Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  CHAPTER 44

  The Chart

  Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squallthat took place on the night succeeding that wild ratificationof his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a lockerin the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowishsea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table.Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him intentlystudy the various lines and shadings which there met his eye;and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spacesthat before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to pilesof old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasonsand 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 chainsover his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship,and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines uponhis wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himselfwas marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts,some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses uponthe deeply marked chart of his forehead.

  But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitudeof his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts.Almost every night they were brought out; almost every nightsome pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted.For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab wasthreading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the morecertain 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 onesolitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet.But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of alltides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings ofthe 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 approachingto certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon thisor that ground in search of his prey.

  So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the spermwhale'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 ininvariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratorycharts of the sperm whale.*

  *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borneout 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 courseof completion; and portions of it are presented in the circular."This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degreesof latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly througheach 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 monthin every district, and the two others to show the number of daysin 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 theyare called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line withsuch 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 whalebe straight as a surveyor's parallel, and though the lineof advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable,straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these timeshe 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'smast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone.The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadthand along that path, migrating whales may with great confidencebe looked for.

  And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well knownseparate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey;but in crossing the widest expanses of water between those groundshe 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 seemedto entangle his delirious but still methodical scheme.But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the gregarioussperm whales have their regular seasons for particular grounds,yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which hauntedsuch and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turnout to be identically the same with those that were found therethe preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionableinstances 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 formeryear been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelleground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast;yet it did not follow that were the Pequod to visit eitherof those spots at any subsequent corresponding season,she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with someother feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places andocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode.And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his objecthave hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been madeto whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his,ere a particular set time or place were attained, when allpossibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahabfondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty.That particular set time and place were conjoined in the onetechnical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodicallydescried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun,in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in anyone sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most ofthe deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place;there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also wasthat tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had foundthe awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautiouscomprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahabthrew his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would notpermit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning factabove mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes;nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillizehis unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.

  Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginningof the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then couldenable her commander to make the great passage southwards,double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitudearrive 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 complexionof things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-fivedays and nights was before him; an interval which, instead ofimpatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seasfar remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn uphis 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 windbut the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the deviouszig-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 broadboundless 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 thoroughfaresof Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow ofMoby 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 wouldthrow 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 recoverhis strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that manendure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloodynails in his palms.

  Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerablyvivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughtsthrough the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies,and whirled them round and 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 himheaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him,from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiendsbeckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himselfyawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship;and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as thoughescaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead ofbeing the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or frightat his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity.For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfasthunter 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 thefrantic 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 itmust have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughtsand fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheerinveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kindof self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimlylive 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 whatseemed 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 verycreature he creates.