tion of that unf alien, Western world, which to the eyes of
archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings
and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as
some king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible,
strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As
strange eyes, metnougnt l peeped to secrets wnicn toofc hold 01 l*od. As I
Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself ; the white thing was so white, 1
its wings so wide, and in those forever exiled waters, I had lost the *
miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at
that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that
darted through me then. But at last I awoke ; and turning, asked a
sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney ! I never had
heard that name before ; is it conceivable that this glorious thing ia
utterly unknown to men ashore ! never ! But some time after, I learned
that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no possi-
bility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those
mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our
deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be
an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little
brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly
lurks the secret of the spell ; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a
solecism of terms there are birds called gray albatrosses ; and these I have
frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the
Antarctic fowl.
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I
will tell ; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea.
At last the captain made a postman of it ; tying a lettered, leathern tally
round its neck, with the ship's time and place ; and then letting it
escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken
off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the
invoking, and adoring cherubim !
238 MOBY-DICK
the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those
primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
bluff -bo wed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether
marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of
countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the
plains, like an Ohio ; or whether with his circumambient
subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils
reddening through his cool milkiness ; in whatever aspect
he presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he
was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can
it be questioned from what stands on legendary record
of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness
chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness ; and that
this divineness had that in it which, though commanding
worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless
terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses
all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in
the White Steed and Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels
and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed
by his own kith and kin ! It is that whiteness which
invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears.
The Albino is as well made as other men has no sub-
stantive deformity and yet this mere aspect of all-
pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous
than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so ?
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least
palpable but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist
among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible.
From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the
Southern seas has been denominated the White Squall.
Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human
malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it
THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE 239
heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when,
masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desper-
ate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
market-place !
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary
experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the
supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted,
that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which
most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there ;
as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of
consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation
here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the
expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them.
Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same
snowy mantle round our phantoms ; all ghosts rising in
a milk-white fog Yea, while these terrors seize us, let
us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by
the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolise whatever
grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can
deny that in its profoundest idealised significance it calls
up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is
mortal man to account for it ? To analyse it would
seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some
of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness
though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped
of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught
fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us the
same sorcery, however modified ; can we thus hope to
light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden
cause we seek ?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals
to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow
another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at
240 MOBY-DICK
least of the imaginative impressions about to be presented
may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may
not be able to recall them now.
Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to
be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar character of
the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal
in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of
slow-pacing pilgrims downcast and hooded with new-
fallen snow ? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protes-
tant of the Middle American States, why does the passing
mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an
eyeless statue in the soul ?
Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned
warriors and kings (which will not wholly account for it)
that makes the White Tower of London tell so much more
strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American
than those other storied structures, its neighbours the
Byward Tower, or even the Bloody ? And those sub-
limer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire,
whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostli-
ness over the soul at the bare mention of that name, while
the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy,
distant dreaminess ? Or *why, irrespective of all latitudes
and longitudes, does thg name of the White Sea exert
such a spectralness over the fancy, while that of the
Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered
mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest
and yet sleepiest of sunsets ? Or, to choose a wholly un-
substantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why,
in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does ' the
tall pale man ' of the Hartz forests, whose changeless
pallor unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves
why is this phantom more terrible than all the whooping
imps of the Blocksburg ?
THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE 241
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-
toppling earthquakes ; nor the stampedoes of her frantic
seas ; nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never rain ;
nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched
cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of
anchored fleets) ; and her suburban avenues of house-
walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of
cards ; it is not these things alone which make tearless
Lima the strangest, saddest city thou canst see. For
Lima has taken the white veil ; and there is a higher
horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,
this whiteness keeps her ruins forever new ; admits not
the cheerful greenness of complete decay ; spreads over
her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that
fixes its own distortions.
I know that, to the common apprehension, this phe-
nomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime
agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise
terrible ; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught
of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another
mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon,
especially when exhibited under any form at all approach-
ing to muteness or universality. What I mean by these
two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated
by the following examples.
First : The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of
foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers,
starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to
sharpen all his faculties ; but under precisely similar
circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to
view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky
whiteness as if from encircling headlands shoals of
combed white bears were swimming round him then he
feels a silent, superstitious dread ; the shrouded phantom
of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost ;
VOL. I. Q
242 MOBY-DICK
in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings ; heart
and helm they both go down ; he never rests till blue
water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who
will tell thee, ' Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking
hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that
so stirred me ' ?
Second : To the native Indian of Peru, the continual
sight of the snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of
dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal
frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and
the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to
lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same
is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with com-
parative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted
with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the
fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding
the scenery of the Antarctic seas ; where at times, by
some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost
and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of
rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views
what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him
with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.
But thou sayest, methinks this white -lead chapter
about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven
soul ; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some
peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts
of prey why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but
shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot
even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness
why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the
ground in frenzies of affright ? There is no remem-
brance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green
northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells
cannot recall to him anything associated with the experi-
THE WHITENESS OP THE WHALE 243
ence of former perils ; for what knows he, this New
England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon ?
No : but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, I.J^A
the instinct of the knowledge of the demonismjin the /* /
world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still
when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring
bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of
the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling
into dust.
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea ; the
bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains ; the
desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies ;
all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo
robe to the frightened colt !
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of
which the mystic sign gives forth such hints ; yet with s
me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist.
Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems
formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this
whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to
the soul ; and more strange and far more portentous
why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning
symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian's Deity ; and yet should be as it is, the intensi-
fying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the
heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus
stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation,
when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way ? Or
is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour
as the visible ^ absence^J_c^laar^ and at the same time the
concrete of all colours ; is it for these reasons that there
is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide
landscape of snows a colourless, all-colour of atheism
244 MOBY-DICK
from which we shrink ? And when we consider that other
theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly
hues every stately or lovely emblazoning the sweet
tinges of sunset skies and woods ; yea, and the gilded
velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young
girls ; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually in-
herent in substances, but only laid on from without ; so
that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot,
whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house
within ; and when we proceed further, and consider
that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of
her hues, the great principle of light, forever remains
white or colourless in itself, and if operating without
medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even
tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge pondering all
this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper ; and like
wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured
and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched
infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white
shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of
all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder
ye then at the fiery hunt ?
CHAPTER XLIII
HARK !
' HIST ! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco ? '
It was the middle -watch : a fair moonlight ; the
seamen were standing in a cordon, extending from one
of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt
near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the
buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most
part, on the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they
were careful not to speak or rustle their feet. From hand
to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only
broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum
of the unceasingly advancing keel.
It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of
the cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches,
whispered to his neighbour, a Cholo, the words above.
' Hist ! did you hear that noise, Cabaco ? '
' Take the bucket, will ye, Archy ? what noise d' ye
mean ?
' Cough be damned ! Pass along that return bucket.'
' There again there it is ! it sounds like two or three
sleepers turning over, now ! '
' Caramba ! have done, shipmate, will ye ? It 's the
three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning over inside
of ye -nothing else. Look to the bucket ! '
4 Say what ye will, shipmate ; I 've sharp ears.'
' Ay, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum
245
246 MOBY-DICK
of the old Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at sea
from Nantucket ; you 're the chap.'
' Grin away ; we '11 see what turns up. Hark ye,
Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold that
has not yet been seen on deck ; and I suspect our old
Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell
Flask, one morning-watch, that there was something of
that sort in the wind.'
' Tish ! the bucket ! '
CHAPTER XLIV
THE CHART
HAD you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin
after the squall that took place on the night succeeding
that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, you
would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and
bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea-charts,
spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then
seating himself before it, you would have seen him intently
study the various lines and shadings which there met his
eye ; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional
courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals,
he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein
were set down the seasons and places in which, on various
former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been
captured or seen.
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended
foi chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion
of the ship, and forever threw shifting gleams and shadows
of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that
while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the
wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing
lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his
forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the
solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts.
Almost every night they were brought out ; almost every
night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were
substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before
247
248
MOBY-DICK
him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies,
with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that
monomaniac thought of his soul.
Now, to anyone not fully acquainted with the ways of
the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task
thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped
oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab,
who knew the sets of all tides and currents ; and thereby
calculating the drif tings of the sperm whale's food ; and,
also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for
hunting him in particular latitudes ; could arrive at
reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties,
concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that
ground in search of his prey.
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodical-
ness of the sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that
many hunters believe that, could he be closely observed
and studied throughout the world ; were the logs for one
voyage of the entire whale -fleet carefully collated, then
the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to
correspond in invariability to those of the herring -shoals
or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have
been made to construct elaborate migratory charts of the
sperm whale. 1
Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-
ground to another, the sperm whales, guided by some
infallible instinct say, rather, secret intelligence from
1 Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an
official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory,
Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that circular, it appears that precisely
such a chart is in course of completion ; and portions of it are presented
in the circular. ' This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees
of latitude by five degrees of longitude ; perpendicularly through each
of which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months ; and hori-
zontally through each of which districts are three lines ; one to show the
number of days that have been spent in each month in every district, and
the two others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or
right, have been seen.'
THE CHART 249
the Deity mostly swim in veins, as they are called ; con-
tinuing their way along a given ocean-line with such
undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her
course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvellous
precision. Though, in these cases, the direction taken
by any one whale be straight as a surveyor's parallel, and
though the line of advance be strictly confined to its
own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein
in which at these times he is said to swim, generally
embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the
vein is presumed to expand or contract) ; but never
exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's mast-
heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone.
The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth
and along that path, migrating whales may with great
confidence be looked for.
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well-
known separate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to
encounter his prey ; but in crossing the widest expanses
of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so
place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be
wholly without prospect of a meeting.
There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to
entangle his delirious but still methodical scheme. But
not so in reality, perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm
whales have their regular seasons for particular grounds,
yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which
haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,
say, will turn out to be identically the same with those
that were found there the preceding season ; though
there are peculiar and unquestionable instances where
the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the same
remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the soli-
taries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales.
So that though Moby-Dick had in a former year been seen,
250 MOBY-DICK
for example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the
Indian Ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese coast ;
yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either
of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season,
she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with
some other feeding -grounds, where he had at times
revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual
stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places
of prolonged abode. And where Ahab's chances of
accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of,
allusion has only been made to whatever wayside, ante-
cedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set time
or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possi-
bility the next thing to a certainty. That particular set
time and place were conjoined in the one technical phrase
the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for
several consecutive years, Moby-Dick had been periodic-
ally descried, lingering in those waters for a while, as the
sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval
in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that
most of the deadly encounters with the White Whale had
taken place ; there the waves were storied with his deeds ;
there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old
man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But
in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigi-
lance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this
unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all
his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned,
however flattering it might be to those hopes ; nor in the
sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillise his unquiet
heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very
beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible en-
deavour then could enable her commander to make the
THE CHART 251
great passage southward, double Cape Horn, and then
running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the
equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he
must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the prema-
ture hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been
correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very com-
plexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred
and sixty-five days and nights was before him ; an inter-
val which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he
would spend in a miscellaneous hunt ; if by chance the
White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote
from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his
wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay,
or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race.
So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers, Harmattans,
Trades ; any wind but the Levanter and Simoom, might
blow Moby-Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of
the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.
But granting all this ; yet, regarded discreetly and
coolly, seems it not but a mad idea, this ; that in the broad
boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered,
should be thought capable of individual recognition from
his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged
thoroughfares of Constantinople ? Yes. For the peculiar
snow-white brow of Moby-Dick, and his snow-white hump,
could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied
the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring
over his charts till long after midnight he would throw
himself back in reveries tallied him, and shall he escape ?
His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost
sheep's ear ! And here, his mad mind would run on in a
breathless race ; till a weariness and faintness of ponder-
ing came over him ; and in the open air of the deck he
would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God ! what
trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed
252 MOBY-DICK
with one unachieved revengeful desire.
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting
and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming
his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them
on amid a clashing of frenzies, and whirled them round
and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing
of his life-spot became insufferable anguish ; and when,
was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him
heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed
opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings
shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down
among them ; when this hell in himself yawned beneath
him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship ; and
with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state-room,
as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet
these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressible
symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own
resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For,
at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly
steadfast hunter of the White Whale ; this Ahab that had
gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused
him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the
eternal, living principle or soul in him ; and in sleep, being
for the time dissociated from the characterising mind,
which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or
agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching
contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it
was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not
exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have
been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and
fancies to his one supreme purpose ; that purpose, by its
own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods
and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being
THE CHART 253
of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the
common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-
stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. There-
fore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes,
when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for
the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic
being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an
object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God
help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature
in thee ; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him
a Prometheus ; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever ;
that vulture the very creature he creates.
CHAPTER XLV
THE AFFIDAVIT
So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book ;
and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very inter-
esting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm
whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as
important a one as will be found in this volume ; but
the leading matter of it requires to be still further and
more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately
understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity
which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may
induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main
points of this affair.
I care not to perform this part of my task methodically ;
but shall be content to produce the desired impression by
separate citations of items, practically or reliably known
to me as a whaleman ; and from these citations, I take
it, the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself.
First : I have personally known three instances where
a whale, after receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete
escape ; and, after an interval (in one instance of three
years), has been again struck by the same hand, and slain ;
when the two irons, both marked by the same private
cipher, have been taken from the body. In the instance
where three years intervened between the flinging of the
two harpoons ; and I think it may have been something
more than that ; the man who darted them happening,
in the interval, to go in a trading-ship on a voyage to
Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and
254
THE AFFIDAVIT 255
penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a
period of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents,
savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other
common perils incident to wandering in the heart of un-
known regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck
must also have been on its travels ; no doubt it had thrice
circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all
the coasts of Africa ; but to no purpose. This man and
this whale again came together, and the one vanquished
the other. I say I, myself, have known three instances
similar to this ; that is in two of them I saw the whales
struck ; and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons
with the respective marks cut in them, afterward taken
from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell
out that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and
the last time distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge
mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed there
three years previous. I say three years, but I am pretty
sure it was more than that. Here are three instances,
then, which I personally know the truth of ; but I have
heard of many other instances from persons whose veracity
in the matter there is no good ground to impeach.
Secondly : It is well known in the sperm whale fishery,
however ignorant the world ashore maybe of it, that there
have been several memorable historical instances where a
particular whale in the ocean has been at distant times
and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale
became thus marked was not altogether arid originally
owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from
other whales ; for however peculiar in that respect any
chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his peculi-
arities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculi-
arly valuable oil. No : the reason was this : that from
the fatal experiences of the fishery there hung a terrible
prestige of perilousness about such a whale as there did
256 MOBY-DICK
about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen
were content to recognise him by merely touching their
tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them
on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more intimate
acquaintance. Like some poor devils ashore that happen
to know an irascible great man, they make distant unob-
trusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they pursued
the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary
thump for their presumption.
But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy
great individual celebrity nay, you may call it an ocean-
wide renown ; not only was he famous in life and now is
immortal in forecastle stories after death, but he was
admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions
of a name ; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or
Caesar. Was it not so, O Timor Tom ! thou famed
leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long didst lurk
in the oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft
seen from the palmy beach of Ombay ? Was it not so,
New Zealand Jack ! thou terror of all cruisers that
crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land?
Was it not so, Morquan ! King of Japan, whose lofty
jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-
white cross against the sky ? Was it not so, Don
Miguel ! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise
with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back I In plain prose,
here are four whales as well known to the students of
Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.
But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel,
after at various times creating great havoc among the
boats of different vessels, were finally gone in quest of,
systematically hunted out, chased and killed by valiant
whaling-captains, who heaved up their anchors with that
express object as much in view, as in setting out through
the Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it
THE AFFIDAVIT 257
in his mind to capture that notorious murderous savage
Annawon, the headmost warrior of the Indian King
Philip.
I do not know where I can find a better place than just
here, to make mention of one or two other things, which
to me seem important, as in printed form establishing
in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of
the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For
this is one of those disheartening instances where truth
requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant
are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most
palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints
touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the
fishery, they might scout at Moby-Dick as a monstrous
fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and
intolerable allegory.
First : Though most men have some vague flitting ideas
of the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have
nothing like a fixed, vivid conception of those perils,
and the frequency with which they recur. One reason
perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and
deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public
record at home, however transient and immediately
forgotten that record. Do you suppose that that poor
fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the
whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried
down to the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan
do you suppose that that poor fellow's name will appear
in the newspaper obituary you will read to-morrow at
your breakfast ? No : because the mails are very
irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact, did
you ever hear what might be called regular news direct
or indirect from New Guinea ? Yet I tell you that
upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific,
among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every
VOL. j. B
258 MOBY-DICK
one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them
more than one, and three that had each lost a boat's crew.
For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and
candles ! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of
man's blood was spilled for it.
Secondly : People ashore have indeed some indefinite
idea that a whale is an enormous creature of enormous
power ; but I have ever found that when narrating to
them some specific example of this twofold enormousness,
they have significantly complimented me upon my
facetiousness ; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no
more idea of being facetious than Moses, when he wrote
the history of the plagues of Egypt.
But fortunately the special point I here seek can be
established upon testimony entirely independent of my
own. That point is this : The sperm whale is in some
cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously
malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly
destroy, and sink a large ship ; and what is more, the
sperm whale has done it.
First : In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain
Pollard, of Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean.
One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase
to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of the
whales were wounded ; when, suddenly, a very large
whale escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal,
and bore directly down upon the ship. Dashing his
forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in less
than ' ten minutes ' she settled down and fell over. Not
a surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the
severest exposure, part of the crew reached the land in
their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain
Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of
another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon
unknown rocks and breakers ; for the second time his
THE AFFIDAVIT 259
ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea,
he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard
is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace,
who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy ;
I have read his plain and faithful narrative ; I have
conversed with his son ; and all this within a few miles
of the scene of the catastrophe. 1
Secondly : The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in
the year 1 807 totally lost off the Azores by a similar onset,
but the authentic particulars of this catastrophe I have
never chanced to encounter, though from the whale-
hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it.
Thirdly : Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commo-
dore J , then commanding an American sloop -of -war
of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of
whaling-captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the
1 The following are extracts from Chace's narrative : ' Every fact
seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance
which directed his operations ; he made two several attacks upon the ship,
at a short interval between them, both of which, according to their
direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead,
and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shook ; to
effect which, the exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His
aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He
came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in
which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for
their sufferings.' Again : ' At all events, the whole circumstances taken
together, all happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the time,
impressions in my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the part of
the whale (many of which impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to
be satisfied that I am correct in my opinion.'
Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a
black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any
hospitable shore. ' The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing ;
the fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed
upon hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful con-
templation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment's thought ; the dismal-
looking wreck, and the horrid aspect and revenge of the whale, wholly
engrossed my reflections until day again made its appearance.'
In another place p. 45, he speaks of ' the mysterious and mortal
attack of the animal.'
260 MOBY-DICK
harbour of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turn-
ing upon whales, the commodore was pleased to be scepti-
cal touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the
professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily denied,
for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-
of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful.
Very good ; but there is more coming. Some weeks after,
the commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for
Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a portly
sperm whale, that begged a few moments' confidential
business with him. That business consisted in fetching
the commodore's craft such a thwack, that with all his
pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to
heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I
consider the commodore's interview with that whale as
providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from
unbelief by a similar fright ?
I will now refer you to Langsdorff 's Voyages for a little
circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer
hereof. Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was
attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern's famous Dis-
co very Expedition in the beginning of the present century.
Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter.
4 By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail,
and the next day we were out in the open sea, on our way
to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine, but
so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our
fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind ;
it was not till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the
north-west sprang up. An uncommon large whale, the
body of which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost
at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any-
one on board till the moment when the ship, which was
in full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was impossible
THE AFFIDAVIT 261
to prevent its striking against him. We were thus placed
in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature,
setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least out
of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell alto-
gether, while we who were below all sprang instantly
upon the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some
rock ; instead of this we saw the monster sailing off with
the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain D'Wolf
applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether
or not the vessel had received any damage from the
shock, but we found that very happily it had escaped
entirely uninjured.'
Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as command-
ing the ship in question, is a New Englander, who, after
a long life of unusual adventures as a sea-captain, this
day resides in the village of Dorchester near Boston. I
have the honour of being a nephew of his. I have par-
ticularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langs-
dorfL He substantiates every word. The ship, however,
was by no means a large one : a Russian craft built on
the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after
bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned
adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders the voyage
of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier's old chums
I found a little matter set down so like that just quoted
from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here
for a corroborative example, if such be needed.
Lionel, it seems, was on his way to ' John Ferdi-
nando,' as he calls the modern Juan Fernandez. ' In
our way thither,' he says, 'about four o'clock in the
morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty
leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible
shock, which put our men in such consternation that they
could hardly tell where they were or what to think ; but
262 MOBY-DICK
everyone began to prepare for death. And, indeed, the
shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted
the ship had struck against a rock ; but when the amaze-
ment was a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but
found no ground. * * * The suddenness of the
shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of
the men were shaken out of their hammocks.  ' Lionel then goes on to impute the shock
to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputa-
tion by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about
that time,, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish
land. But I should not much wonder if, in the darkness
of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all
caused by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull
from beneath.
I might proceed with several more examples, one way
or another known to me, of the great power and malice
at times of the sperm whale. In more than one instance,
he has been known, not only to chase the assailing boats
back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long
withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks.
The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head ;
and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been
examples where the lines attached to a running sperm
whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and
secured there ; the whale towing her great hull through
the water, as a horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is
very often observed that, if the sperm whale, once struck,
is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so often with
blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction
to his pursuers ; nor is it without conveying some elo-
quent indication of his character, that upon being attacked
he will frequently open his mouth, and retain it in that
dread expansion for several consecutive minutes. But I
THE AFFIDAVIT 263
must be content with only one more and a concluding
illustration ; a remarkable and most significant one, by
which you will not fail to see, that not only is the most
marvellous event in this book corroborated by plain
facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all
marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages ; so that for
the millionth time we say amen with Solomon Verily
there is nothing new under the sun.
In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Chris-
tian magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when
Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general. As many
know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work every
way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he
has always been considered a most trustworthy and un-
exaggerating historian, except in some one or two par-
ticulars, not at all affecting the matter presently to be
mentioned.
Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that,
during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople, a
great sea-monster was captured in the neighbouring
Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed
vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more
than fifty years. A fact thus set down in substantial
history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any
reason it should be. Of what precise species this sea-
monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed
ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a
whale ; and I am strongly inclined to think a sperm whale.
And I will tell you why. For a long time I fancied that
the sperm whale had been always unknown in the Medi-
terranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even
now I am certain that those seas are not, and perhaps
never can be, in the present constitution of things, a place
for his habitual gregarious resort. But further investi-
gations have recently proved to me, that in modern times
264 MOBY-DICK
there have been isolated instances of the presence of the
sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good
authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore
Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm
whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes through
the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same
route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that
peculiar substance called brit is to be found, the aliment
of the right whale. But I have every reason to believe
that the food of the sperm whale squid or cuttle-fish
lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures,
but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found
at its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements
together, and reason upon them a bit, you will clearly
perceive that, according to all human reasoning, Pro-
copius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the
ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have
been a sperm whale.
CHAPTER XLVI
SURMISES
THOUGH, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose,
Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the
ultimate capture of Moby-Dick ; though he seemed ready
to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one passion ; never-
theless it may have been that he was by nature and long
habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways,
altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the
voyage. Or at least if this were otherwise, there were
not wanting other motives much more influential with
him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even con-
sidering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness
toward the White Whale might have possibly extended
itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the
more monsters he slew, by so much the more he multiplied
the chances that each subsequently encountered whale
would prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such
an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were still
additional considerations which, though not so strictly
according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were
by no means incapable of swaying him.
To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools ; and
of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most
apt to get out of order. He knew, for example, that
however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was
over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the
complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal
superiority involves intellectual mastership ; for to the
265
266 MOBY-DICK
purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of
corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and Starbuck's
coerced will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet
at Starbuck's brain ; still he knew that for all this the
chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain's quest, and
could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it,
or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval
would elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that
long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into open
relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership,
unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influ-
ences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that,
but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby-Dick
was no ways more significantly manifested than in his
superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for
the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of
that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally
invested it ; that the full terror of the voyage must be
kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few
men's courage is proof against protracted meditation
unrelieved by action) ; that when they stood their long
night-watches, his officers and men must have some nearer
things to think of than Moby-Dick. For however eagerly
and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announce-
ment of his quest ; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or
less capricious and unreliable they live in the varying
outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness and when
retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit,
however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is
above all things requisite that temporary interests and
employments should intervene and hold them healthily
suspended for the final dash.
Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of
strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations ;
but such times are evanescent. The permanent con-
SURMISES 267
stitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale
fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing
round their savageness even breeds a certain generous
knight -errant ism in them, still, while for the love of it
they give chase to Moby-Dick, they must also have food
for their more common, daily appetites. For even the
high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not
content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight
for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries,
picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by
the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final
and romantic object that final and romantic object,
too many would have turned from in disgust. I will not
strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash ay,
cash. They may scorn cash now ; but let some months
go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then \
this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them,
this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.
Nor was there wanting still another precautionary
motive more related to Ahab personally. Having im-
pulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat pre-
maturely revealed the prime but private purpose of the
Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that,
in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the
unanswerable charge of usurpation ; and with perfect
impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed,
and to that end competent, could refuse all further
obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the
command. From even the barely hinted imputation
of usurpation, and the possible consequences of such
a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must of
course have been most anxious to protect himself. That
protection could only consist in his own predominating
brain and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely
268 MOBY-DICK
calculating attention to every minute atmospheric influ-
ence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected to.
For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too
analytic to be verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw
that he must still in a good degree continue true to the
natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's voyage ; observe
all customary usages ; and not only that, but force
himself to evince all his well-known passionate interest
in the general pursuit of his profession.
Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard
hailing the three mast-heads and admonishing them to
keep a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a
porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.
CHAPTER XLVII
THE MAT-MAKER
IT was a cloudy, sultry afternoon ; the seamen were
lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over
into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were
mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,
for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and
subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene,
and such an incantation of revelry lurked in the air,
that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own
invisible self.
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy
at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling
or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp,
using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg,
standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken
sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon
the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every
yarn : I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign
all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the
intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as
if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle
mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.
There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one
single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that
vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise inter-
blending of other threads with its own. This warp
seemed necessity ; and here, thought I, with my own hand
I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these
269
270 MOBY-DICK
unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,
indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly,
or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might
be ; and by this difference in the concluding blow pro-
ducing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the
completed fabric ; this savage's sword, thought I, which
thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof ; this
easy, indifferent sword must be chance ay, chance, free
will, and necessity no wise incompatible all inter-
weavingly working together. The straight warp of neces-
sity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course its every
/ alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that ; free
will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads ;
and chance, though restrained in its play within the right
lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed
by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance
by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at
events.
*******
Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I
I started at a soundjgq strange, long drawn, and musically
I wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from
my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that
voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees
was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was
reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a
wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries.
To be sure, the same sound was that very moment perhaps
being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whale-
men's look-outs perched as high in the air ; but from
few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have
derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the
Indian's.
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air,
so wildly and eagerly peering toward the horizon, you
THE MAT-MAKER 271
would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding
the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing
their coming.
' There she blows ! there ! there ! there ! she blows !
she blows ! '
4 Where away ? '
' On the lee-beam, about two miles off ! a school of
them ! '
Instantly all was commotion.
The sperm whale blows as a clock ticks, with the
same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby
whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of
his genus.
' There go flukes ! ' was now the cry from Tashtego ;
and the whales disappeared.
4 Quick, steward ! ' cried Ahab. ' Time ! time ! '
Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and
reported the exact minute to Ahab.
The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she
went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that
the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we con-
fidently looked to see them again directly in advance of
our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by
the sperm whale when, sounding with his head in one
direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the
surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the opposite
quarter this deceitfulness of his could not now be in
action ; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish
seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed
knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for
ship-keepers that is, those not appointed to the boats
by this time relieved the Indian at the mainmast-head.
The sailors at the fore and mizen had come down ; the
line-tubs were fixed in their places ; the cranes were
thrust out ; the main-yard was backed, and the three
272 MOBY-DICK
boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over
high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with
one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly
poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-
war's men about to throw themselves on board an enemy's
ship.
But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was
heard that took every eye from the whale. With a start
all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky
phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
CHAPTER XLVIII
THE FIRST LOWERING
THE phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on
the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity,
were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which
swung there. This boat had always been deemed one
of the spare boats, though technically called the captain's,
on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter.
The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart,
with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like
lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally
invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark
stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a
glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided
and coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart
in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid,
tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal
natives of the Manillas ; a race notorious for a certain
diabolism of subtlety, and by some honest white mariners
supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential
agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-
room they suppose to be elsewhere.
While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing
upon these strangers, Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned
old man at their head, ' All ready there, Fedallah ? '
' Ready,' was the half -hissed reply.
4 Lower away then ; d' ye hear ? ' shouting across the
deck. ' Lower away there, I say.'
Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their
VOL. i. s
274 MOBY-DICK
amazement the men sprang over the rail ; the sheaves
whirled round in the blocks ; with a wallow, the three
boats dropped into the sea ; while, with a dexterous, off-
handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors,
goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship's side into the
tossed boats below.
Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee,
when a fourth keel, coming from the windward side,
pulled round under the stern, and showed the five strangers
rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern, loudly
hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves
widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with
all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and
his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the
command.
' Captain Ahab ? ' said Starbuck.
' Spread yourselves,' cried Ahab ; ' give way, all four
boats. Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward ! '
' Ay, ay, sir,' cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping
round his great steering -oar. ' Lay back ! ' addressing
his crew. ' There ! there ! there again ! There she
blows right ahead, boys ! lay back ! '
' Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.'
' Oh, I don't mind 'em, sir,' said Archy ; ' I knew it all
before now. Didn't I hear 'em in the hold ? And didn't
I tell Cabaco here of it ? What say ye, Cabaco ? They
are stowaways, Mr. Flask.'
' Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive ; pull, my children ;
pull, my little ones,' drawlingly and soothingly sighed
Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of
uneasiness.  What is it you stare at ? Those chaps in yonder
boat ? Tut ! They are only five more hands come to
help us never mind from where the more the merrier.
Pull, then, do pull ; never mind the brimstone devils
THE FIRST LOWERING 275
are good fellows enough. So, so ; there you are now ;
that 's the stroke for a thousand pounds ; that 's the
stroke to sweep the stakes ! Hurrah for the gold cup
of sperm oil, my heroes ! Three cheers, men all hearts-
alive !
 So, so, so, then ; softly,
softly ! That 's it that 's it ! long and strong. Give
way there, give way ! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin
rapscallions ; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers,
and pull. Pull, will ye ? pull, can't ye ? pull, won't ye ?
Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don't ye
pull ? pull and break something ! pull, and start your
eyes out ! Here ! ' whipping out the sharp knife from his
girdle ; ' every mother's son of ye draw his knife, and pull
with the blade between his teeth. That J s it that 's it.
Now ye do something ; that looks like it, my steel-bits.
Start her start her, my silver-spoons ! Start her,
marling-spikes ! '
Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large,
because he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them
in general, and especially in inculcating the religion of
rowing. But you must not suppose from this specimen
of his sermonisings that he ever flew into downright
passions with his congregation. Not at all ; and therein
consisted his chief peculiarity. He would say the most
terrific things to his crew, in a tone so strangely com-
pounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calcu-
lated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could
hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear
life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing. Be-
sides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself,
so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly
gaped open-mouthed at times that the mere sight of
such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast,
276 MOBY-DICK
acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb
was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity
is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all in-
feriors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.
In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now
pulling obliquely across Stubb 's bow ; and when for a
minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each other,
Stubb hailed the mate.
4 Mr. Starbuck ! larboard boat there, ahoy ! a word
with ye, sir, if ye please ! '
' Halloa ! ' returned Starbuck, turning round not a
single inch as he spoke ; still earnestly but whisperingly
urging his crew ; his face set like a flint from Stubb 's.
' What think ye of those yellow boys, sir ? '
' Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed.

(Seethe her, seethe her, my lads !) but never mind, Mr.
Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong,
come what will. (Spring, my men, spring !) There 's
hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that 's what
ye came for. (Pull, my boys !) Sperm, sperm 's the
play ! This at least is duty ; duty and profit hand in
hand ! '
' Ay, ay, I thought as much,' soliloquised Stubb,
when the boats diverged, c as soon as I clapt eye on 'em,
I thought so. Ay, and that 's what he went into the
after-hold for, so often, as Dough -Boy long suspected.
They were hidden down there. The White Whale 's at
the bottom of it. Well, well, so be it ! Can't be helped !
All right ! Give way, men ! It ain't the White Whale
to-day ! Give way ! '
Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such
a critical instant as the lowering of the boats from the
deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort of
THE FIRST LOWERING 277
superstitious amazement in some of the ship's company ;
but Archy's fancied discovery having some time previous
got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then,
this had in some small measure prepared them for the
event. It took off the extreme edge of their wonder ;
and so what with all this and Stubb's confident way of
accounting for their appearance, they were for the time
freed from superstitious surmisings ; though the affair
still left abundant room for all manner of wild conjectures
as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the matter from the
beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious
shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during
the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the enigmatical
hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.
Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having
sided the furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead
of the other boats ; a circumstance bespeaking how potent
a crew was pulling him. Those tiger-yellow creatures of
his seemed all steel and whalebone ; like five trip-hammers
they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which
periodically started the boat along the water like a hori-
zontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for
Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer-oar, he
had thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his
naked chest with the whole part of his body above the
gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions
of the watery horizon ; while at the other end of the boat
Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer's, thrown half backward
into the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip ;
Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering -oar as in a j
thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn(
him. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar
motion and then remained fixed, while the boat's five oars
were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat
motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats
278 MOBY-DICK
in the rear paused on their way. The whales had irregu-
larly settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no
distantly discernible token of the movement, though
from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.
4 Every man look out along his oars ! ' cried Starbuck.
' Thou, Queequeg, stand up ! '
Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in
the bow, the savage stood erect there, and with intensely
eager eyes gazed off toward the spot where the chase
had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme stern
of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level
with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and
adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his
chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of
the sea.
Not very far distant Flask's boat was also lying breath-
lessly still ; its commander recklessly standing upon the
top of the logger-head, a stout sort of post rooted in the
keel, and rising some two feet above the level of the stern
platform. It is used for catching turns with the whale -
line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a
man's hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask
seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship which had
sunk to all but her trucks. But little King-Post was small
and short, and at the same time little King-Post was full
of a large and tall ambition, so that this logger-head stand-
point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.
c I can't see three seas off ; tip us up an oar there, and
let me on to that.'
Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale '
to steady his way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting him-
self volunteered his lofty shoulders for a pedestal.
' Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount ? '
' That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow ;
only I wish you fifty feet taller.'
THE FIRST LOWERING 279
Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite
planks of the boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little,
presented his flat palm to Flask's foot, and then
putting Flask's hand on his hearse-plumed head and
bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one
dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry on
his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing,
Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a breast-
band to lean against and steady himself by.
At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with
what wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whale-
man will maintain an erect posture in his boat, even when
pitched about by the most riotously perverse and cross-
running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily
perched upon the logger-head itself, under such circum-
stances. But the sight of little Flask mounted upon
gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious ; for sustaining
himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought-of,
barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea
harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back,
flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer
looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious,
tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then
stamp with impatience ; but not one added heave did he
thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen
Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous'
earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons
for that.
Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such
far-gazing solicitudes. The whales might have made
one of their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from
mere fright ; and if that were the case, Stubb, as his
wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the
languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from
his hat-band, where he always wore it aslant like a feather.
280 MOBY-DICK
He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his
thumb-end ; but hardly had he ignited his match across
the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his
harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to windward like
two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect
attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick frenzy of
hurry, ' Down, down all, and give way ! there they are ! '
To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring,
would have been visible at that moment ; nothing but a
troubled bit of greenish-white water, and thin scattered
puffs of vapour hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing
off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling
billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled,
as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of
iron. Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and
partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales
were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other indi-
cations, the puffs of vapour they spouted, seemed their
forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders.
All four bojits were now in keen pursuit of that one spot
of troubled water and air. But it bade far to outstrip
them ; it flew on and on, as a mass of interblending
bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills.
' Pull, pull, my good boys,' said Starbuck, in the lowest
possible but intensest concentrated whisper to his men ;
while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes darted straight
ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles
in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much
to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him.
Only the silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly
pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with
command, now soft with entreaty.
How different the loud little King-Post. ' Sing out
and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my
thunderbolts ! Beach me, beach me on their black backs,
THE FIRST LOWERING 281
boys ; only do that for me, and 1 11 sign over to you my
Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys ; including wife and
children, boys. Lay me on lay me on ! Lord, Lord !
but I shall go stark, staring mad ! See ! see that white
water ! ' And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his
head, and stamped up and down on it ; then picking it
up, flirted it far off upon the sea ; and finally fell to
rearing and plunging in the boat's stern like a crazed
colt from the prairie.
' Look at that chap now,' philosophically drawled
Stubb, who, with his unlighted short pipe, mechanically
retained between his teeth, at a short distance, followed
after ' He 's got fits, that Flask has. Fits ? yes, give
him fits that 's the very word pitch fits into 'em.
Merrily, merrily, hearts -alive. Pudding for supper, you
know ; merry 's the word. Pull, babes pull, sucklings
pull, all. But what the devil are you hurrying about ?
Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and keep
pulling ; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and
bite your knives hi two that 's all. Take it easy why
don't ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your livers and
lungs ! '
But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that
tiger-yellow crew of his these were words best omitted
here ; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical
land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may
give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and
eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped
after his prey.
Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific
allusions of Flask to ' that whale,' as he called the fictitious
monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalising
his boat's bow with his tail these allusions of his were at
times so vivid and lifelike, that they would cause some
one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over the
282 MOBY-DICK
shoulder. But this was against all rule ; for the oarsmen
must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their
necks ; usage pronouncing that they must have no
organs but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these critical
moments.
It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe ! The vast
swells of the omnipotent sea ; the surging, hollow roar
they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like
gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green ; the brief
suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an
instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that
almost seemed threatening to cut it in two ; the sudden
profound dip into the watery glens and hollows ; the
keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite
hill ; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side ;
all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers,
and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the won-
drous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her
boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her
screaming brood ; all this was thrilling. Not the raw
recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever-
heat of his first battle ; not the dead man's ghost en-
countering the first unknown phantom in the other world ;
neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions
than that man does, who for the first time finds himself
pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted
sperm whale.
The dancing white water made by the chase was now
becoming more and more visible, owing to the increasing
darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung upon the sea.
The jets of vapour no longer blended, but tilted every-
where to right and left ; the whales seemed separating
their wakes. The boats were pulled more apart ; Star-
buck giving chase to three whales running dead to lee-
ward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising
THE FIRST LOWERING 283
wind, we rushed along ; the boat going with such madness
through the water, that the lee -oars could scarcely be
worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from the
rowlocks.
Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of
mist ; neither ship nor boat to be seen.
4 Give way, men,' whispered Starbuck, drawing still
further aft the sheet of his sail ; ' there is time to kill a
fish yet before the squall comes. There 's white water
again ! close to ! Spring ! *
Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side
of us denoted that the other boats had got fast ; but
hardly were they overheard, when with a lightning-like
hurtling whisper Starbuck said : ' Stand up ! ' and Quee-
queg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the
life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet with their
eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern
of the boat, they knew that the imminent instant had
come ; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound
as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile
the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves
curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of
enraged serpents.
' That 's his hump. There, there, give it to him ! '
whispered Starbuck.
A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat ; it was
the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded
commotion came an invisible push from astern, while
forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge ; the sail
collapsed and exploded ; a gush of scalding vapour shot
up near by ; something rolled and tumbled like an earth-
quake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated
as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling
cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
284 MOBY-DICK
blended together ; and the whale, merely grazed by the
iron, escaped.
Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly
unharmed. Swimming round it we picked up the floating
oars, and lashing them across the gunwale, tumbled back
to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea,
the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our
downward-gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral
boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean.
 In vain we hailed the other boats ; as
well roar to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming
furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile
the driving scud, rack, and mist grew darker with the
shadows of night ; no sign of the ship could be seen.
The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat.
The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the
office of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the
waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck
contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern ; then stretch-
ing it on a waif -pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-
bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding
up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty
forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol
of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in
the midst of despair.
Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing
of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on.
The mist still spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay
crushed in the bottom of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg
started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear. We all
heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto
THE FIRST LOWERING 285
muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and
nearer ; the thick mists were dimly parted by a huge,
vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as
the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon
us within a distance of not much more than its length.
Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as
for one instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship's
bows like a chip at the base of a cataract ! and then the
vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more till it
came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were
dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up
and safely landed on board. Ere the squall came close
to, the other boats had cut loose from their fish and
returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us
up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some
token of our perishing, an oar or a lance pole.
CHAPTER XL1X
THE HYENA
THERE are certain queer times and occasions in this
strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this
whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit
thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects
that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. How-
ever, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while
disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and
beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and in-
visible, never mind how knobby ; as an ostrich of potent
digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as
for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden
disaster, peril of life and limb ; all these, and death itself,
seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches
in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable
old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking
of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribu-
lation ; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so
that what just before might have seemed to him a thing
most momentous, now seems but a part of the general
joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed
this free-and-easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy ;
and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the
Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.
' Queequeg/ said I, when they had dragged me, the
}ast man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in
my jacket to fling off the water ; ' Queequeg, my fine
friend, does this sort of thing often happen ? ' Without
286
THE HYENA 287
much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he
gave me to understand that such things did often happen.
4 Mr. Stubb,' said I, turning to that worthy, who,
buttoned up in his oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking
his pipe in the rain ; ' Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you
say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate,
Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I
suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your
sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's
discretion ? '
1 Certain. I 've lowered for whales from a leaking
ship in a gale off Cape Horn.'
4 Mr. Flask,' said I, turning to little King-Post, who was
standing close by ; ' you are experienced in these things,
and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalter-
able law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break
his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death's
jaws ? '
' Can't you twist that smaller ? ' said Flask. ' Yes,
that 's the law. I should like to see a boat's crew backing
water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha ! the whale
would give them squint for squint, mind that ! J
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a
deliberate statement of the entire case. Considering,
therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and
consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of
common -occurrence in this kind of life ; considering that
at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the
whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who
steered the boat oftentimes a fellow who at that very
moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling
the craft with his own frantic stampings ; considering
that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was
chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale
almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that
288 MOBY-DICK
Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great
heedfulness in the fishery ; considering that I belonged to
this uncommonly prudent Starbuck 's boat ; and finally
considering in what a devil's chase I was implicated,
touching the White Whale : taking all things together, I
say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough
draft of my will. ' Queequeg,' said I, ' come along, you
shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee/
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be
tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are
no people in the world more fond of that diversion. This
was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done
the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon
the present occasion, I felt all the easier ; a stone was
rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should
now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived
after his resurrection ; a supplementary clean gain of so
many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived
myself ; my death and burial were locked up in my chest.
I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet
ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a
snug family vault.
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the
sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive
at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.
CHAPTER L
ARAB'S BOAT AND CREW. FEDALLAH
* WHO would have thought it, Flask ! ' cried Stubb. ' If
I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat, unless
maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh !
he 's a wonderful old man ! '
' I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account,'
said Flask. ' If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would
be a different thing. That would disable him ; but he
has one knee, and good part of the other left, you know.'
' I don't know that, my little man ; I never yet saw
him kneel.'
*******
Among whale -wise people it has often been argued
whether, considering the paramount importance of his
life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling-
captain to jeopardise that life in the active perils of the
chase. So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears
in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to
be carried into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect.
Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling
wight in all times of danger ; considering that the pursuit
of whales is always under great and extraordinary diffi-
culties ; that every individual moment, indeed, then
comprises a peril ; under these circumstances is it wise
for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt ?
As a general thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must
have plainly thought not.
VOL. I. T
290 MOBY-DICK
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home
would think little of his entering a boat in certain com-
paratively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake
of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in
person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually
apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt
above all, for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra
men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew that such
generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners
of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat's
crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires
on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measure
of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco's
published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it,
though to be sure when, after being a little while out of
port, all hands had concluded the customary business of
fitting the whale-boats for service ; when some time after
this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in
the matter of making thole-pins with his own hands for
what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which
when the line is running out are pinned over the groove
in the bow ; when all this was observed in him, and par-
ticularly his solicitude hi having an extra coat of sheath-
ing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb ; and
also the anxiety he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh -
board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the hori-
zontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the knee against
in darting or stabbing at the whale ; when it was observed
how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee
fixed in the semicircular depression in the cleat, and
with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and
straightened it a little there ; all these things, I say, had
awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But
FEDALLAH 291
almost everybody supposed that this particular prepara-
tive heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the
ultimate chase of Moby-Dick ; for he had already revealed
his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But
such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest
suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that
boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder
remained soon waned away ; for in a whaler wonders soon
wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds
and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating
outlaws of whalers ; and the ships themselves often pick
up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about
the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whale-boats,
canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not ; that
Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down
into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not
create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the
subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the
crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them,
yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled
mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly
world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon
evinced himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes;
nay, so far as to have some sort of a half -hinted influence ;
Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority
over him ; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an
indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a
creature as civilised, domestic people in the temperate
zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly ; but
the like of whom now and then glide among the unchang-
ing Asiatic communities, especially the oriental isles to
the east of the continent those insulated, immemorial,
292 MOBY-DICK
unalterable countries, which even in these modern days
still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's
primal generations, when the memory of the first man was
a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, un-
knowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phan-
toms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were
created and to what end ; when though, according to
Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters
of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins,
indulged in mundane amours.
CHAPTER LI
THE SPIRIT- SPOUT
DAYS, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod
had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds ;
that off the Azores ; off the Cape de Verdes ; on the
Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Bio de la
Plata ; and the Carrol ground, an unstaked, watery
locality, southerly from St. Helena.
It was while gliding through these latter waters that
one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled
by like scrolls of silver ; and, by their soft, suffusing
seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a
solitude : on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far ,;
in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by I
the moon, it looked celestial ; seemed some plumed and
glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first
descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was
his wont to mount to the mainmast-head, and stand a
look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been
day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by
night, not one whalemen in a hundred would venture a
lowering for them. You may think with what emotions,
then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft
at such unusual hours ; his turban and the moon, com-
panions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform
interval there for several successive nights without utter-
ing a single sound ; when, after all this silence, his un-
earthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit
jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some
293
294 MOBY-DICK
winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the
mortal crew. ' There she blows ! ' Had the trump of
judgment blown, they could not have quivered more ; yet
still they felt no terror ; rather pleasure. For though it
was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry,
and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on
board instinctively desired a lowering.
Walking the deck with quick, side -lunging strides,
Ahab commanded the t '-gallant-sails and royals to be set,
and every stun' -sail spread. The best man in the ship
must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned,
the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The
strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze
filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant,
hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet ; while
still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences
were struggling in her one to mount direct to heaven, 1
the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. H
And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would
have thought that in him also two different things were
warring.  On life and death this old man walked. But
though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every
eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery
jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore
he saw it once, but not a second time.
This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten
thing, when, some days after, lo ! at the same silent hour,
it was again announced : again it was descried by all ;
but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it dis-
appeared as if it had never been. And so it served us
night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at
it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or
starlight, as the case might be ; disappearing again for
THE SPIRIT-SPOUT 295
one whole day, or two days, or three ; and somehow
seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still
further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed
forever alluring us on.
Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race,
and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed,
which in many things invested the Pequod, were there
wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever
and wherever descried ; at however remote times, or in
however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnear-
able spout was cast by one self-same whale ; and that
whale, Moby-Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a
sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it
were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that
the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at
last in the remotest and most savage seas.
These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful,
derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity
of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness,
some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days
and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily,
lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our
vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our
urn-like prow.
But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape
winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon
the long, troubled seas that are there ; when the ivory-
tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the
dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver
chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks ; then all
this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place
to sights more dismal than before.
Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted
hither and thither before us ; while thick in our rear flew
the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched
296 MOBY-DICK
on our stays, rows of these birds were seen ; and spite
of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the
hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting,
uninhabited craft ; a thing appointed to desolation, and
therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And
heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black
sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience ; and the great
mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long
sin and suffering it had bred.
Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye ? Rather Cape
Tormentoto, as called of yore ; for long allured by the
perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found
ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty
beings transformed into those fowls and these fish,
seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any
haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon.
But calm, snow-white, and unvarying ; still directing
its fountain of feathers to the sky ; still beckoning us on
from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.
During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though
assuming for the time the almost continual command
of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the
gloomiest reserve ; and more seldom than ever addressed
his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after every-
thing above and aloft has been secured, nothing more
can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale.
Then captain and crew become practical fatalists. So,
with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and
with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours
and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an
occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal
his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven
from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas
that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along
the bulwarks in the waist ; and the better to guard against
THE SPIRIT-SPOUT 297
the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a
sort of bow-line secured to the rail, in which he swung as
in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken ; and
the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax,
day after day tore on through all the swift madness and
gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same
muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean
prevailed ; still in silence the men swung in the bow-lines ;
still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when
wearied nature seemed demanding repose, he would not
seek that repose in his hammock. Never could Starbuck
forget the old man's aspect, when one night going down
into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw
him with closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed
chair ; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from
which he had some time before emerged, still slowly
dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the table
beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and
currents which have previously been spoken of. His
lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand. Though
the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that the
closed eyes were pointed toward the needle of the tell-
tale that swung from a beam in the ceiling. 1
Terrible old man ! thought Starbuck with a shudder,
sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy
purpose.
1 The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because, without going to
the compass at the helm, the captain, while below, can inform himself of
the course of the ship.
CHAPTER LII
THE ALBATROSS
SOUTH-EASTWARD from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts,
a good cruising -ground for right whalemen, a sail loomed
ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly
drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the foremast -head, I
had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in
the far ocean fisheries a whaler at sea, and long absent
from home.
As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached
like the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her
sides, this spectral appearance was traced with long
channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her
rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over
with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild
sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those
three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts,
so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived
nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops
nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathom-
less sea ; and though, when the ship slowly glided close
under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each
other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-
heads of one ship to those of the other ; yet, those for-
lorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed,
said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-
deck hail was being heard from below.
' Ship ahoy ! Have ye seen the White Whale ? '
But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid
THE ALBATROSS 299
bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet to his
mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea ; and
the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make
himself heard without it. Meantime, his ship was still
increasing the distance between. While in various silent
ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observ-
ance of this ominous incident at the first mere mention
of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a
moment paused ; it almost seemed as though he would
have lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the
threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage of his
windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and
knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a
Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed
' Ahoy there ! This is the Pequod, bound round the
world ! Tell them to address all future letters to the
Pacific Ocean ! and this time three years, if I am not at
home, tell them to address them to '
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and
instantly, then, in accordance with their singular ways,
shoals of small harmless fish, that for some days before
had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away
with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves
fore and aft with the stranger's flanks. Though in the
course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before
have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac
man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.
' Swim away from me, do ye ? ' murmured Ahab,
gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in
the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless
sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced.
But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been
holding the ship in the wind to diminish her headway,
he cried out in his old lion voice, ' Up helm !  There is much in that sound to
inspire proud feelings ; but whereto does all that circum-
navigation conduct ? Only through numberless perils
to the very point whence we started, where those that we
left behind secure, were all the time before us.
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing east-
ward we could forever reach new distances, and discover
sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands
of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.
But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in
tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time
or other, swims before all human hearts ; while chasing
such over this round globe, they either lead us on in
barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
CHAPTER LIII
THE GAM
THE ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the
whaler we had spoken was this : the wind and sea be-
tokened storms. But even had this not been the case,
he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded her judging
by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions if so it
had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained
a negative answer to the question he put. For, as it
eventually turned out, he cared not to consort, even for
five minutes, with any stranger captain, except he could
contribute some of that information he so absorbingly
sought. But all this might remain inadequately esti-
mated, were not something said here of the peculiar usages
of whaling-vessels wlfen meeting each other in foreign
seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.
If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York
State, or the equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England ;
if casually encountering each other in such inhospitable
wilds, these twain, for the life of them, cannot well avoid
a mutual salutation ; and stopping for a moment to
interchange the news ; and, perhaps, sitting down for a
while and resting in concert : then, how much more natural
that upon the illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains
of the sea, two whaling-vessels descrying each other at the
ends of the earth off lone Fanning 's Island, or the far
away King's Mills ; how much more natural, I say,
that under such circumstances these ships should not only
interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly
and sociable contact. And especially would this seem to
901
302 MOBY-DICK
be a matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one
seaport, and whose captains, officers, and not a few of the
men are personally known to each other ; and consequently,
have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk about.
For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, per-
haps, has letters on board ; at any rate, she will be sure
to let her have some papers of a date a year or two later
than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files.
And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship
would receive the latest whaling intelligence from the
cruising-ground to which she may be destined, a thing of
the utmost importance to her. And in degree, all this
will hold true concerning whaling-vessels crossing each
other's track on the cruising-ground itself, even though
they are equally long absent from home. For one of them
may have received a transfer of letters from some third,
and now far remote vessel ; and some of those letters
may be for the people of the ship she now meets. Besides,
they would exchange the whaling news, and have an
agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all
the sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar
congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually
shared privations and perils.
Nor would difference of country make any very essential
difference ; that is, so long as both parties speak one lan-
guage, as is the case with Americans and English.
Though, to be sure, from the small number of English
whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when
they do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness
between them ; for your Englishman is rather reserved,
and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing
in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers
sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over
the American whalers ; regarding the long, lean Nan-
tucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort
of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in the English
THE GAM 303
whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say,
seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more
whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years.
But this is a harmless little foible in the English whale-
hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take much to
heart ; probably, because he knows that he has a few
foibles himself.
So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the
sea, the whalers have most reason to be sociable and
they are so. Whereas, some merchant ships crossing
each other's wake in the mid- Atlantic, will oftentimes
pass on without so much as a single word of recognition,
mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace
of dandies in Broadway ; and all the time indulging,
perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other's rig. As
for men-of-war, when they chance to meet at sea, they
first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings,
such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be
much right-down hearty goodwill and brotherly love
about it at all. As touching slave-ships meeting, why, they
are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each
other as soon as possible. And as for pirates, when they
chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is,
' How many skulls ? ' the same way that whalers hail
' How many barrels ? ' And that question once answered,
pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal
villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of
each other's villainous likenesses.
But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hos-
pitable, sociable, free-and-easy whaler ! What does the
whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of
decent weather ? She has a ' Gam,' a thing so utterly
unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the
name even ; and if by chance they should hear of it, they
only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about 'spouters'
and c blubber-boilers,' and such like pretty exclamations.
304 MOBY-DICK
Why it is that all merchant seamen, and also all pirates
and man-of-war's men, and slave-ship sailors, cherish
such a scornful feeling toward whale-ships ; this is a
question it would be hard to answer. Because, in the
case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that
profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It
sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed ; but only
at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in
that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his
superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting
himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that
assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.
But what is a Gam ? You might wear out your index
finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries,
and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained
to that erudition ; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it.
Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for
many years been in constant use among some fifteen
thousand true-born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a
definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon.
With that view, let me learnedly define it.
GAM. NOUN A social meeting of two (or more)
whale-ships, generally on a cruising-ground ; when, after
exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats' crews : the
two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship t
and the two chief mates on the other.
There is another little item about Gamming which must
not be forgotten here. All professions have their own
little peculiarities of detail ; so has the whale-fishery. In
a pirate, man-of-war, or slave-ship, when the captain
is rowed anywhere hi his boat, he always sits in the stern-
sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there,
and often steers himself with a pretty little milliner's
tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the
whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort what-
THE GAM 305
ever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling-
captains were wheeled about the water on castors like
gouty old aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller,
the whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy ; and
therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew must
leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer
is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon
the occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit in,
is pulled off to his visit all standing like a pine-tree. And
often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of
the whole visible world resting on him from the sides of
the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the
importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his
legs. Nor is this any very easy matter ; for in his rear
is the immense projecting steering-oar hitting him now
and then in the small of his back, the after-oar reciprocat-
ing by rapping his knees in front. He is thus completely
wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself
sideways by settling down on his stretched legs ; but a
sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple
him, because length of foundation is nothing without
corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of
two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again,
it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted
eyes, it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain
to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by
catching hold of anything with his hands ; indeed, as
token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally
carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets ; but perhaps
being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them
there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred
instances, well authenticated ones too, where the captain
has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or
two, in a sudden squall, say to seize hold of the nearest
oarsman's hair, and hold on there like grim death.
VOL. i. u
CHAPTER L1V
THE TOWN-HO'S STORY
(As told at the Golden Inn.)
THE Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round
about there, is much like some noted four corners of a
great highway, where you meet more travellers than in
any other part.
It was not very long after speaking the Goney that
another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho? was
encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Poly-
nesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong
news of Moby-Dick. To some the general interest in the
White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance
of the Town-Ho' s story, which seemed obscurely to in-
volve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visi-
tation of one of those so-called judgments of God which
at times are said to overtake some men. This latter
circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments,
forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy
about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain
Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was
unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was
the private property of three confederate white seamen
of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to
Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the
following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep,
1 The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-1
still used by \vhalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
306
THE TOWN-HO'S STORY 307
revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was
wakened he could not well withhold the rest. Neverthe-
less, so potent an influence did this thing have on those
seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of
it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they
governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among
themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Peqiwd's
mainmast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker
thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship,
the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on
lasting record.
For my humour's sake, I shall preserve the style in
which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of
my Spanish friends, one saint's eve, smoking upon the
thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine
cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on
the closer terms with me ; and hence the interluding
questions they occasionally put, and which are duly
answered at the time.
4 Some two years prior to my first learning the events
which I am about rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-
Ho, sperm whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your
Pacific here, not very many days' sail westward from the
eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere
to the northward of the Line. One morning upon hand-
ling the pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed
that she made more water in her hold than common.
They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen.
But the captain, having some unusual reason for believing
that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes, and
therefore being very averse to quit them ; and the leak
not being then considered at all dangerous, though,
indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as
low down as was possible in rather heavy weather ; the
ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working
308 MOBY-DICK
at the pumps at wide and easy intervals ; but no good luck
came ; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet
undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so,
that now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail,
stood away for the nearest harbour among the islands,
there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
4 Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the
commonest chance favoured, he did not at all fear that
his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps
were of the best, and being periodically relieved at them,
those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship
free ; never mind if the leak should double on her. In
truth, well-nigh the whole of this passage being attended
by very prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but
certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without
the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the
brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and
the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman
and desperado from Buffalo.
' " Lakeman ! Buffalo ! Pray, what is a Lakeman,
and where is Buffalo ? " said Don Sebastian, rising in his
swinging mat of grass.
' On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don ; but
I crave your courtesy maybe, you shall soon hear
further of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs
and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large and stout as
any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla ;
this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America,
had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting
impressions popularly connected with the open ocean.
For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-
water seas of ours, Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
Superior, and Michigan, possess an ocean -like expansive-
ness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits ; with many
of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They
THE TOWN-HO'S STORY 309
contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the
Polynesian waters do ; in large part, are shored by two
great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is ; they furnish
long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial
colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks ; ;
here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by
the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw ; they have
heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories ; at intervals
they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red-
painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams ; for
leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered
forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of
kings in Gothic genealogies ; those same woods harbour-
ing wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose
exported furs give robes to Tartar emperors ; they mirror
the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as
Winnebago villages ; they float alike the full-rigged
merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer,
and the beech canoe ; they are swept by Borean and dis-
masting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave ;
they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land,
however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight
ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though
an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-
ocean nurtured ; as much of an audacious mariner as
any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have
laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at
his maternal sea ; though in after life he had long followed
our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific ; yet
was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the
backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn
handled bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man
with some good-hearted traits ; and this Lakeman, a
mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by
inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common
310 MOBY-DICK
decency of human recognition which is the meanest
slave's right ; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been
retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had
proved so thus far ; but Radney was doomed and made
mad, and Steelkilt but, gentlemen, you shall hear.
' It was not more than a day or two at the furthest
after pointing her prow for her island haven, that the
Town-Ho's leak seemed again increasing, but only so as
to require an hour or more at the pumps every day. You
must know that in a settled and civilised ocean like our
Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pump-
ing their whole way across it ; though of a still, sleepy
night, should the officer of the deck happen to forget his
duty in that respect, the probability would be that he
and his shipmates would never again remember it, on
account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor
in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the west-
ward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to
keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even
for a voyage of considerable length ; that is, if it lie along
a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable
retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel
is in some very out-of-the-way part of those waters, some
really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel
a little anxious.
' Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho \ so
when her leak was found gaining once more, there was
in truth some small concern manifested by several of her
company ; especially by Radney the mate. He com-
manded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home
anew, and every way expanded to the breeze. Now this
Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as little
inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching
his own person, as any fearless, unthinking creature on
land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentle-
THE TOWN-HO'S STORY 311
men. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about
the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that
it was only on account of his being a part owner in her.
So when they were working that evening at the pumps,
there was on this head no small gamesomeness slyly going
on among them, as they stood with their feet continually
overflowed by the rippling clear water clear as any
mountain spring, gentlemen that bubbling from the
pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady
spouts at the lee scupper-holes.
4 Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case hi
this conventional world of ours watery or otherwise ;
that when a person placed in command over his fellow-
men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior
in general pride of manhood, straightway against that
man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness ;
and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverise that
subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.
Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all events
Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a
Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasselled
housings of your last viceroy's snorting charger ; and a
brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which
had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son
to Charlemagne's father. But Radney, the mate, was
ugly as a mule ; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious.
He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
' Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at
the pump with the rest, the Lakeman affected not to
notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings.
' " Ay, ay, my merry lads, it 's a lively leak this ;
hold a cannikin, one of ye, and let 's have a taste. By the
Lord, it 's worth bottling ! I tell ye what, men, old Rad's
investment must go for it ! he had best cut away his part
of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-
312 MOBY-DICK
fish only began the job ; he 's come back again with a
gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what
not ; and the whole posse of 'em are now hard at work
cutting and slashing at the bottom ; making improve-
ments, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I 'd tell
him to jump overboard and scatter 'em. They 're play-
ing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he 's a
simple old soul, Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say
the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I
wonder if he 'd give a poor devil like me the model of his
nose."
 " Thunder away at it ! "
" Ay, ay, sir," said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket.
" Lively, boys, lively, now ! " And with that the pump
clanged like fifty fire-engines ; the men tossed their hats
off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs
was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life's
utmost energies.
' Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band,
the Lakeman went forward all panting, and sat himself
down on the windlass ; his face fiery red, his eyes blood-
shot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow. Now
what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed
Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporeally
exasperated state, I know not ; but so it happened.
' Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a