Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and moredid I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul.A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchlessfeud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of thatmurderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oathsof violence and revenge.

  For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostlyfrequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of themknew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively,had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet hadactually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed.For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderlyway they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference,many of them adventurously pushing their quest alongsolitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonthor more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sailof any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage;the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these,with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructedthe spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the specialindividualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardlyto be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered,at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian,a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale,after doing great mischief to his assailants, has completelyescaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption,I say, that the whale in question must have been no other thanMoby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had beenmarked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity,cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was,that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick;such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribethe peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perilsof the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahaband the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.

  And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale,by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thingthey had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlesslylowered for him, as for any other whale of that species.But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults--not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs,or devouring amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality;those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and pilingtheir terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far toshake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the storyof the White Whale had eventually come.

  Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and stillthe more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters.For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very bodyof all surprising terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birthto its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma,wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for themto cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter,so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life,in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimescirculate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexemptfrom that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors;but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly broughtinto contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea;face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw,give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that thoughyou sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you wouldnot come to any chiselled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneaththat part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing toosuch a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influencesall tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transitover the wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whaledid in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies,which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed fromanything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panicdid he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least,had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willingto encounter the perils of his jaw.

  But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of theSperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other speciesof the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body.There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent andcourageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale,would perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency,or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate,there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nationsnot sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilelyencountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathanis restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish firesideinterest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling.Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whaleanywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prowswhich stem him.

  And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendarytimes thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists--Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only to bea consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to beso incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almostsimilar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History,the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish(sharks included) are "struck with the most lively terrors,"and "often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves againstthe rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death."And however the general experiences in the fishery may amendsuch reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to thebloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is,in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the mindsof the hunters.

  So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him,not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick,the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimeshard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perilsof this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that althoughother leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and pointlances at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man.That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity.On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may be consulted.

  Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these thingswere ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who,chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specificdetails of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompanimentswere sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.

  One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linkedwith the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined,was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he hadactually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the sameinstant of time.

  Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceitaltogether without some faint show of superstitious probability.For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yetbeen divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden waysof the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part,unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originatedthe most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them,especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after soundingto a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftnessto the most widely distant points.

  It is a thing well known to both
American and Englishwhale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritativerecord years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have beencaptured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have beenfound the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas.Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it hasbeen declared that the interval of time between the two assaultscould not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference,it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage,so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale.So that here, in the real living experience of living men,the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountainin Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in whichthe wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that stillmore wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse(whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Landby an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almostfully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.

  Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these;and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whalehad escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise thatsome whalemen should go still further in their superstitions;declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal(for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though grovesof spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swimaway unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spoutthick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception;for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away,his unsullied jet would once more be seen.

  But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enoughin the earthly make and incontestable character of the monsterto strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was notso much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him fromother sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a peculiarsnow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump.These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby,even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity,at a long distance, to those who knew him.

  The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted,and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end,he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale;a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect,when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea,leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangledwith golden gleamings.

  Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet hisdeformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror,as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according tospecific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults.More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay thanperhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers,with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been knownto turn around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave theirboats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.

  Already several fatalities had attended his chase.But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore,were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances,such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity,that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not whollyregarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.

  Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the mindsof his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chipsof chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swamout of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene,exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

  His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling inthe eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow,had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe,blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep lifeof the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenlysweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick hadreaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote himwith more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then,that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wildvindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in hisfrantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only allhis bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of allthose 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 whosedominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds;which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriouslytransferring 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 demonismsof life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified,and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale'swhite hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his wholerace from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar,he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

  It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instantrise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment.Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had butgiven loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity;and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probablybut felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and forlong months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretchedtogether in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary,howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashedsoul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter,that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certainfrom the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he wasa raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vitalstrength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreoverintensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lacehim fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock.In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales.And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship,with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics,and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left behindhim with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his darkden into the blessed light and air; even then, when he borethat firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calmorders once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madnesswas now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on.Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing.When you think it fled, it may have but become transfiguredinto some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not,but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that nobleNorthman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge.But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab'sbroad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness,not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished.That before living agent, now became the living instrument.If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormedhis general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentredcannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having losthis strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousandfold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear uponany one reasonable object.

  This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel deCluny where we here stand--however grand and wonderful, now quit it;--and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman hallsof Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man's upper earth,his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits
in bearded state;an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes!So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king;so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen browthe piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder,sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye,he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sireonly will the old State-secret come.

  Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely;all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact;he likewise knew that to mankind he did now long dissemble;in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling wasonly subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling,that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketerthought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that tothe quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.

  The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewisepopularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the addedmoodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailingin the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow.Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitnessfor another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms,the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclinedto harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he wasall the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuitso full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales.Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed,unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one,could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his ironand lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes.Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitatedfor that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competentto cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack.But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the madsecret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab hadpurposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only andall-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any oneof his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what waslurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteoussouls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man!They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counteddown in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious,immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

  Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing withcurses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew,too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways,and cannibals--morally enfeebled also, by the incompetenceof mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck,the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessnessin Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew,so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by someinfernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the oldman's ire--by what evil magic their souls were possessed,that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whaleas much their insufferable foe as his; how all this cameto be--what the White Whale was to them, or how to theirunconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way,he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,--all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go.The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tellwhither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled soundof his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag?What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one,I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place;but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could seenaught in that brute but the deadliest ill.