Queequeg, and Tashtego, a Gayhead Indian from the Vineyard, and Daggoo,
a gigantic, coal-black negro savage, with a lion-like tread, moving
about the deck in all the pomp of his six feet five in his socks. “A
white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of
a fortress.” As for the crew itself, they were not merely islanders,
usually; they were Isolatoes, each man living on a separate continent
of his own. Above them all towers Captain Ahab. The first time he
appears on deck, a foreboding shiver runs over Ishmael. “Reality outran
apprehension.... He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the
fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.”
One of Ahab’s legs has been snapped off by a whale: he stands on a
stump made of whale ivory, with a crucifixion in his face, in all the
nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. “A Khan of the
plank and a king of the sea and a great Lord of Leviathans was Ahab.”
In his presence, his mates shrivel and crumple up, like a paper in a
fire. Compared with Ahab’s titanic pride, their decent professional
self-respect is nothing. There is madness in that pride, the madness of
a tormented soul.
What goads Ahab? What goads him is the memory of his encounter with
that white whale, Moby-Dick, who, in malice or play or accidental
defence, had bitten off Ahab’s leg and left him humiliated and
crippled, for long months of days and weeks, stretched in one
hammock, his torn body and gashed soul bleeding into one another,
and so interfusing, making him mad.... “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 the 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
reverence 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 demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were
visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He
piled up on 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.”
Ahab assembles his crew, and after working them up with a reminder of
their common duties, to sing out, to lower away, to get a dead whale
or a stove boat, he nails a gold-piece to the main mast and in a high,
raised voice exclaims: “Who ever of ye raises me a white-headed whale
with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw ... shall have this gold ounce.”
Daggoo recognizes Moby-Dick. Ahab, surprised, confesses his past
humiliation and announces his purpose. “This is what we have shipped
for, men! to chase the white whale on both sides of the land, and over
all sides of the earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out!”
The crew is seized with Captain Ahab’s wild purpose. Starbuck alone,
prudent, thoughtful, pious, remonstrates with his captain. “‘Vengeance
on a dumb brute!’ cries Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest
instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems
blasphemous.’” And Ahab answers:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each
event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but
still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from
behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the
mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through
the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.
Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me;
he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable
malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is what I chiefly hate;
and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will
wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man: I’d strike
the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I
the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealously
presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair
play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.”
Ahab pledges his crew; they drink and swear death to Moby-Dick. Ahab
withdraws to his cabin, to contemplate his own madness, maddened:
there he defies the great gods themselves, mere cricket players and
pugilists. “I will not say as schoolboys do to their bullies--Take
some one of your size: don’t pommel _me_! No, ye’ve knocked me down,
and I am up again, but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind
your cotton bags!... Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can
swerve me.” The crew, lightened by drink, burst into revelry: they jig
and frolic and dream about girls. Ishmael’s shouts go up with the rest:
his oath had been welded to theirs; a wild mystical feeling is in him:
Ahab’s quenchless feud seems his. With greedy ears he learns the story
of the monster against whom he and his shipmates have taken the oath of
Ahab’s revenge.
4
And now comes Moby-Dick. In all the sperm whale fishery there is
no whale more prodigious in magnitude or malignity. All whales are
dangerous to hunt with harpoon and spear in a whale-boat; but Moby-Dick
multiplies the vicissitudes of the chase: he turns on his pursuers,
and again and again escapes them, with an apparently immortal destiny,
however accurately the harpoons may have been planted in his side, and
however strong the line that makes him fast. A wrinkled forehead, a
high white hump, and a streaked and marbled body add to his formidable
size: as sperm whales are more dangerous than Right or Greenland
whales, so Moby-Dick is more terrifying than the usual sperm whale. The
rumours about Moby-Dick raise to enormous dimensions what was already
great enough in actuality; but the very whiteness of the whale adds
something more.
While white, says Melville, has a hundred fine mythological allusions,
conveying some special virtue or perfection to the elephant of Siam or
the Imperial charger; while the white wampum of the red man was the
deepest pledge of honour, and the most august of religions had made of
it a symbol of divine spotlessness and power--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 a panic to the soul than that redness which
affrights in blood. The whiteness of the white shark, the whiteness
of the white squall in southern seas, the terror of white breakers
when a ship is skirting the coast--all these things gain an element
of bleak terror from their cold hue. White is the terrible, elemental
truth: all warmer hues and colours are but laid on from without: nature
paints like a harlot, and beneath these happy colours is the ghastly
white uniformity of the charnel-house. “Pondering all this, the palsied
universe lies before us like a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured or 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?”
5
Night and day Ahab’s mind broods over Moby-Dick. In his cabin he
pores over his charts, endeavouring to follow the seasonal tracks of
Moby-Dick from one probable feeding-ground to another; but, as he knows
his crew have common daily appetites, and the permanent constitution
of the manufactured man is sordidness, although he may occasionally be
fired into knight-errantry, on the first raising of a whale, the Pequod
goes in pursuit.
In his virgin encounter with the whale, under the “prudent” Starbuck,
Ishmael finds himself in a swamped boat, riding through the night in
the hope of being picked up in the morning; and on top of the long
vigil, the little whale-boat, lost in the mist, is run down by the
Pequod, and all the cold, drenched hands take to the water for their
lives. It is all in a day’s work. When terror and anguish become
unbearable, what seems most momentous becomes part of a general joke.
This humour of desperation colours and effervesces through all the
bitter potions that the tale itself offers: it does not remove the
bitterness, but, as sweet and bitter may mingle in the same draught,
it offers a counter-taste: and it keeps the most frenzied blackness
from having the unrelieved and inhuman quality of a maniac’s delirium.
The men who face death and danger most constantly, the sailor, the
miner, the soldier, the lonely pioneer, develop this shrug and grin
at the very moment of encountering death--and in the whale fishery,
these moments are plentiful. Little Pip, the negro, pops out of his
boat in fright, and is left behind in the heat of the chase, and,
though finally rescued, is turned into a blank idiot: Tashtego, ladling
out the fragrant sperm from the dead whale’s head, falls into it,
the entire mass drops into the sea, and the Indian is rescued only
by a feat of almost obstetrical skill: any hour, one may drop from a
lookout station or get tangled in the whale-line itself, as the whale
races with it, and perish in the coils. But what of it? “All men
live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their
necks; but it is only in the swift, subtle turns of death that mortals
realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be
a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart
feel one whit more of terror than though seated before your evening
fire with a poker and not a harpoon by your side.”
As the pursuit of the whale goes on, as the Pequod encounters the
sperm whale and the right whale, and kills them, fastens them to its
side, and dismantles their corpses, getting sperm oil from one and
whalebone from the other, as they watch the spout of the whale from
the distance, or see, at midnight, an apparition of a spout, perhaps
a portent, perhaps jetting from the head of Moby-Dick himself: as
they sample the whale as food, as they render down its blubber into
oil, as they watch the sharks thrust their slithering upturned mouths
at the carcass, as they squeeze the lumps of cold, solidified fat
back into liquid; as all the events and preparations take place, the
whale finally emerges as a complete body. What the whale is to the
whaleman and what he is to the artist; what he is to the naturalist
and what he is to the merchant; and what he is in the chase--and
in the museum--and in human history--all these things come forth.
There is not one method of knowledge: every manifestation in human
experience contributes to the reality of the whale itself. No one
lives to himself, or comprehends himself, except by establishing
relationships with that which is outside himself: man gives to the
whale something that the creature is incapable of giving back: his
own needs, his own desires, his own understanding. Melville no more
forgets the aesthetics of whaling than he forgets the economics. He is
a free spirit: he explores everything, embraces everything, reports on
everything. We must not confuse Moby-Dick with the monomaniac captain
who belongs to the fable: the book itself has a hundred sides, and
is the precise opposite of that narrow quest. For immediate action,
people forget many of these relations: the artist or the scientist is
just as narrow in his interests as Flask, just as single-minded in his
pursuit as Ahab. But Melville is neither Flask nor Ahab nor artist nor
scientist: he philosophizes out of a completer experience and a more
coherent consciousness than any of these partial figures. The whale is
no phantom symbol; and this stage is no pasteboard stage. If this is
not the universe, the full universe, that Melville embodies under these
symbols, no one in our time has had inkling of a fuller one. Moby-Dick
is an imaginative synthesis; and every aspect of reality belongs to it,
one plane modifying the other and creating the modelled whole.
6
The ship sails on: she meets other ships and the crews mingle in a
conversation or “gam.” But Ahab restlessly drives on towards his
ultimate goal: to each captain his first question is--“Hast seen the
White Whale?”
Passing through the straits of Sunda, which divide Sumatra from Java,
the Pequod spies great semi-circles of whale-jets sparkling on the
horizon: she spreads sails after the Grand Armada; and presently, the
boats are in the midst of it: among sires and cows and calves, the big
and the little, spouting, playing, plunging, frantically mobbing the
whale-boat, a tumult of power and virile energy on the outskirts of
the Armada, but safe within the circle, calm and bliss, dalliance and
delight, calves milking their mothers, and amorous bulls warm-bloodedly
a-wenching. The boats, luckily, get out of this jam and tumult without
damage; but while they set their pennoned poles on many, only one of
the drugged whales is captured. This is but one of a score of scenes
in Moby-Dick that remain in the memory like a personal experience: one
exclaims with Ishmael: I was one of that crew, I pulled in that boat,
I floundered around in those waters. A thousand things happen in life
with less vividness and impact than they make in these printed pages:
the Straits of Sunda are nearer than the neighbouring street.
Shortly after this encounter, the chase grows hotter: the Pequod
meets the Samuel Enderby of London, and the Samuel Enderby has met
Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab cannot contain himself: his gam with the
English captain ends abruptly, and, with the blood pounding in his
veins, he springs back to the ship--so precipitately that his ivory
leg is shattered and the carpenter must fit him with a new one. The
indignity increases Ahab’s impatient pride: “Here I am,” he exclaims,
“proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for
a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-debtedness which will
not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the
whole world’s books.” Ahab causes a new harpoon head to be forged: he
mans his own boat with the mysterious figures that had crept on the
Pequod in the twilight of the morning they left Nantucket, Orientals,
led by a Parsee, Fedallah. But at every move, Ahab stumbles on some
new obstruction, or delay; and his words become more frenzied, while
the effort of his will leaves a white scar of terror wherever his
lightnings momentarily strike. When the Bachelor, homeward bound, full
of oil, seeks to detain the Pequod for a friendly parley, Ahab leaves
it behind with a curse.
Against the under-chorus of Stubb’s common sense and Starbuck’s prudent
humanity, Ahab’s shrieks mount more wildly: he even throws the quadrant
overboard, to steer by compass, fathom-line, and dead reckoning. In the
last extremity of pursuit, in utter arrogance of purpose, he thrusts
aside the quadrant as the foolish toy and baby’s plaything of haughty
admirals and commodores and captains: in the final issue of life and
death, science is impotent: it can but tell where the ship is on the
planet, but not where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be
tomorrow noon. Now the Pequod must ride out a typhoon; and in the midst
of the electric storm, three corposants, tapers of white flame, appear
on the three lightning-rods of the masts. For Ahab, his purpose is only
beating nearer its goal: instead of bowing to the blind forces around
him, the storm, the sea, the lightning, the whale, his resolution is
more deeply fortified. Note his words: there are none more sudden and
final with meaning in the whole book.
“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that
to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit,
and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love
nor reverence will thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but
kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy
speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life
will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst
of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but
a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I
earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal
rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of
love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere
supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted
worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. O thou
clear spirit, of the fire thou madest me, and like a true child of
fire, I breathe it back to thee.”
Everything conspires against Ahab’s deed: the compass needle goes
wrong: the log and line, hitherto seldom used, snap off when they are
heaved: a man is lost overboard and the life-buoy that was sent over
after him springs a leak and goes down with him; finally, another
whaler, the Rachel, that has lost a boat’s crew with the captain’s son
aboard, seeks to stay Ahab, so that the Pequod may help in the search:
Ahab refuses this call of humanity. One being alone almost defeats
Ahab, not Starbuck, who, rifle in hand, is tempted to kill Ahab and
end his crazy pursuit, but Pip, the little Negro idiot, whose devotion
rises as the isolation of Ahab grows. Ahab flees from him: his love,
faith, devotion move him from his purpose as no disasters or portents
have hitherto moved him. “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s
purpose keels up in him,” Ahab admonishes himself. The boy is black,
and an outcast. The black is an idiot, and so doubly an outcast. From
one as mad and isolated as himself, Ahab receives love, a love deep
as his own sense of pride and power, and he is almost unmanned by it.
“Spite of a million villains,” says Ahab, “this makes me a bigot in the
fadeless fidelity of man.” But love has come too late: the chase goes
on.
As Ahab nears Moby-Dick his old humanity comes back to him. He sees his
own wife and child in Starbuck’s eye, regrets her perpetual widowhood,
and is lenient to Starbuck’s own desire to return to his hearth. No:
more: Ahab sees his wasted years: the desolation of their solitude: the
slavery of a lonely command: the dry nourishment this isolated soul
has fed upon--forty years of waste and forty years of folly since, as
a lad of eighteen, on a mild sweet day, he struck his first whale,
a boy-harpooner of eighteen. How is it that in spite of all this he
pursues his purpose? What keeps him pushing and crowding himself all
the time, recklessly making himself ready to do what in his own nature
he had no desire to accomplish?
The mild day and the steel-blue sky and the smell of the wind, as if
the haymakers had been mowing grass on the slopes of the Andes--this
day is scarcely over before Ahab detects a whale in the wind; and at
next daybreak, Ahab himself raises the hump-like snow-head--Moby-Dick.
In the smoother ocean, Moby-Dick seems as mild as the day, gliding with
scarcely a ripple through the water, his wrenched, hideous jaw beneath
the surface. Becoming aware of the chase, he sounds--only to return
with open jaws beneath the bottom of Ahab’s boat, and, after playing
with it as a cat with a mouse, he bites it in twain. The Pequod sails
on the whale and drives him off. Ahab and his crew are rescued, Ahab
with bloodshot blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles,
manly wails arising from some far inland part of his being, as desolate
as sounds from out ravines.
The second day comes, and the boats lower again. Moby-Dick takes the
initiative and plunges immediately towards the boats with open jaws
and lashing tail, warping and manoeuvring in such a fashion that the
harpoons thrust into him become tangled and the lines shortened: again
the whale dives, and again he rises, this time throwing Ahab’s boat
topsy-turvy in the air. Ahab’s ivory leg is snapped off; but again
he is rescued; and a third day opens. At noon, Ahab, keeping lookout
himself, and doubling on his tracks, sights the whale, making towards
him in the distance. Again the calm and beauty of the day wake some old
humanity in Ahab; but he is churned onward by his purpose.
“Some men die at ebb-tide; some at low water; some at the full of
the flood;--I feel like a billow that’s all one crested comb. I am
old;--shake hands with me, man,” says Ahab to his first mate.
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; but Starbuck’s manly tears cannot
restrain Ahab’s order to lower away in pursuit, nor can the sharks
that crowd around the boat and snap maliciously at the oars, nor can
the hawk that tears at the red flag running on the main truck; nothing
diverts him. The whale sounds; when he rises, tormented by a mass of
harpoons and lines, it is as if a submerged iceberg rose suddenly to
the surface, the waters flash like a heap of fountains, break in a
shower of flakes, and leave the circling surface creamed like new milk
round the marble trunk of the whale. Moby-Dick, churning his tail among
the boats, dashes in the bows of the mate’s boat: Ahab, unscathed,
orders them back to the ship, while he keeps to the hunt. The whale,
fagged or malicious, permits Ahab to catch up with him: Ahab darts iron
and curse into his flanks; but the line snaps loose, and the whale
turns upon the Pequod herself, and bears down on her, his solid white
buttress of a forehead meeting and shivering the planks. The ship
settles. Ahab, cut off from the ship, makes one last thrust at the
whale; the line spins out and runs foul, and Ahab, stooping to unsnarl
it, is caught round the neck and shot out of the boat, fulfilling the
prophecy of Fedallah, who has been drowned before him. The rest of the
crew turns towards the Pequod; only its masts remain above the water;
and as it goes down, they are carried in the suction. As its final spar
settles in the water, a red arm and hammer hover back upliftedly in
the air, in the act of nailing the flag faster to the subsiding spar.
A sky-hawk, pecking at the flag, intercepts the hammer with his wing;
and in the death-grasp of Tashtego, the pinioned bird of heaven, with
shrieks, his form folded in Ahab’s flag, is dragged into the water:
the boat would not sink to hell until she had carried a living part of
heaven with her, and helmeted herself with it.
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen
white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the
great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
7