends, resembling a slender Polynesian canoe, scattering aromatic shavings across the sunny planking as he toiled without respite.
After a night and day of unremitting labor, that singular funeral chest was completed. Its joints were fitted with watertight precision, its lid furnished with iron staples and hasps; and when the finished casket was carried into the forecastle and laid beside the sick man's bunk, exhaling the rich perfume of seasoned oak, the entire company gathered in solemn silence to witness that extraordinary encounter between the mortal frame and its wooden receptacle, enveloped in reverent stillness and profound foreboding.
With incredible fortitude, Queequeg raised himself upon his elbows, and with Ishmael's assistance, crawled into the open coffin to perform a solemn rehearsal of his burial! He caused his barbed harpoon to be placed beside him, adjusted his wooden pillow, took his little black idol Yojo unto his breast, and closed his eyes in peaceful contemplation, smiling with child-like serenity as he tested the dimensions of his final resting place, resembling an ancient king preparing for coronation in a sepulchral chamber.
Satisfied that the casket was worthy of a royal prince, Queequeg called for his carving gouge and jack-knife; and sitting upright within that narrow bed, he began, with trembling yet unerring fingers, to carve intricate geometric glyphs and figures upon the smooth surface of the oak lid, working by the yellow flame of a swinging whale-oil lamp, the keen blade tracing delicate, symmetrical furrows in the dark grain of the seasoned wood with unyielding precision and deep mystical concentration, oblivious to the tossing of the ship.
Those singular figures were faithful transcriptions of the mystical tattoos that covered his own body—hieroglyphics imprinted upon his flesh by a departed seer in Kokovoko, containing a complete astrological chart of the heavens, the secret chronology of the world, and the unwritten mysteries of the soul's wanderings through the realms of immortality! An entire cosmic encyclopedia was thus inscribed upon the wooden lid of the coffin by the hand of that dying savage, transcribing eternity onto oak with primitive, sacred majesty that stunned the intellect.
I leaned over the casket in profound metaphysical astonishment: here was an illiterate barbarian, unable to write his own name save by a crooked cross, yet his living flesh and his dying coffin bore the complete cipher of universal truth! A secret geometry that mockingly transcended all the universities, theological schools, and royal societies of the civilized globe, achieving a sublime fusion of mortal artifact and cosmic law that defied the comprehension of all mortal philosophy and earthly science!
When the last sacred character had been carved into the oak, Queequeg sank back exhausted, his eyelids closing in what seemed the final slumber; the mariners retreated in hushed reverie, awaiting the morning watch to announce his demise; but when the first rays of the dawn illumined the scuttles, a miraculous transformation defied all the established dogmas of physiology, shattering the grim predictions of terrestrial medicine with silent and breathtaking grandeur!
The raging fever had completely broken! His skin was cool and moist, his pulse beat with steady, majestic strength; and as the sun crested the horizon, the dying warrior sat up in his coffin, calling in cheerful tones for a smoking trencher of salt beef and biscuit, his spirit vigorous and triumphant over the shadowy specter of the grave, laughing at the impotence of sickness!
The sailors were struck with superstitious awe, unable to comprehend this sudden resurrection from the grave. When I questioned him concerning this miraculous recovery, Queequeg smiled with characteristic tranquility, explaining that in the dark watches of the night he had remembered a small matter of unfinished business on Nantucket, and had therefore 'changed his mind about dying', returning unto mortal life by sovereign decree of his untamed spirit, proving that the human heart commands its own destiny!
Unto that untamed savage, death was not an irresistible mechanical fatality, but a sovereign contract requiring the soul's deliberate consent! So long as the human will retains its unyielding mastery, the mortal frame refuses to surrender unto the grave; he had vanquished the destroyer by sheer imperial fiat, adjourning his funeral until a more convenient season, demonstrating the primordial vitality of uncorrupted nature that laughs at mortal infirmities.
Yet his recovery created a comical dilemma for the ship's company—that massive canoe-coffin, adorned with celestial ciphers, remained an empty and cumbersome monument upon the crowded deck. The carpenter scratched his gray head in perplexity, uncertain how to dispose of an article whose intended occupant was merrily smoking his tomahawk-pipe upon the windlass, pacing the planks with vigorous strides and laughing at the superstitious whispers of his messmates.
Observing the difficulty from the quarter-deck, Captain Ahab approached with measured tread; his somber eyes rested upon that carved oak chest, and turning unto the artisan, he issued a command of singular and terrible originality, completely subverting the conventional boundaries between life and death: 'Carpenter! Fetch thy pitch-pot! Nail the lid fast with copper spikes, caulk every seam with oakum and boiling pitch until it be tight as a cask, and sling it at the stern where the old buoy hung! Let this coffin become the ship's new life-buoy, a dark sentinel watching over the living!'
'A coffin for a life-buoy, sir?!' stammered the carpenter, aghast at the unholy conjunction; 'can an emblem of the sepulchre preserve mortal life upon the sea?! Must the drowning seaman climb into a grave to find salvation?! Surely the sea will vomit forth such mockery of heaven's holy order!'
'Obey, thou old knuckle-head!' shouted Ahab with bitter laughter; 'life and death are but the twin faces of the same dark medal! What floats more buoyantly upon the surge than an empty coffin?! Since heaven's life-buoy hath sunk unto the worms, let us trust our mortal preservation unto the casket of the dead! Let the sea behold: the Pequod rides above the abyss, supported by the very house of mortality! The absurd alone governs this inscrutable cosmos!'
Under the terror of that command, the carpenter obeyed; the seams were caulked with black, boiling pitch, sealing Queequeg's celestial ciphers beneath an impenetrable varnish; hempen lanyards were secured unto the corners, and the carved oak coffin was hoisted unto the taffrail, swinging above the ship's churning wake like a dark, suspended ark between heaven and the deep, swaying rhythmically with the rolling swells beneath the indifferent stars of the equator.
It was a spectacle pregnant with sublime irony: daily the mariners paced beneath that symbol of the grave, which had been transfigured into their sole guarantee of earthly salvation; a vessel constructed for corruption now designated as the fragile sanctuary of human hope upon the rolling desert of the Pacific, defying the hungry maw of the abyss with grim defiance and mysterious dignity.
As the Pequod rushed southward toward the equator, the empty coffin swayed gently in the trade winds, bearing the memory of eternity upon its darkened lid, keeping its silent and enigmatic vigil over the waters, awaiting that final catastrophic convulsion when the living and the dead should be mingled together in the swallowing vortex of the deep, ready to receive its solitary passenger in the supreme hour of doom.
The rotten cask of the life-buoy plunged into the three-mile abyss with a hollow groan, cheating the drowning seaman of his salvation! ... Dying of mortal fever, Queequeg ordered a canoe-coffin of dark oak, copying the celestial tattoos of his own flesh upon its lid! ... Then, by sovereign will alone, the savage warrior banished death! ... And when the carpenter caulked the seams with pitch to suspend it as the ship's new life-buoy, the casket of the dead was transfigured into our only ark of life!
The Log and Line, the Madness of Pip, and the Submerged Divinity
As the Pequod surged southward through the trackless reaches of the equatorial Pacific, the total destruction of the quadrant deprived the vessel of every celestial aid in determining her latitude upon the deep. Captain Ahab was reduced entirely unto the ancient, primitive art of Dead Reckoning, relying exclusively upon the steering compass of the binnacle and the level line of the traditional wooden log-chip to deduce the ship's advancing geometry over the curved surface of the watery abyss. A breathless, electric suspense pervaded the entire company, for every seaman knew we were plunging headlong across a desolate watery desert untouched by the charts of civilized men; the overhead constellations offered no familiar sanctuary, and only the hollow roaring of midnight breakers beneath our wooden keel marked our blind trajectory through the void.
In the dusky twilight of a tempestuous evening, while the gale howled through the taut rigging and black billows broke over the weather bulwarks, Ahab summoned unto the quarter-deck the oldest mariner aboard—the aged Manxman, a silent, white-haired patriarch hailing from the Isle of Man. Ahab commanded this weather-worn ancient to repair unto the taffrail and heave the log-line into the churning wake, that the ship's physical velocity across the ocean floor might be freshly determined beneath the freshening blast, giving our blind course its solitary physical anchor upon the deep and attempting once more to impose terrestrial geometry upon an unmeasured wilderness of chaos.
The ancient seaman grasped the wooden reel with his gnarled, calloused hands, casting the triangular wooden log-chip into the boiling surge; the chip bit into the sea, holding its stationary position amid the foam, while the slender line spun from the whirring spindle like a swift serpent escaping unto freedom. The Manxman rested his thumb upon the flying hemp, solemnly counting the passing knots as they leaped through his fingers, measuring the barque's headway through the gathering gloom, murmuring mystical calculations beneath his breath as though tolling the funeral march of our doomed expedition across the waste.
Yet in the very instant when forty fathoms had been payed out into the black water, a sharp, metallic snap resounded from the depths of the surge! Subjected unto the combined tension of the heavy drag and the ship's plunging hull, that ancient cord, long weakened by the rot of tropical brine and parching equatorial suns, snapped cleanly in twain! The severed end whipped back through the air, falling lifeless upon the wet planking like a dead serpent cast upon the shore, leaving the vacant spindle humming in empty futility and mocking the last mathematical pretensions of mortal seamen upon the waters.
The old seaman slowly wound up the vacant reel; the wooden chip was swallowed forever in the three-mile deep, leaving not a trace behind. Ahab stared upon that frayed, rotted strand in the Manxman's hand, a terrible cloud of volcanic rage and bitter melancholy darkening his scarred visage: the Pequod had lost her final physical instrument for measuring her flight across the world; she was now utterly blind, plunging headlong through an unmeasured void without a single terrestrial yardstick to reckon her progress across the waste of waters, abandoned unto the mercy of arbitrary currents that swept us toward destruction!
'Common iron I can weld, and seasoned timber I can shape, but who can restore the rotted fibres of an ancient line?!' muttered Ahab in hollow despair; nature's silent, unhasting processes of decay mocked the iron tenacity of his mortal purpose. With a curt wave of his hand he dismissed the ancient mariner, leaning his scarred brow against the cold wooden bulwarks, gazing down into the black water where the white foam hissed in mockery of all human calculation, his internal fury blazing with redoubled vehemence against the unanswering universe in terrible and unyielding defiance.
In that suffocating interval of solitary contemplation, a faint, musical, yet unearthly murmuring floated from the shadowy forecastle. It was the little Alabama cabin-boy Pip, holding his battered tambourine beneath his arm, stepping with erratic, feather-like lightness across the tilting deck, resembling a wandering phantom of the dusk as he approached the quarter-deck rail, muttering strange, poetic soliloquies unto the unanswering billows, his gentle voice carrying an unearthly chill that pierced through the howling gale like an apparition from the other side of life.
A catastrophe of transcendent psychological horror had overtaken that gentle child. He had been the merriest, tenderest soul aboard our grim hunter of leviathans, enlivening the forenoon watches with the joyful jingling of his tambourine, bringing the solitary beam of sunshine unto a ship steeped in blood and blubber; yet his delicate, timid spirit was utterly destitute of the ferocious fortitude required to confront the monstrous slaughter of the deep, shrinking in mortal terror from the violent butchery of the leviathans, trembling at every thunderous concussion of the sea.
Weeks earlier, when Stubb's whaleboat was short of an oarsman, the terrified lad had been pressed into service; and when a wounded bull Cachalot breached beside the gunwale with a sound like thunder, the panic-stricken boy, losing his terrestrial wits, leaped overboard into the boiling surge, splashing in helpless terror amid the white spray while the infuriated oarsmen cursed his cowardice beneath their breath, endangering the balance of the boat in the midst of mortal battle upon the waves.
Though rescued from the waves on that occasion, Stubb had shaken his clay pipe in the boy's face with terrible menace: 'Weep not, thou timid imp; but if thou jumpest again, by heaven, I will leave thee to drown! A whale is worth three thousand dollars, and thy black hide is not worth a brass farthing upon the open market!' Yet in a subsequent encounter, when the line whizzed smoking through the chocks, Pip leaped again, becoming entangled in the deadly coils of the harpoon-rope amid the roaring waves, drawn down into the churning abyss!
To preserve the lad's limbs, Tashtego had severed the taut harpoon-line; and Stubb, seeing his precious quarry escaping across the swell, carried out his ferocious threat, abandoning little Pip to float solitary upon the vast bosom of the Pacific while the boat pulled away in headlong pursuit of the sounding monster, leaving the child alone in the awful center of that unpitying watery desert, cast out upon the boundless expanse of eternity without hope or succor beneath the sky!
It was an experience of metaphysical terror that transcends the boundaries of human speech! For three long hours, beneath the burning eye of a vertical sun, that tiny human speck floated upon the unruffled sapphire mirror of the infinite sea; surrounded by a boundless horizon forty leagues in diameter, where heaven and earth met in terrible, unanswering silence, with no sail nor spar to relieve the crushing lonesomeness of the void, isolated in the dreadful center of eternity where no human prayer could ever penetrate!
The mortal intellect of man can preserve its sanity only by clinging unto the manifold scaffolding of terrestrial society; but when the finite consciousness is suddenly cast into the infinite silence of the cosmos, the boundless void presses upon the solitary soul with the weight of an unpitying universe! Pip did not drown in the physical brine; but in that boundless solitude, his human wits were drowned forever beneath the celestial indifference of the sea, extinguished by the awful majesty of the deep, leaving only an empty vessel behind in the glare!
The ocean had taken away his terrestrial sanity, yet in that sublime baptism of the deep it had bestowed upon him an inspired madness that saw through the flimsy veils of earthly existence! When the barque picked him up at nightfall, he was no longer a mortal child, but an inspired, laughing seer of the abyss, dancing upon the deck and proclaiming that he had looked upon the hidden foundations of the world, reading the grand secrets of eternity with unblinking eyes and mocking the trivial pursuits of living men upon the shore!
'Pip saw it all! Pip looked upon the secret loom!' murmured the boy in ecstatic reverie, his dark eyes glowing with supernatural illumination; 'down in the bottomless caverns where the white skeletons sleep, Pip saw the great foot of God upon the treadle of the loom! The whole universe was weaving its starry garment in silence, while mortal fools shouted on the water for barrels of grease! How strange! How wonderfully strange and pitiful is the blindness of men upon this earth!'
The coarse mariners laughed at his distracted speech, counting him a worthless idiot fit only for the mockery of the forecastle, even proposing to lock him in the hold lest his presence invite misfortune; Starbuck wept for him with gentle sorrow, feeling the utter helplessness of mortal charity; but Captain Ahab, gazing upon that ruined child with his smoldering gray eyes, discovered in Pip's divine lunacy a holy fellowship that shattered all the defenses of his granite heart, recognizing a fellow pilgrim of the void.
Approaching the boy as he leaned over the taffrail, Ahab laid his iron hand upon the lad's trembling shoulder with tender reverence: 'What sayest thou, little Pip? What callest thou across the waters in the twilight hour? What voice hast thou heard in the caverns of the deep, and what doom seest thou written upon the masts of this doomed barque? Speak unto Ahab, for thou alone hast looked behind the veil of this indifferent creation!'
The child turned his dark, luminous eyes upon the scarred face of the captain, smiling with pathetic innocence: 'Pip is seeking for poor Pip, kind master! Little Pip jumped into the sea and drowned, and the big ocean kept his soul in her coral caves! This boy standing here is only Pip's wandering ghost! Have ye seen the real Pip, good sir? Help me find him ere the night closes in, and carry him back to the warm hearth of Alabama, where my mother sings her evening lullaby beside the cotton fields!'
That innocent and heart-breaking speech pierced Ahab's soul like a poisoned lance! The iron titan, who had defied the lightning and cursed the heavens, trembled from head to foot, a solitary tear of unutterable compassion gleaming upon his withered cheek in the fading light, tracing the jagged course of that thunderous brand that scarred his brow from crown to sole, falling softly upon the cold timbers of the deck in solemn mourning.
'Thou touchest my inmost center, boy!' cried Ahab, his voice shaking with sublime grief; 'thy crazy looniness hath more holy divinity in it than all the sanity of Nantucket! The blind gods have crushed thy fragile mind, yet through the cracks of thy broken reason shines the light of the primeval abyss! Thou art a holy martyr of the void, and mortal kings are but blind emmets compared with the majesty of thy sorrow! Thou hast reached the bottom of all earthly mystery!'
Stooping his towering frame, the dreaded commander grasped the trembling black hand of the cabin-boy in his own scarred, calloused palm, raising him gently from the deck: 'Come with me, Pip! Henceforth thou shalt live in Ahab's cabin; my bread shall be thy food, and my locker thy pillow! While Ahab breathes, no dog aboard this barque shall bark at thee, or Ahab shall tear his throat asunder with these hands and fling him unto the sharks of the deep to feast upon!'
Before the amazed gaze of the entire crew, the monomaniac captain led the outcast negro child toward the cabin companionway, holding his hand with the tender solicitude of a father guiding his son through the valley of the shadow of death, his grim countenance softened by an unearthly majesty that held the mariners in breathless silence, wondering at this miraculous resurrection of mortal tenderness within an iron breast that had seemed dead to all pity.
Starbuck bowed his head in weeping wonder, witnessing that sublime alliance between the defiant titan who defied heaven and the broken child who had seen God's foot upon the loom; two solitary outcasts of creation united in mutual sanctuary upon the threshold of doom, standing together against the indifferent stars while the ship plunged forward through the gathering dark of the Pacific.
They descended together into the black interior of the barque, while night fell upon the rolling Pacific; the Pequod plunging southward without a log-line, bearing in her heart that unearthly communion of madness and sorrow, racing toward the final encounter where all mortal enigmas should be solved in the deep, and all earthly pilgrimages brought to an end beneath the everlasting surges of eternity.
Haul in the line, old man! ... The cord hath snapped in the furious surge, and we have lost our last physical measure upon the sea! ... Poor little Pip, abandoned in the infinite solitude of the deep, beheld God's foot upon the treadle of the loom! ... Ahab grasped the trembling hand of the manic boy, proclaiming unto all: 'Come, lad, this cold barque is unworthy of thee; Ahab's cabin shall be thy sanctuary!'
The Rachel: The Anguish of the Father and the Unheeded Cry
Several days subsequent unto that bloody baptism of the harpoon beneath Perth's anvil, the Pequod encountered an oceanic tragedy that shook the mortal foundations of every soul aboard. In the pale gray mist of an equatorial dawn, ere the sun had burned away the ocean vapors, the look-out at the mainmast-head raised a sail upon the southern horizon; an outbound whaler bearing down upon our weather-bow under a tremendous press of canvas, cleaving the white surges with frantic and reckless velocity as though pursued by the ministers of wrath! The watch on deck crowded eagerly unto the bulwarks, their hearts leaping at the unexpected apparition of a living sister ship upon that vast and silent watery wilderness.
It was the Rachel, hailing from our own home port of Nantucket; yet that sister barque, which should have brought the joyful tidings of familiar hearths, approached us enveloped in an atmosphere of unutterable desolation and sepulchral despair. As the two vessels neared each other across the tumbling swells, our crew beheld her bulwarks thronged with silent, motionless mariners, every man grasping a spyglass, sweeping the rolling billows with feverish and despairing vigilance, searching the empty wilderness of water as though seeking for lost spirits cast out upon the surface of eternity.
Ere the two hulls had glided within ordinary hailing distance, Captain Gardiner of the Rachel, a venerable and weather-beaten Nantucketer with silver hair, leaped upon his weather-rail; grasping a battered brass speaking-trumpet in his trembling hands, he sent across the water a wild, hoarse cry that sounded like a scream of mortal agony: 'Have ye seen the White Whale?! Have ye seen a stove boat drifting upon the deep?! Tell me, in heaven's sacred name, if ye have crossed their lonely track across this desert!'
At the electrifying mention of that albino nemesis, Ahab started as though transfixed by lightning! His smoldering gray eyes flared with volcanic fury, and springing unto the taffrail, he leaned his towering frame over the abyss, shouting back with a roar that drowned the surge: 'Where was that beast?! Where saw ye the demon?! Did ye strike him?! Did ye kill him?! Answer Ahab, ere the roaring wind snatches thy words away into the void!'
The mutual shouts crossed like javelins upon the salt wind, but Gardiner's response was a message of unmitigated grief. He cried through his trumpet that on the previous afternoon they had raised Moby Dick browsing upon the deep, lowering all four boats in headlong pursuit; but the ferocious leviathan, after destroying two lances, had sounded into the western horizon, towing their fastest light-boat into the eye of the setting sun, and when night enveloped the ocean, that distant craft and all her crew had vanished forever from mortal sight, swallowed in the bottomless caverns of the Pacific!
Ere the lanyards could be hove, the distraught father descended into a light whaleboat, pulling frantically unto our side, and scrambled over the Pequod's bulwarks with the agility of despair. His eyes were bloodshot from sleepless vigils, his haggard visage pale as a shroud; and in broken, gasping accents, he revealed the terrible core of his torment—in that missing, drifting boat was his own twelve-year-old boy, his youngest and beloved son, the solitary joy of his declining age, who had sailed with his father to learn the hardy craft of the fisheries!
The boy was the darling of his declining years, the light of his Nantucket home; and for twenty-four hours the Rachel had cruised the trackless waste, burning signal lanterns through the darkness, firing distress guns across the silent water, yet receiving from the indifferent sea naught save the mocking murmur of the waves. The father's heart was broken, yet a desperate ray of hope still flickered within his anguished breast, urging him to plead with his fellow countrymen for Christian succor upon the deep.
'Captain Ahab!' cried Gardiner, seizing Ahab's woolen coat with both hands, hot tears streaming down his furrowed cheeks; 'in the name of God and our common Nantucket home, help me! Swerve thy course for forty-eight hours and join me in a systematic grid search of this quadrant! Two ships cruising abreast can sweep forty miles of ocean! My boy may still be afloat, clinging unto an oar beneath this vertical sun, dying of thirst upon the salt waste, calling upon his father to deliver him from a dreadful grave!'
The wretched commander abandoned all the traditional dignity of a shipmaster, sinking upon his knees upon our drenched deck! Drawing from his bosom his private charts and papers, he offered all his earthly fortune: 'Ahab! I will surrender my entire lay in this voyage! I will deed unto thee my home and shares on Nantucket! Only give me forty-eight hours of thy ship's company! Lend me two days to save my child! Pity the agony of a father's bleeding heart, and turn not away from my weeping eyes!'
'Thou art a father, Captain Ahab!' cried the kneeling man, his voice rising in passionate supplication; 'thou hast a young wife and a tender babe asleep beside thy hearth on Nantucket! Put thyself in my place! If thy sweet boy were drifting helpless amid these ravenous sharks, wouldst thou not cry unto heaven and earth for mercy?! Can mortal man turn his back upon the agonizing cries of fatherhood, weighing gold and vengeance against the blood of innocent youth?!'
That heart-rending appeal struck like a thunderbolt through the company. Starbuck turned away, his chest heaving with silent sobs; Stubb and Flask brushed away unbidden tears; and even the savage harpooners, Tashtego and Daggoo, breathed heavily in profound compassion, their fierce countenances softened by the universal bond of human pity, every soul silently imploring Ahab to grant the father's prayer and rescue the innocent child drifting beneath the equatorial sun.
Ahab stood before that kneeling suppliant like a pillar of cold basalt, his scarred face impassive as a granite monument. Deep within his smoldering eyes, a titanic spiritual battle raged for a single second; at the mention of his own wife and sleeping child, a faint tremor shook his lips, and a spark of mortal tenderness flickered in his volcanic breast, threatening to dissolve the frozen armor of his iron resolution and return him unto the fellowship of mortal men.
Yet that fleeting light was instantly extinguished by the demonic obsession of his quest! Ahab's calculating intellect perceived the cold reality: Moby Dick had been sighted yesterday fifty miles to the leeward! The White Whale was cruising before the trade wind, and the Pequod was at last closing the gap upon her white nemesis! The hour of metaphysical retribution was at hand, brooking no delay upon the sea, and every second lost was an unpardonable treason against his vengeance!
To pause for forty-eight hours to search for a lost boy meant abandoning the scent of the white leviathan, losing his enemy forever in the boundless labyrinth of the Pacific! On the one hand lay the sacred duty of mortal pity; on the other, the monomaniacal crusade against the cosmic malice of creation; and in Ahab's warped soul, all terrestrial affections were as dust before his hunger for metaphysical vengeance against the primeval beast that had reft him of his limb!
'Rise, Captain Gardiner,' said Ahab, stepping back with cold, mechanical composure, his voice hollow as the wind upon a heath; 'I will not detain myself. I must be gone. Even though the yawning pit should open before my prow, Ahab cannot turn aside from his chosen path. Every mortal soul must bear his appointed burden across the waste, and thy sorrow belongs not unto the destiny of this barque, which is sealed unto a darker purpose.'
Gardiner gazed upon him in stunned disbelief, clutching at Ahab's knees: 'Ahab! Dost thou refuse a father's last prayer?! A single day! Give me twenty-four hours! Half a day! Merciful God, can twelve hours rob thee of thy purpose?! Hast thou extinguished the last spark of human compassion within thy breast?! Is thy heart forged of demoniac iron that knows no touch of mortal sorrow, deaf unto the cries of an agonizing father?!'
'Not an hour!' shouted Ahab with sudden, ferocious finality, his eyes burning like live coals within the cavernous hollows of his brow; 'time flies like blood from a severed artery, and every pulse brings us nearer unto the fatal convergence! Even were it my own son drifting in the surge, Ahab's course would not swerve by half a point! My track is an iron line drawn across the abyss, and no earthly power shall turn me aside! It is grooved in steel unto the gates of doom, and to swerve by a single degree were mortal damnation, cowardly betrayal of my fate, and surrender unto the mockery of the deep!'
Turning his back upon the weeping father with inexorable determination, the monomaniac captain shouted his merciless command unto the mates, his words cutting like frozen steel through the salt spray: 'Starbuck! Brace up the yards! Clear the ship! Loose the topgallants! All hands make sail! Not a second shall be wasted upon this deck! Let the salt blast carry away every whisper of mortal grief, and let the ship fly forward upon her track like an arrow loosed from the bow of vengeance!'
Starbuck trembled with horror as he obeyed; perceiving that in this terrible refusal, Ahab had severed his last tie unto the family of man, surrendering his ship entirely unto the powers of darkness, transforming the Pequod into a floating sepulchre of doom, plunging blindly toward an unhallowed grave from which no soul should ever return unto the shores of light and peace.
Supported by his weeping boat-crew, Captain Gardiner slowly rose and descended into his craft, uttering neither curse nor reproach, but gazing upon Ahab with an awful, shuddering horror that spoke louder than words; his tears dried to salt upon his cheeks as he returned unto his desolate ship, bearing the crushing weight of an unmitigated despair back unto his weeping companions upon the rolling swells.
The two Nantucket vessels parted company; the Pequod plunging southward like a bloodhound upon the trail of blood, while the Rachel spread her canvas to resume her solitary, hopeless search across the rolling desert of the sea, mocking the broken heart of mortal love beneath the empty skies that gave no sign of mercy or redemption unto the suffering children of dust, leaving both ships solitary in their contrasting forms of agony upon the vast surface of the world.
I watched her from the taffrail as she faded into the southern mist, tacking back and forth across the waves like a distracted mother wandering through the rooms of a desolate house, her white sails gleaming like a shroud upon the water, seeking her unburied dead through the rolling wilderness of brine, her fluttering signals answering only the hollow wind that blew across the wastes of the deep, bearing no answer back unto her aching prayers.
She was Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they were not! An emblem of mortal bereavement wandering through the indifferent cosmos, while the sea rolled on unchanged over her unburied dead, swallowing all human grief in its eternal silence and burying every mortal prayer beneath the sapphire tomb of its abysses, untouched by the anguish of terrestrial hearts.
The Pequod drove onward through the foam without looking back, trampling the cries of human love beneath her keel, racing headlong toward the fatal meridian where the white leviathan waited to enact the final catastrophe of our voyage, sealing our doom in the abyss and drawing the black curtain of fate across our mortal eyes, plunging into the vortex of eternal silence.
Look aloft, Ishmael! Behold that Nantucket craft bearing down under a press of sail! ... Captain Gardiner of the Rachel hath lost his youngest son in the white jaws of Moby Dick! ... He knelt upon our deck, weeping, begging Ahab for a forty-eight-hour search in the name of mortal fatherhood! ... Yet Ahab's heart remained cold as basalt: 'I will not detain myself! Even for thy child, Ahab's course cannot swerve!'
The Delight, the Burial of the Dead, and the Symphony of Tears
As the Pequod surged southward through the equatorial reaches of the Pacific like a bloodhound upon the trail of death, an atmosphere of suffocating suspense enveloped the doomed barque. The sea birds had vanished from the gray sky, no porpoises leaped in our wake, and only the heavy, salt-laden trades moaned through the taut shrouds like a funeral dirge across the waters, as though the ocean itself held its breath in expectation of the coming slaughter. The mariners moved about the decks in silence, grinding their lances and harpoons upon the oilstones, knowing in their inmost souls that every league traversed drew us nearer unto the fatal theater of doom, an unmeasured wilderness of spirits.
In the misty gray dawn of a mournful morning, while the swells rolled in leaden heaps capped with sickly yellow foam, the masthead raised a shattered sail upon the lee beam. It was a battered, storm-rent whaler drifting like a water-logged derelict upon the swell—the ninth and final consort encountered by the Pequod upon her unhallowed voyage; and upon her weather-counter was carved in faded gilt letters that name of bitter and tragic irony: The Delight, gleaming with sombre pallor beneath the overcast sky.
That barque, christened with an appellation of earthly joy, exhibited no vestige of gladness, presenting the appearance of a floating sepulchre drifting over the abyss. As the hulls glided within hail, our awe-struck crew beheld one of her waist-boats hanging from the cranes utterly stove and ruined; its bottom smashed into splinters by some tremendous downward blow, the broken cedar ribs protruding like the shattered breast of a slaughtered beast, the salt spray washing through the hollow ruin with a melancholy sound that chilled the heart.
Upon her quarter-deck stood her gaunt, hollow-eyed captain, his gray hair whipping in the gale, directing with solemn gestures a funeral ceremony of mortal woe. Resting upon the starboard gangway lay a hammock tightly stitched in heavy canvas, weighted at the feet with a round cannon shot; over that rude shroud was draped a faded Nantucket ensign, silently proclaiming unto the silent ocean that another child of dust had surrendered his mortal breath unto the deep, while the cold wind stirred the frayed canvas edges.
Ahab sprang unto the bulwarks, his silver hair streaming backward in the wind, his gray eyes fixing that stove boat with the ferocious scrutiny of a hawk, shouting across the water with a voice that cleaveth the surge: 'Have ye seen the White Whale?! Have ye struck your harpoons into that demon's hide?! Tell me, man of Nantucket, have ye crossed his track?! Speak, that Ahab may know the bearings of his foe!'
The captain of the Delight raised his haggard countenance, regarding Ahab with an expression of hollow despair that seemed to gaze beyond the boundaries of mortal life: 'Look upon this hammock!' cried the stranger in a voice broken by weeping; 'behold these shattered ribs! Yesterday afternoon, twenty miles to the leeward, we struck Moby Dick! In one solitary minute, that white fiend tore five of our stoutest oarsmen from the living world! The bravest lads that ever drew breath upon Nantucket, now dead in the abyss!'
'No lance forged by mortal hands can penetrate that monster's hide!' continued the desolate commander with desperate earnestness; 'the toughest oak and seasoned cedar of New England are but as brittle eggshells beneath the horizontal flukes of that terror! If ye possess one spark of Christian reason, put about your helm and fly from this unhallowed meridian! To seek that white demon is to plunge with open eyes into the eternal jaws of hell, throwing away mortal life in blind madness!'
At that awful admonition, a terrible smile of demoniac derision curved Ahab's withered lips. Reaching into his breast, he drew forth that Perth-forged, pagan-baptized harpoon of tempered steel, holding its polished shank aloft so that it gleamed like a blue lightning-bolt against the sullen clouds: 'Look upon this tempered barb, captain of the Delight! Common steel may bend, and terrestrial courage may wither, but this point was welded in midnight fire and baptized in the blood of heathens! This brand was fashioned for the heart of Moby Dick!'
The stranger gazed upon that unholy weapon with a shudder of profound horror, raising his hands unto the weeping heavens: 'God pity thee, old man! Thou art rushing headlong unto thine own unhallowed burial, and knowest it not!' With a sorrowful gesture he signaled unto his seamen; the gangway was tilted, and with a dull, heavy plunge, the canvas-shrouded mariner dropped into the three-mile deep, leaving a momentary ring of white foam that vanished forever in the leaden surge, resting in bottomless peace.
In the very instant when that unburied dead descended into the abyss, a solitary gray bird circled the Pequod's main-truck, uttering a wild, discordant shriek that echoed across the waste; and at the same moment, Queequeg's carved cedar coffin, suspended from our stern, swung heavily upon its lanyards without the touch of any wave, its timbers groaning as though an invisible hand within were knocking upon the wood in summons, sealing our appointed doom upon the sea.
The two barques glided apart; the Delight melting into the northern haze, bearing her mourning crew toward their native shores; and with her departure, the last human messenger was withdrawn from Ahab's path. In all the boundless arena of the Pacific, no mortal voice remained to plead for mercy, and no earthly barrier stood between the Pequod and her catastrophic rendezvous with fate, the circle closing around us forever.
The pendulum of destiny swung unto its final hour. On the morning subsequent unto that mournful parting, the Pacific presented an aspect of transcendent, supernatural serenity—the glorious, incomparable Symphony of Melville's epic vision! The tempestuous gales that had raged for weeks died away into a breathless calm, and the great ocean lay unrolled beneath the heavens in pristine, Eden-like beauty, untouched by human sin or sorrow, restoring primeval peace unto creation.
The sky was a vault of pure, unclouded azure, through which the equatorial sun poured its golden splendor; while the sapphire ocean, smooth as an unruffled mirror, rose and fell in long, languid undulations of celestial peace. Heaven and earth seemed to have met in holy communion, weeping into each other like reconciled lovers, the soft breeze carrying a fragrance like the breath of paradise, whispering of forgiveness and eternal rest unto the weary heart, washing away all bitter memories of toil.
That miraculous sweetness of nature struck through the blood-stained souls of our company with an overwhelming, dream-like enchantment. The rough mariners stepped softly upon the deck, gazing over the tranquil blue with wonder-smitten eyes, as though the ancient universe, on the very threshold of doom, were offering unto mortal men a parting revelation of its primal innocence and love, calling them back from slaughter unto the sweet sanctuaries of home.
Ahab stood alone beside the weather rail, leaning his weary brow upon his hands, gazing down into the bottomless transparent blue. The warm gold of the morning light illuminated his haggard, furrowed countenance, softening the grim line of that thunder-scar that seamed him from crown to sole; and in that hour of celestial peace, the volcanic fires of hatred seemed for one miraculous moment to be utterly quenched within his soul, leaving only the infinite sadness of an aged wanderer.
A tear—a solitary, burning tear of mortal sorrow, unwept through forty years of iron warfare upon the sea—welled from the hollow orbit of his eye, glistening in the morning beam, and fell softly into the unruffled Pacific, making a tiny, vanishing circle upon the sapphire deep ere it was swallowed forever in the boundless waste of waters, leaving no trace behind save that unseen drop of human grief.
Starbuck, drawing near with reverent steps, beheld that glistening drop upon the weathered cheek, and his heart leaped with an agony of hope! He saw that the demon had loosened its grip upon the titan's spirit; the terrible Ahab was weeping like a mortal child upon the brink of the grave, and the holy spirit of human love was knocking once more at the door of his granite heart, illuminating his dark inner world.
Ahab turned his countenance upon the mate, and his gray eyes were clear and gentle as the morning sky: 'Step near me, Starbuck... come close unto Ahab. Look ye, what a lovely day it is! How soft and sweet the ocean breathes, like a child upon its mother's breast! Such a day should never have dawned upon this cruel and blood-stained earth, mocking the misery of mortal men... wherefore should men pursue their fellow creatures with such relentless fury?'
'Forty years ago, Starbuck!' murmured the old man, his voice trembling with unutterable grief; 'forty years ago this very day, did Ahab strike his first whale as a boy of eighteen! Forty years of privation, forty years of storm and battle, with scarcely three years of terrestrial life upon the dry land! Forty years of solitude, of gall and wormwood, walled up in the wooden dungeon of this barque, feeding upon dry biscuit and salt junk, estranging myself from all the sweet affections of mankind, squandering the precious years of youth!'
'I remember my young wife on Nantucket...' whispered Ahab, gazing into the distance; 'I married her past fifty, and the next morning sailed away for the Cape Horn! I left her a widow with her first-born babe upon her knee! And my sweet boy, Starbuck... he was asleep in his cradle when Ahab kissed him farewell! If I could but sit once more beside my hearth, holding their warm hands in mine, what paradise were that compared with this bloody hunt across the waters!'
'What is it, Starbuck?!' cried the old man, lifting his hands unto the unanswering sky; 'what cozening, hidden lord and master, what cruel, remorseless emperor commands me against all natural lovings and longings to push on, and strike, and burn?! Am I Ahab, or is God Ahab, that lifts this arm?! Are we but puppets moved by unseen wires across this watery stage, playing out an agony not our own?! Can mortal man ever break from his predestined orbit?!'
Starbuck fell upon his knees, grasping Ahab's coat with passionate devotion, hot tears blinding his eyes: 'Captain! Beloved captain! Turn the helm! Let us fly home! A fair wind blows toward Nantucket; the ship is full of oil, and our wives are waiting beside the hearth! My Mary weeps for me, and thy sweet wife looks toward the sea! Oh, Ahab! For the love of God, break this fatal spell, and let us sail for home ere the dark waters close over our heads!'
Ahab gazed down upon the weeping mate, and his mighty frame shook with the agony of that supreme temptation; all the sweet sanctities of home, of wife, of child, rushed back upon his soul, almost dissolving the iron purpose of forty years. He reached forth his hand to touch Starbuck's shoulder, to speak the word of salvation and command the ship to put about her helm—when suddenly his gaze traveled past the mate, and fell upon the dark figure of Fedallah standing in the shadow of the mainmast!
The Parsee stood motionless, his arms folded upon his breast, his black eyes fixed upon Ahab with a cold, serpentine glare that silently held up the fatal prophecy of the hearses and the hemp! At that sinister apparition, the brief dawn of human love was instantly extinguished; Ahab's countenance hardened once more into granite basalt, and pushing the weeping mate aside, he turned his face toward the southern horizon: 'The ship must sail on, Starbuck... our course is charted in the stars, and Ahab must follow his doom unto the end, meeting the judgment of the void!'
Behold these shattered ribs hanging from our cranes! Yesterday afternoon the White Whale destroyed five of our stoutest men! ... The toughest Nantucket oak is as an eggshell beneath the flukes of that monster! ... Yet on the eve of doom, the sea presented a morning of unearthly serenity—the blue sky and sapphire wave weeping into each other like a cosmic symphony! Ahab leaned over the rail, a solitary tear dropping into the Pacific: 'Starbuck, forty years ago did I begin this chase! Forty years of isolation, forty years of gall! If I could but sit once more beside the hearth of Nantucket...'
The Chase—First Day: The White Ridge, the Stove Boat, and the Whirlpool
When the fleeting dawn of human tenderness was swallowed once more by the unyielding night of doom, the equatorial Pacific on the subsequent morning unveiled the bloody prologue of a catastrophe that should pierce heaven and earth. Ere the sun had climbed above the sea-rim, the ambient air was charged with a pungent, musky fragrance—the peculiar ambergris odor and fermentation of sea-moss that indicates the feeding-grounds of mighty bull Cachalots in the deep; the atmosphere was arid and electric, no cloud flecked the brassy vault of the sky, and the equatorial sun beat down upon the sapphire desert like a furnace, baking the tumbling billows into blinding sheets of white fire, while the rhythmic pounding of the swells against the hull sounded like war drums.
Captain Ahab could brook no terrestrial delay upon the deck; with the earliest gray of dawn, he commanded a wicker basket to be rove unto the halyards of the main-truck, and four brawny mariners manning the winch, he was hoisted aloft in his perch, his iron frame swinging between the double crosstrees a hundred feet above the deck. Wedging himself firmly into the rigging, his gray eyes sweeping the boundless circle of the horizon with burning vigilance, he made himself the foremost sentinel of the ship, sworn to raise the white fiend ere any seaman could claim the prize, his searching gaze piercing through leagues of luminous azure.
In that electrifying instant when the morning beams transformed the ocean floor into a wilderness of shattered gold, three miles upon our lee bow, the glassy blue surface of the deep parted without a sound in a foaming track hundreds of feet in length! And then, rising with majestic, deliberate slowness from the unmeasured depths, a colossal hump like a snow-hill broke the azure wave, glistening in the vertical sun with blinding, unearthly whiteness, throwing up showers of crystalline spray that dazzled the eye with titanic splendor, heralding unto all the world the arrival of the monarch of the abyss!
'There she breaches! There she breaches! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!' shouted a voice of thunder from the main-truck that shook the very timbers of the ship! Ahab had torn his throat with that triumphant scream, his withered frame vibrating between the spars like a harp-string in a gale, his spyglass trembling in his iron grasp; he had raised the White Whale himself, securing with his own eye the golden doubloon, and sealing with his own tongue the mortal doom of thirty living men!
'Lower away! All hands lower away! Starbuck, keep the ship; the rest follow Ahab!' Sliding down the main-shrouds like a stooping falcon, the captain struck the quarter-deck with his ivory heel with a concussion like iron striking stone. The decks erupted in wild, savage frenzy; the watch leaped unto the cranes, and the three wooden whaleboats dropped with hollow concussions into the churning foam, throwing up sheets of white brine as their crews tumbled into the thwarts, springing forward like hounds loosed upon their quarry!
Moby Dick was browsing leisurely through the summer sea, exhibiting neither haste nor terror at our furious approach; through his spiracle he discharged at regular intervals mighty columns of dazzling, snow-white vapor, ascending sixty feet into the still air, expanding into radiant rainbows beneath the morning sun. There was an imperial, unhurried majesty in his gliding course, as though the monarch of the deep were fully conscious of his challengers, awaiting their onset with sovereign contempt upon his watery throne, surveying mortal pretensions with icy calm.
Ahab's boat, propelled by the silent, rhythmic stroke of Fedallah's dusky crew, leaped across the waves like an arrow loosed from a bow of steel. The Parsee phantoms, clad in their dark garments, pulled with ferocious, mechanical energy, their sinewy muscles starting like cords beneath their bronze skins, cutting the sapphire swells with razor-like precision. Ahab stood erect in the bows, his Perth-forged harpoon grasped in his right hand, his gray eyes reflecting that approaching white mountain, his soul contracted into a solitary point of metaphysical rage, blazing with lethal purpose!
Stubb and Flask followed in his wake, deploying their craft unto the starboard and larboard quarters, advancing upon the leviathan in a wide crescent of battle. As the distance closed unto a cable's length, the colossal proportions of the white demon were unveiled in all their terrifying reality: a body eighty feet in length, crowned with that corrugated, snow-white hump, his albino flanks encrusted with ancient barnacles and scarred with the rusted sockets of broken harpoons, resembling a floating fortress armored in bone and blubber, breathing forth primeval destruction!
Ere the boats could glide within harpoon-throw, the white leviathan sounded beneath the surface with deliberate ease, his broad horizontal flukes lifting forty feet into the air and descending without a splash! The sea smoothed out into a vast, oily vortex where he had sunk; the three light craft lay motionless upon the swell, the oarsmen resting on their oars, every man holding his breath, peering into the bottomless transparent blue, awaiting the submarine eruption of the titan from the unmeasured caves of the deep, suspense strangling every heart.
Suddenly, a vast, pale shadow broadened with supernatural velocity beneath the keel of Ahab's boat! Ere a warning could be uttered, the surface burst asunder like a submarine volcano, and towering sixty feet into the air, the colossal white head of Moby Dick shot vertically from the brine, his terrible ivory jaws, twenty feet in length and studded with formidable conical teeth, gaping open in the foaming spray like the open portals of an abysmal tomb, torrents of brine cascading from his corrugated brow!
With calculated, demonic precision, the monster singled out his ancient persecutor; twisting his mighty body in mid-air, he descended upon the wooden craft, his glistening white lower jaw coming up beneath the bottom-boards with the speed of a guillotine, catching the light cedar whaleboat in the very center of its length, between the thwarts where Ahab stood, bringing down crushing doom upon our frail human vessel!
'Oars! Back water, men!' roared Ahab, lunging with his steel harpoon toward the monster's eye; but the movement was too late; with a sickening crunch that resounded across the water, the jaws of the white leviathan closed like an iron vise upon the fragile shell of the boat, biting it clean in twain through timbers, thwarts, and gunwales in one ferocious snap, shattering cedar ribs like dry reeds!
Splintered cedar, shattered oars, and tangled ropes flew into the air like chaff before the wind; the sea poured into the fractured hull with a roar, and the oarsmen, thrown from their seats, floundered helpless in the white water while the two severed halves of the boat drifted apart upon the waves, abandoned unto the mercy of the raging monster, cast into the swirling chaos of the deep!
Ahab was hurled into the air by the terrible concussion, his ivory limb striking the sea with crushing force, dragging him down into the foaming vortex! The salt brine rushed into his throat, and the heavy ivory bone upon his stump, acting like a plummet of lead, threatened to carry him down into the three-mile deep ere he could strike out with his solitary arm against the furious current, suffocating beneath the indifferent brine!
Yet Moby Dick did not sound after destroying the craft; displaying that malignant intelligence that distinguished him from all common leviathans, he began to swim rapidly in circles around the swimming men, his vast white body creating a churning, concentrated whirlpool whose steep walls of foam held the struggling mariners imprisoned in their center, while his flukes lashed the surface into a boiling cauldron, walling them round with living destruction!
In that supreme crisis of mortal peril, Ahab's indomitable will triumphed over the weakness of the flesh. Grasping a floating fragment of the steering oar with his iron fingers, he kept his gray head above the boiling surge, coughing the bitter brine from his lungs, his gray hair plastered unto his scarred temples, his blazing eyes fixed with unabated, unyielding hatred upon the white mountain that circled him within arm's reach, unconquered even in ruin!
The scent of blood drew a score of ferocious gray sharks from the depths; their razor-like fins sliced the foam within inches of the swimming mariners, snapping their jaws at the floating oars; while Fedallah and his dusky boatmen treaded water with supernatural calmness, watching the gyrations of the monster with unblinking eyes, as the shadow of death deepened upon the waves.
Starbuck, observing the catastrophe from the quarter-deck of the Pequod, acted with the promptitude of a consummate seaman; shouting unto the helmsman, he threw the ship before the wind, sending the towering barque headlong into the center of the vortex, interposing her massive oak hull between the White Whale and her struggling captain, plunging forward with heroic desperation!
The mighty barque drove through the boiling surge like a moving battlement, her copper-sheathed stem cleaving the whirlpool in twain; the immense shadow of her sails fell upon the water, and Moby Dick, balked of his prey by the sudden apparition of that wooden mountain, sounded with a sullen plunge beneath the hull, vanishing into the deep, leaving a trail of churning white foam behind his flukes.
Lines were hove from the deck, and Tashtego and Daggoo, leaping into the chains despite the ravenous sharks, grasped the exhausted commander as he sank beneath the foam, dragging his dripping, half-drowned frame over the bulwarks and laying him upon the quarter-deck planking, hauling him from the hungry jaws of the abyss.
Ahab lay gasping upon the wet timbers, the bitter salt brine pouring from his nostrils and mouth, his ivory leg splintered at the heel by the crunch of the jaws, his haggard face pale as death, his chest heaving with convulsive gasps like a stranded leviathan expiring upon the sand, battered almost unto extinction by the shock of battle.
The whole company gathered round in breathless consternation, their countenances pale with dread; Starbuck knelt beside his fallen commander, supporting his head, whispering with tears of pity: 'Master! Give over the chase! It is God's own hand that hath shattered thy boat! We have escaped with our lives from the mouth of hell; let us tempt the Almighty no more upon these waters!'
Yet at that gentle supplication, the drowned titan stirred with supernatural resurrection! Raising himself upon his elbows, his gray eyes flaring with redoubled fury, Ahab pushed the weeping mate aside, his voice hissing like molten iron through his clenched teeth: 'Peace, fool! What is a stove boat unto Ahab?! It is but the first day of the battle!'
Grasping the fife-rail with his scarred hands, he dragged his shattered body erect before the terrified crew, shouting into the gathering twilight: 'Lower away another boat by dawn! Moby Dick hath tasted Ahab's timber, but Ahab shall yet taste his blood! Tomorrow the chase begins anew, and heaven itself shall not turn Ahab from his mark!'
There she breaches! There she breaches! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick! ... Ahab himself raised the white fiend from the main-truck, his terrible cry cleaving the morning calm! ... Three boats leaped into the foam, racing toward that mighty jet of dazzling vapor sixty feet in air! ... Yet in the first clash of battle, Moby Dick's jaws closed upon Ahab's cedar craft, biting it clean in twain! ... Ahab floundered in the churning vortex, hauled from the jaws of death by the desperate hands of Starbuck!
The Chase—Second Day: The Shattered Boats, the Broken Ivory Leg, and the First Hearse
When the frantic white foam of the first day's combat died away into the equatorial twilight, the Pequod lay rolling upon the silent swells in an atmosphere of sepulchral foreboding. Throughout the night, the decks resounded with the grim industry of preparation; Perth the blacksmith and the aged carpenter labored by lantern-light, repairing the stove boats and sharpening the reserve irons, while the forge flared with sinister red flames in the darkness; the iron clamps were fitted unto Ahab's cracked bone-leg, yet the solitary commander never closed an eye, standing upon the quarter-deck like a spectral sentinel guarding a tomb, his haggard countenance turned southward toward the unseen foe across the deep, awaiting the crimson renewal of dawn while hollow sighs broke from the weary crew.
With the earliest crimson streaks of the second dawn, the ambient atmosphere grew heavy and stifling as though charged with the smoke of subterranean furnaces. The eastern sky flared with an ominous, blood-like illumination, and the leaden billows heaved in tumultuous disorder, rolling in chaotic heaps beneath a sky pregnant with destruction; ere the watch aloft could raise a cry, two miles upon our weather bow, the deep erupted in a mountain of boiling spray—Moby Dick, assuming an aggressive ferocity unrecorded in the annals of the fisheries, was bearing down upon the barque under the impetus of his own titanic rage, churning the sea into foam and rushing forward like an ancient god of slaughter!
Breaching clear of the water, his eighty feet of corrugated alabaster blazed with terrible majesty in the morning beams; cataracts of foaming brine poured in blinding sheets from his snow-white hump, and lashing the sea with his horizontal flukes until the thunder of his strokes shook the horizon, the monarch of the abyss advanced to meet his terrestrial tormentors in open and unsparing war upon the surface of the waters, casting his colossal shadow across the morning calm and drowning the wind in roaring billows!
'Lower all boats! Stand by to lower! Every man unto his thwart! Tarry not a second!' shouted Ahab, his smoldering eyes flaring with demoniac illumination as he brandished that Perth-forged dart of tempered steel. The three reserve whaleboats plunged into the boiling surge, their lanyards smoking through the sheaves; and Ahab, Stubb, and Flask drove their cedar craft abreast into the teeth of the advancing mountain, racing toward that wall of living foam with desperate velocity, the shouts of the oarsmen mingling with the thunder of the sea as they cleaved the foam!
The collision was instantaneous and mortal! Converging upon the leviathan from three quarters, the harpooners leaped unto the thwarts and hurled their irons with desperate force; three tempered barbs drank the hot life-blood of the monster, and fountains of crimson gore spouted from his albino flank, dyeing the sapphire swells into a wide, boiling lake of carnage that disgusted the morning sun, filling the ambient air with the stench of slaughter and exciting ravenous sharks into a frenzy!
Maddened by the agonizing bite of the steel, Moby Dick gave loose unto a paroxysm of destructive fury! Instead of sounding into the cool sanctuaries of the abyss, he wheeled upon the surface with the agility of a serpent, sweeping his immense tail across the billows with strokes that sounded like the discharge of broadsides, creating a roaring vortex of white foam that threatened to engulf the fragile shells of his assailants, tossing them helplessly upon the crests of the waves like withered autumn leaves in a gale!
Stubb's boat and Flask's boat, caught in the sudden swirl of that submarine maelstrom, lost their steerage-way, their ash oars snapped like dry twigs in the boiling surge; and ere the mates could back water, that colossal white tail, twenty feet across the tips, descended from the sky like an avalanche of solid bone and muscle, crushing both craft in one simultaneous and thunderous stroke that seemed to shatter the surface of the deep into a chaos of bloody foam and flying timber!
With a sickening crash that echoed across the Pacific, the cedar planks were pulverized into splinters; the two crews, hurled high into the air amid flying line-tubs and shattered oars, rained down into the bloody foam, struggling for life amid the snapping jaws of a score of gray sharks that had gathered to feast upon the carnage of the fishery, splashing desperately amid the crimson surges while their cries pierced the gale with agonizing despair!
Having annihilated the supporting craft, Moby Dick turned the terrible wedge of his forehead directly upon Ahab's advancing boat! Driving through the water with the momentum of a falling cliff, the solid mass of his cranium struck the cedar bow of the captain's craft, shearing away the forward timbers as cleanly as the stroke of an axe, the impact reverberating through the hollow hull with mortal force and lifting the boat clean out of the water!
The concussion flung Ahab violently across the broken bottom-boards; and in that terrible shock, that artificial limb carved from the jaw-bone of a sperm whale, already strained and clamped, snapped in twain beneath the titan's weight, the splintered bone piercing through the flesh of his stump in a gush of dark blood, exposing the jagged bone unto the brine and drenching the shattered cedar!
Prostrated upon the crimson planks, with the brine washing over his gray temples, the old man uttered not a single groan; clutching his Perth-forged harpoon with unbroken ferocity, he dragged his mangled frame erect upon his solitary limb, balancing against the gunwale, his gray eyes burning with unquenched hatred upon the white titan that hovered over his ruined craft, defiant as a wounded demigod upon the field of battle, refusing to submit unto mortal agony!
The harpoon-lines, tangled in the thrashing flukes of the leviathan, spun through the air in flying death-coils; Fedallah the Parsee, drawing his sheath-knife, plunged waist-deep into the foam, hacking frantically at the fouled hemp to clear the wreckage from Ahab's prostrate body, his black robe whipping like a funeral pennon in the salt gale, his dark visage impassive as a bronze statue as the steel flashed amid the spray to stave off the fatal snare.
Yet in the very instant when his blade severed the taut strand, Moby Dick rolled violently in the surge; the flying coils of the harpoon-line whipped through the spray like a living serpent, and catching the Parsee about the chest and neck, bound him in an unbreakable knot of hemp against the barnacled flank of the sounding monster, embedding the cords deep into his trembling flesh and pinioning his arms in an iron grip!
A single smothered cry burst from the Parsee's lips; and ere a hand could be stretched forth in succor, the white leviathan sounded into the three-mile deep, carrying the strangled astrologer down into the unmeasured caverns of eternity, leaving not a bubble behind upon the leaden surface of the sea, the waters closing forever over his unburied head and sealing his doom in primeval darkness!
The wild spray slowly subsided; the shipwrecked crews of Stubb and Flask clung unto drifting fragments of cedar, but Fedallah, the mysterious shadow of Ahab's pilgrimage, had vanished forever from the light of the sun, his silent eyes closed in the bottomless caverns of the Pacific, leaving only the desolate waves to mourn his departure and echo the warning of his fatal end.
Starbuck, bringing the Pequod into the wind, lowered slings and lines, rescuing the exhausted mariners and hoisting his crippled commander aboard the quarter-deck; an awful stillness fell upon the crew, for every soul recognized that in two successive days of slaughter, the White Whale had shattered our boats and mocked our mortal pride, proving his supernatural supremacy upon the deep and foretelling universal doom across the waters.
Ahab sat upon the deck, his shattered ivory limb streaming with blood; refusing to be carried below, he commanded the carpenter to fashion a rough wooden peg from an oak spar, while Perth hammered the iron ring upon the forge, the rhythmic strokes of the hammer tolling like a funeral knell through the silent ship, chilling the hearts of all who listened unto its grim and relentless cadence.
Starbuck fell upon his knees before his commander, weeping bitter tears: 'Ahab! Master! Behold the finger of God! Four boats stove, thine own limb reft away, and Fedallah dragged unto the bottom of the sea! It is the third day tomorrow! If thou pushest on, this barque and every soul aboard must sink into the unmeasured void, swallowed forever in the deep! Command the ship to turn about, I implore thee by all that is sacred!'
Ahab opened his smoldering eyes, gazing through the mate with unearthly intensity; in the throbbing agony of his wound, the dark prophecy of the Parsee echoed through his brain—'The first hearse must be of no mortal wood... and the second of American timber... and Fedallah must die before thee, and be thy guide... and only the hemp can kill Ahab!'
Ahab's monomania seized upon the words with frantic, distorted ecstasy: Fedallah was dead, yet where was the hearse of living bone?! In all the empty wilderness of the Pacific, where was the hearse not made by mortal hands?! How could a hearse appear upon the sea?! The prophecy was a guarantee of his own immortality upon the waters, a divine pledge that shielded him from death, poisoning his soul with pride and blinding his spirit unto doom!
'Hearse?! There is no hearse upon the deep!' cried Ahab with a terrible, mocking laugh that froze the blood of the listeners; 'Fedallah lies drowned, but the hearse exists not! Ahab cannot die until he sees the hearses, and no hearse can float upon this brine! Ahab is immortal upon the sea, and the White Whale shall feel this steel! Victory shall be ours, and none can stay Ahab's hand from the final stroke!'
Starbuck shuddered with despair, perceiving that the doomed captain had converted the very signs of his destruction into instruments of delusion, dragging his company headlong toward an unhallowed grave from which no repentance could deliver them, blind unto the yawning pit at their feet, awaiting the final crash in helpless and mournful silence.
The sun descended in the west, painting the Pacific in hues of burning crimson, as though the ocean itself had become an infinite lake of blood; while three miles away, Moby Dick cruised slowly across the swell, the three broken harpoons still bristling from his white hump, towing the long lines behind him like mourning ribbons across the wave, silent and terrible in the fading light, moving like a phantom of wrath across the deep.
Leaning upon his rough wooden peg, Ahab fixed his gray eyes upon the dying light, uttering his final vow unto the darkening sky: 'Tomorrow is the third day! Let heaven strike or hell open her gates, on the third day Ahab shall plunge this iron into the white fiend's heart, and seal our destiny upon the deep, brooking no retreat from our fatal mark! Ahab stands fast against eternity, fighting unto the last breath of mortal life!'
The White Whale breaches once more in our van! Three irons drink his blood, yet his titanic fury crushes our craft like dry leaves! ... Ahab's ivory leg snapped in twain amid the concussion, the titan prostrated upon the crimson planks! ... When the wild spray subsided, the Parsee Fedallah was gone! ... 'The first hearse must be of no mortal wood... and only one not born of woman can slay Ahab...' The dread prophecy tolled like a knell across the waters, yet Ahab roared against the decree of death: 'Though the barque founder, on the third day Ahab shall have the heart of Moby Dick!'
The Chase—Third Day: The Corpse on the Flukes, the Sinking Ship, and the Orphan
The dawn of the third day broke upon the Pacific in majestic and awful serenity, unrolling the ocean like a leaden arena of antiquity beneath a pale, unclouded sky. The morning breeze blew with faint, solemn mournfulness, carrying the pungent scent of brimstone and dried brine, while an invisible blade of destiny seemed suspended between heaven and the deep; Captain Ahab, supported by his freshly hewn oak peg and grasping his solitary Perth-forged dart, his haggard visage resembling a moss-grown effigy disinterred from a primeval tumulus, commanded the last cedar whaleboat to be lowered into the tranquil water to enact the final catastrophe of our voyage, embarking upon an irreversible pilgrimage of blood, every seaman conscious that this was a voyage from which no soul should return, their spirits quailing before the coming doom.
For three long hours the search was maintained in breathless silence, while the equatorial sun climbed unto the zenith like a furnace of white fire, baking the rolling billows into sheets of blinding mercury; and then, without a ripple or a sound of warning, the sapphire surface parted three hundred fathoms ahead in an eruption of blinding spray! Towering vertically sixty feet into the brassy air, the colossal alabaster hump of Moby Dick breached toward heaven, his snow-white bulk dazzling the vertical sun, descending with a crash that threw mountains of foaming brine unto the clouds with thunderous roar, proclaiming unto the universe the commencement of the final judgment across the unmeasured wastes!
In that electrifying instant of his majestic fall, a simultaneous shriek of mortal horror burst from the throats of the oarsmen! Lashed unto the corrugated flank of the monster by countless turns of fouled and knotted harpoon-line, hung the swollen, blackened corpse of Fedallah the Parsee! His dark garments were shredded by the rocks of the deep, his white turban trailing like sea-moss in the foam; and as the white flukes rose and fell, his unclosed, glassy eyes stared through the blinding spray directly into Ahab's face, his withered arm waving in ghastly summons toward the abyss, calling the living unto the sepulchre with inexorable authority, sealing the unholy covenant of the pit!
'The first hearse! The first hearse of living bone, not made by mortal hands!' cried Ahab in a paroxysm of terrible laughter, his iron frame vibrating with the ecstasy of fulfilled doom! Every syllable of that dark prophecy was translated in fire upon his brain; yet in that supreme revelation of destruction, the titan knew no touch of fear, his indomitable will contracting into a solitary blade of unquenched hatred: 'Fedallah! Thou black pilot of the pit! Ahab follows thee unto the end! Though the pit swallow my soul, Ahab shall strike down his white nemesis! Pull, men, pull on into the jaws of doom!'
Bending unto their oars, the crew drove the shattered craft through the boiling surges; yet Moby Dick wheeled not to confront the boat; ignoring the puny cedar shell, the wounded monarch of the deep curved through the sea in a wide circle of foam, fixing his wicked, malicious eyes upon that towering wooden fortress that lay rolling upon the swells—the ship Pequod herself, turning his destructive purpose upon the floating fortress of his tormentors, raising a wall of water before his bows as he accelerated across the deep!
With the sublime cunning of a primeval intelligence, the leviathan recognized the source and sanctuary of his tormentors! Discharging a crimson spout that darkened the azure heavens, he lowered his colossal head beneath the water, driving forward with the momentum of an avalanche, directing the solid, corrugated battering-ram of his forehead squarely against the starboard bow of the doomed barque, throwing up mountains of white water as he charged across the deep with thunderous roar that echoed unto the ends of the world!
Starbuck, standing upon the quarter-deck, beheld that white mountain bearing down upon his vessel with the speed of light, and falling upon his knees, uttered his final cry of mortal prayer: 'The ship! The hearse of American wood! The second hearse hath appeared upon the water! God have mercy upon our souls, for the prophecy is fulfilled unto the last syllable! Stand by to receive the shock, all hands, and commend your souls unto the Almighty!'
With a shock that seemed to split the solid globe, the solid bone of the White Whale's forehead struck the oak timbers of the Pequod! Planks, knees, and ceiling-timbers were crushed to powder in that awful concussion; the sea rushed through the shattered bow in a roaring cataract, and the mighty vessel, reeling upon her keel, settled rapidly by the head, her crew scrambling across the tilting deck in wild despair, crying unto heaven for succor that came not, sliding toward the boiling brine in helpless agony!
Ahab, beholding from his boat the destruction of his ship, rose to his full height upon his wooden peg, his soul erupting in the sublime defiance of an expiring titan: 'Dost thou founder, my noble ship?! Must thou perish without Ahab?! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I strike at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee! Let the void witness the unyielding spirit of mortal defiance, though the heavens crumble and the abyss swallow all creation!'
Urging his oarsmen alongside the monster's flank, Ahab raised his last steel harpoon, and with the concentrated energy of forty years of hatred, drove the barb deep into the soft blubber of the leviathan's throat! Moby Dick writhed in mortal agony, his flukes beating the sea into a cauldron of foam, while the harpoon-line whizzed smoking through the chocks with the velocity of lightning, throwing up clouds of blinding friction-smoke that choked the rowers and blotted out the sun!
The hemp spun through the air in flying death-loops; and in that fatal second, a kink in the line flew from the line-tub, caught Ahab around the neck with the swiftness of a noose, and snapped tight like an iron collar! Ere the stricken titan could utter a cry or grasp the hemp with his hands, he was snatched bodily from the boat, vanishing beneath the waves as the sounding monster dragged him down into the three-mile deep, leaving only a fading swirl of red foam behind upon the rolling swells as he plunged unto his doom!
He was gone; no word of farewell, no floating relic, no parting bubble marked the spot where the great captain met his doom; the titan who had challenged heaven and hell was choked by a common hempen cord, dragged down into the eternal silence of the abyss to sleep forever beside his albino nemesis in the unplumbed cold of the ocean floor, ending his mortal pilgrimage in darkness and everlasting mystery!
And now the doomed Pequod, her holds choked with the incoming sea, spun downward in a concentrated vortex whose steep walls of foam drew down the shattered whaleboats, the floating spars, and the drowning mariners into her wooden tomb, burying all mortal pride beneath the sapphire surge, swallowing thirty living souls into the yawning sepulchre of the deep, blotting out all human striving beneath the waters of oblivion!
Yet upon the main-truck, still protruding above the waves, Tashtego the Gay-Head Indian clung with unconquerable fidelity, his hammer poised in air, nailing the red flag of Ahab unto the spar as the ship sank into the vortex, maintaining his savage devotion unto the final heartbeat of life, defying doom with unflinching courage and chanting his death-song!
A sky-hawk, swooping low to peck at the fluttering bunting, became entangled beneath the Indian's hammer; and with a final, dying stroke, Tashtego drove the iron nail through the bird's living wing, pinning the captive eagle unto the masthead as the waves closed over his head, sealing the unyielding covenant of blood and carrying heaven down into the abyss to share the grave of man!
So the pagan barque sank into the unmeasured deep; dragging down with her the living bird of heaven, her unbending crew descending with unyielding defiance into the dark caverns of the ocean, leaving no trace behind of their mortal pilgrimage, enveloped in the eternal shroud of the Pacific, silenced beneath the endless waste of waters that know no sorrow.
The vortex slowly smoothed away its foaming ridges; the roaring waters closed their lips; the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago over all unburied dead; and silence resumed its eternal reign above the watery desert, washing away every memorial of human striving and leaving no footprint upon the deep, wiping the slate of history clean.
And I alone was saved! Flung from the boat at the first shock of battle, I had floated upon the outer rim of the vortex; and when the ship settled forever into the deep, the black, carved coffin of Queequeg, released from its lashings by the sea, shot vertically from the abyss like a buoyant cork, breaking the foam beside my fainting limbs and offering a sanctuary of wood carved with eternal signs!
It was a life-buoy fashioned of unyielding cedar, carved with the sacred hieroglyphics of an extinct king; rising beside me in the foam, it offered unto my fainting limbs an unhallowed but miraculous sanctuary upon the breast of eternity, preserving the solitary scribe of this catastrophe from the cold teeth of the abyss, buoying up my trembling frame.
For one whole day and night I floated upon that floating sepulchre, surrounded by unharming sharks whose mouths seemed shut by supernatural hands, while the sea-hawks glided above my head with unmolesting wings, the boundless blue sky meeting the unanswering blue sea in absolute and unpitying silence, cradling the lone survivor upon the waters in primeval peace, suspended between life and death.
On the second afternoon, when the equatorial haze parted before the breeze, a sail broke the horizon—it was the weeping Rachel, still cruising the empty quadrant in search of her missing children, tacking back and forth across the waves in uncomforted bereavement, seeking her lost boy through the deserts of brine with breaking heart and weary eyes.
Her look-out raised the floating coffin upon the water; her boat pulled across the swell, and the weeping father, seeking his lost boy through the deserts of the sea, reached down his hands and drew aboard his weeping vessel another orphan of the deep, providing succor unto the solitary witness of the wreck and comforting his wounded soul upon the desolate main.
Thus was the tragedy of the White Whale accomplished; the Pequod and her thirty mariners swallowed in the bottomless caves of the abyss, her defiance answered only by the hollow murmur of the surge, while the sapphire desert of the Pacific stretched away unto the horizon, unchanged and unchanging beneath the heavens, burying the memory of our crusade in silence.
And Ishmael alone returned to tell the tale, bearing in his soul the eternal parallax of the white leviathan, whose albino forehead reflects the indifferent mystery of God, while the great shroud of the sea rolls on, as it rolled in the morning of creation, over the unmeasured deep of the world, turning the silent axis of the void.
Look at the lashings upon the White Whale's flanks! It is Fedallah! The first hearse of living bone hath appeared! ... On the third noon, the catastrophe broke upon the deep! ... Moby Dick rammed the solid oak stem of the Pequod, stove her planks, and the sea rushed into her hold! ... Ahab hurled his last dart, yet the flying hemp caught him round the neck, dragging the titan into the abyss forever! ... The ship spun down into the vortex, Tashtego nailing a sky-hawk to the submerged spar! ... And Ishmael, buoyed by Queequeg's floating coffin, drifted upon the unpitying void, till the Rachel, seeking her missing children, found another orphan!