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CHAPTER 41

Moby Dick.


I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the
rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted,
and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my
soul.  A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's
quenchless feud seemed mine.  With greedy ears I learned the history
of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken
our oaths of violence and revenge.

For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen.  But not all of them knew of
his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen
him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given
battle to him, was small indeed.  For, owing to the large number of
whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the
entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their
quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole
twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling
sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the
irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other
circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread
through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special
individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick.  It was hardly to be
doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such
or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of
uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great
mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some
minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in
question must have been no other than Moby Dick.  Yet as of late the
Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent
instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly
gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part,
were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it
were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the
individual cause.  In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter
between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by
chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had
every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him,
as for any other whale of that species.  But at length, such
calamities did ensue in these assaults--not restricted to sprained
wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations--but fatal
to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses,
all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those
things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to
whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.

Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the
more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters.  For not
only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all
surprising terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birth to its
fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma,
wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them
to cling to.  And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so
the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the
wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate
there.  For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that
ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all
sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact
with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face
they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle
to them.  Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a
thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to
any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of
the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a
calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending
to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.

No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit
over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale
did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid
hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies,
which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from
anything that visibly appears.  So that in many cases such a panic
did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had
heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to
encounter the perils of his jaw.

But there were still other and more vital practical influences at
work.  Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the
Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the
leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body.  There
are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous
enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would
perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or
timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there
are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not
sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered
the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is
restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;
seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish
fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern
whaling.  Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm
Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those
prows which stem him.

And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary
times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book
naturalists--Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only
to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to
be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human
blood.  Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or
almost similar impressions effaced.  For in his Natural History, the
Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish
(sharks included) are "struck with the most lively terrors," and
"often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against
the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death."  And
however the general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports
as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty
item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some
vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.

So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few
of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier
days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to
induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this
new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other
leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance
at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man.
That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick
eternity.  On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may
be consulted.

Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things
were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number
who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the
specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious
accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle
if offered.

One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be
linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously
inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous;
that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one
and the same instant of time.

Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit
altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability.  For
as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been
divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of
the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part,
unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated
the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them,
especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a
great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the
most widely distant points.

It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships,
and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by
Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the
Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted
in the Greenland seas.  Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of
these instances it has been declared that the interval of time
between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days.
Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the
Nor' West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to
the whale.  So that here, in the real living experience of living
men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello
mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in
which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still
more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose
waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an
underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully
equalled by the realities of the whalemen.

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and
knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had
escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some
whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring
Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but
ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in
his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should
ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a
ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of
leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.

But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough
in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to
strike the imagination with unwonted power.  For, it was not so much
his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm
whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a peculiar snow-white
wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump.  These were
his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless,
uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to
those who knew him.

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with
the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his
distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally
justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through
a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all
spangled with golden gleamings.

Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet
his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural
terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to
specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his
assaults.  More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of
dismay than perhaps aught else.  For, when swimming before his
exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had
several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down
upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back
in consternation to their ship.

Already several fatalities had attended his chase.  But though
similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means
unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White
Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or
death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been
inflicted by an unintelligent agent.

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds
of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of
chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out
of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene,
exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in
the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow,
had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly
seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the
whale.  That captain was Ahab.  And then it was, that suddenly
sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had
reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.  No
turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with
more seeming malice.  Small reason was there to doubt, then, that
ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild
vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his
frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all
his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual
exasperations.  The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac
incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel
eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and
half a lung.  That intangible malignity which has been from the
beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe
one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east
reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship
it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred
white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it.  All that
most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all
truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the
brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to
crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable
in Moby Dick.  He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all
the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and
then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's
shell upon it.

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise
at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment.  Then, in darting at
the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden,
passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that
tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but
nothing more.  Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards
home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay
stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that
dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and
gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.
That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter,
that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the
fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic;
and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in
his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium,
that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he
sailed, raving in his hammock.  In a strait-jacket, he swung to the
mad rockings of the gales.  And, when running into more sufferable
latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the
tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium
seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth
from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he
bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm
orders once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was
now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on.  Human
madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing.  When you
think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still
subtler form.  Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly
contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows
narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge.  But, as in
his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had
been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great
natural intellect had perished.  That before living agent, now became
the living instrument.  If such a furious trope may stand, his
special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned
all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from
having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a
thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear
upon any one reasonable object.

This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains
unhinted.  But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is
profound.  Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked
Hotel de Cluny where we here stand--however grand and wonderful, now
quit it;--and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast
Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of
man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits
in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned
on torsoes!  So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that
captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his
frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages.  Wind ye down there, ye
prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king!  A family
likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from
your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.

Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my
means are sane, my motive and my object mad.  Yet without power to
kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind
he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still.  But that thing of
his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his
will determinate.  Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that
dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no
Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and
that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken
him.

The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly
ascribed to a kindred cause.  And so too, all the added moodiness
which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on
the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow.  Nor is it so very
unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling
voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of
that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those
very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a
pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales.
Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting
fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would
seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the
most appalling of all brutes.  Or, if for any reason thought to be
corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem
superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the
attack.  But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad
secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had
purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and
all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale.  Had any one of his
old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in
him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have
wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man!  They were bent on
profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the
mint.  He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural
revenge.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with
curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too,
chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and
cannibals--morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere
unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invunerable
jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading
mediocrity in Flask.  Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially
picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his
monomaniac revenge.  How it was that they so aboundingly responded to
the old man's ire--by what evil magic their souls were possessed,
that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much
their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be--what the
White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings,
also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding
great demon of the seas of life,--all this to explain, would be to
dive deeper than Ishmael can go.  The subterranean miner that works
in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever
shifting, muffled sound of his pick?  Who does not feel the
irresistible arm drag?  What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand
still?  For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and
the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see
naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.



CHAPTER 42

The Whiteness of The Whale.


What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he
was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick,
which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm,
there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror
concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely
overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable
was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.
It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.
But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim,
random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be
naught.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty,
as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way
recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the
barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the
White Elephants" above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of
dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white
quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the
one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire,
Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour
the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to
the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over
every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been
even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone
marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and
symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching,
noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though
among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum
was the deepest pledge of honour; though in many climes, whiteness
typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and
contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by
milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most
august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine
spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white
forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek
mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white
bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of
the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their
theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest
envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of
their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for
white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their
sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and
though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially
employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the
Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the
four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white
throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for
all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and
honourable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the
innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul
than that redness which affrights in blood.

This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness,
when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any
object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest
bounds.  Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of
the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the
transcendent horrors they are?  That ghastly whiteness it is which
imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than
terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect.  So that not the
fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as
the white-shrouded bear or shark.*


*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him
who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the
whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable
hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened
hideousness, it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that
the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in
the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing
together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear
frightens us with so unnatural a contrast.  But even assuming all
this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not
have that intensified terror.

As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in
that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies
with the same quality in the Polar quadruped.  This peculiarity is
most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that
fish.  The Romish mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam"
(eternal rest), whence REQUIEM denominating the mass itself, and any
other funeral music.  Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness
of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the
French call him REQUIN.


Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
imaginations?  Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great,
unflattering laureate, Nature.*


*I remember the first albatross I ever saw.  It was during a
prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas.  From my
forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there,
dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of
unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime.  At
intervals, it arched forth its vast 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 Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its
wings so wide, and in those for ever 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! never had
heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is
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
possibility 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 grey
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!


Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of
the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,
large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a
thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage.  He was the
elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those
days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies.  At
their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which
every evening leads on the hosts of light.  The flashing cascade of
his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings
more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished
him.  A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen,
western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters
revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic
as a god, bluff-browed 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
substantive 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 heightens the effect
of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of
their faction, the desperate 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, symbolize whatever grand or gracious
thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest
idealized 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 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, down-cast and hooded
with new-fallen snow?  Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant
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
neighbors--the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody?  And those sublimer
towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar
moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness 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 the 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 unsubstantial 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?

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 can'st 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 for ever 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 phenomenon 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 approaching 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; 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
snowhowdahed 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 comparative
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 that 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 phrensies of affright?  There is no remembrance 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 experience 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, the instinct of the
knowledge of the demonism in 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 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 intensifying 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 of colour; 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 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 subtile deceits, not actually inherent 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, for ever 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 43

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 neighbor, a
Cholo, the words above.

"Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"

"Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean?"

"There it is again--under the hatches--don't you hear it--a cough--it
sounded like a cough."

"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!"

"Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears."

"Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of the old
Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket;
you're the chap."

"Grin away; we'll 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 44

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 in chains over
his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for
ever 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 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 any one 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 driftings 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 periodicalness 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.*


*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 horizontally 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."


Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another,
the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct--say, rather,
secret intelligence from the Deity--mostly swim in VEINS, as they are
called; continuing 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 the 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 solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm
whales.  So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, 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 way-side,
antecedent, 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 possibility 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
periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, 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 vigilance 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 tranquillize 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 endeavor then could enable her
commander to make the great passage southwards, 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 premature hour of the Pequod's sailing
had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this
very complexion of things.  Because, an interval of three hundred and
sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval 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 Simoon, 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 pondering 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 with one unachieved revengeful desire.  He sleeps
with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his
palms.

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 phrensies, and
whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till
the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and
when, as 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 unsuppressable 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 characterizing
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 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.  Therefore, 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
for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

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