Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
the White Whale first. There she blows! there she blows!—there
she blows! There again!—there again!” he cried, in long-drawn,
lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of
the whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails! Down
top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay
on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So;
steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All
ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck;
lower, lower,—quick, quicker!” and he slid through the air to the deck.
“He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away from
us; cannot have seen the ship yet.”
“Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up!
Shiver her!—shiver her! So; well that! Boats, boats!”
Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails
set—all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to
leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up
Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.
Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the
sea; but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the
ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves;
seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless
hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire
dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an
isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest,
fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the
slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft
Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad,
milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade;
and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving
valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and
danced by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of
hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate with their
fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull
of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected
from the white whale’s back; and at intervals one of the cloud of
soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over
the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail
feathers streaming like pennons.
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested
the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering
eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness,
rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that
great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so
divinely swam.
On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once
leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale
shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who
namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured
to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all
who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way
thou may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea,
among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture,
Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors
of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of
his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water;
for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like
Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes
in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of
sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls
longingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.
With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift,
the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.
“An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he gazed
beyond the whale’s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing
vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed
whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze
now freshened; the sea began to swell.
“The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.
In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were
now all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began
fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with
joyous, expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab
could discover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and
down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger
than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying
as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two
long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the
undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled
jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the
sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored
marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab
whirled the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling
upon Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and
seizing Perth’s harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and
stand by to stern.
Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis,
its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while yet
under water. But as if perceiving this strategem, Moby Dick, with
that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted
himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head
lengthwise beneath the boat.
Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled
for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner
of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within
his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high
up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The
bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of
Ahab’s head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White
Whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse.
With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the
tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s heads to gain the
uttermost stern.
And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from
his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at
from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and
while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis
impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with
this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and
helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized
the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from
its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the
frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like
an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in
twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the
two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the
crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold
fast to the oars to lash them across.
At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first
to perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head,
a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand
had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only
slipping further into the whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as
it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him
out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the
sea.
Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in
the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled
body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or
more feet out of the water—the now rising swells, with all their
confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing
their shivered spray still higher into the air.[22] So, in a gale,
the but half baffled Channel billows only recoil from the base of the
Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its summit with their scud.
[22] This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives
its designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that
preliminary up-and-down poise of the whale-lance, in the
exercise called pitchpoling, previously described. By this
motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view
whatever objects may be encircling him.
But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly
round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his
vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more
deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him,
as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus’s elephants
in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of
the whale’s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,—though
he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as
that; helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the
least chance shock might burst. From the boat’s fragmentary stern,
Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the
other drifting end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for
them to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White
Whale’s aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles
he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the
other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull
into the eddy to strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant
destruction of the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that
case could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then,
they remained on the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had
now become the old man’s head.
Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship’s
mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;
and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her;—“Sail on
the”—but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and
whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing
to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,—“Sail on the whale!—Drive him
off!”
The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle,
she effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly
swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.
Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white
brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily
strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a
time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one trodden
under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from
him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.