Moby Dick; Or, The Whale
Page 29
CHAPTER 28
Ahab
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatcheswas seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each otherat the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary,they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only theysometimes issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory,that after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously.Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hithertounseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacredretreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below,I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible;for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain,now in the seclusion of the sea became almost a perturbation.This was strangely heightened at times by the ragged Elijah'sdiabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me,with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of.But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moodsI was almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalitiesof that outlandish prophet of the wharves. But whateverit was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness--to call it so--which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship,it seemed against all warranty to cherish such emotions.For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than anyof the tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experienceshad made me acquainted with, still I ascribed this--and rightlyascribed it--to the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wildScandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked.But it was especially the aspect of the three chief officersof the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculatedto allay these colorless misgivings, and induce confidenceand cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in hisown different way, could not readily be found, and they wereevery one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder,a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shotfrom out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather,though all the time running away from it to the southward;and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed,gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerableweather behind us. It was one of those less lowering,but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition,when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the waterwith a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity,that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch,so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail,foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension;Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him,nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut awayfrom the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted allthe limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particlefrom their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form,seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould,like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from amonghis grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawnyscorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing,you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish.It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight,lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearinglydarts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels andgrooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off intothe soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scarleft by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage littleor no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates.But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew,superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty yearsold did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him,not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strifeat sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived,by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had neverere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the oldsea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly investedthis old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment.So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he saidthat if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered--then, whoever shoulddo that last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on himfrom crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me,and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few momentsI hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimnesswas owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood.It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea beenfashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw."Aye, he was dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Indian once;"but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast withoutcoming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em."
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained.Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty closeto the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about halfan inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole;one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect,looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow.There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate,unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke;nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all theirminutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy,if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubledmaster-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stoodbefore them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the namelessregal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew;either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had;or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, beganto grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse;as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintrybleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by,it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air;but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the atlast sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast.But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising;nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fullycompetent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself,to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval,the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as everall clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant,holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood.For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip hometo the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, mostthunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts,to welcome such gladhearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end,a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air.More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in anyother man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
CHAPTER 29
Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb