Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
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.
AHAB’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 jeopardize 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 difficulties; 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.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of
his entering a boat in certain comparatively 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 measures 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
whaleboats 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 particularly his solicitude in having
an extra coat of sheathing 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 horizontal 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 semi-circular 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 almost everybody supposed that this
particular preparative 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
civilized, 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 unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental
isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial,
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, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other
as real phantoms, 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 Rio 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 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 main-mast 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 whaleman 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, companions in one sky. But
when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive
nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence,
his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet,
every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some 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 stunsail 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, the
other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched
Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two
different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively
echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a
coffin-tap. 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 disappeared 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 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 for ever
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 unnearable 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 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