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.[6]
[6] 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 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 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 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 color, 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.