Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest as silently following.

  Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so singularly unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean—nay! on the whole round globe—yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his only food. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the giant squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding one hundred fifty and even two hundred feet in length! Bishop Pontoppodan, writing in his natural history of Norway, fancies that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.

  By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious Kraken, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish or squid family, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.

  Chapter

  The Line

  With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.

  The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly vapoured with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strength, however much it may give it compactness and gloss.

  Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian in his strength and darkness; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.

  The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms.[1] Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded “sheaves,” or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the “heart,” or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese.

  [1]1 fathom = 6 feet

  As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists.

  Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for common safety’s sake; for were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea.

  Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp—the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.

  Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as mystic jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly.

  Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.

  Perhaps very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated whaling disasters—some few of which are casually chronicled—of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam and shaft and wheel is grazing you.

  It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other without the slightest warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action can you escape being made a Mazeppa[1] of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.

  [1]Mazeppa: narrative poem by Lord Byron (1819), based on the legend of Ivan Mazeppa (1639-1709). According to the poem, the young Mazeppa was punished for cuckoldry by tying him naked to a wild horse and setting the horse loose. Most of the poem describes the traumatic journey aboard the horse.

  Again: as the profound calm which precedes and prophesies of the storm is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines abo
ut the oarsmen before being brought into actual play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair.

  But why say more? All of us do live enveloped in whale-lines. All of us are born with halters round our necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn 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.

  Chapter

  Stubb

  Kills a Whale

  If to Starbuck the apparition of the Kraken was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different object. “When you see him big-ee ‘quid, him Kraken,” said the tattooed islander, honing his harpoon in the bow of his hoisted boat, “then you quick see him big ‘parm whale.”

  The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.

  It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.

  Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their soft-hissing crests like sleeping breaths; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.

  Half-drowsing at the masthead there, the soft hiss of the sea and sparsely cloud-spackled sky did take my mind vividly backwards to a similar sound under a similar sky.

  I lazed outside the ringing smithy on a small grass-covered hillock where, on the southward side I basked lizardlike in the sun, upwind from the smell of smoke and hot steel spewing from the smithy, half-sleeping in the sun and too sick in heart and body to care if any zomby found me there, for I had abandoned myself entirely to those mad weavers, the Fates; a profound fatalistic philosophy engulfed me in its illusory security. In truth “dazed” would suffice for my state of being, for the sudden absence of laudanum caused my whole body to ache and to shiver, to sweat and to itch; I was thankful the vomiting had subsided for the time.

  All the long previous day and all morning the sound of pounding hammers had rung in the bright air, as though Hephaestus had borrowed Mjölnir and wielded its might for forging work. In my imagination it was the ringing of the zomby death knell, and I welcomed it, for now my rage was becoming more precisely—and therefore hotly—stoked, as the forest fire’s wild heat is to the engineered, white-hot heat of the forge fire, stoked by the leather lungs of the forge-bellows. All smithies across the land rang with such blows, and many hearts like mine were similarly stoked to rage. The rush to crush plowshares into swords was, of necessity, urgent.

  This was no common smithy, however, being adjacent to the forge where the Liberty Bell had been cast, and the place where Dane axes first birthed in the New World. This smithy, founded generations ago by Danish master smith Jørgen Hummel, was the first to produce the American version of the Danish Axe; Hummel was a native of that country and had apprenticed himself under a master smith there before embarking for the Colonies. And, as his name did attest—it means “bumblebee”—Hummel busily applied himself and soon had his own New World smithy, where he began producing the style of Danish axe that proved so useful in the hewing of timber. I knew from my laudanum vision of the aforementioned change to the axe’s poll, or butt, that it would be useful crushing the heads of zombies. As I have previously and at length addressed the large and the small of these axes, I will say no more.

  Soon, but not soon enough for my impatience, the blades were done. Hummel’s great-grandson, now a man of graying hair himself, with arms like sides of beef presented them to me, then went so far as to assist me in finding the perfect length for the white ash hafts of each. They were the finest of weapons and soon became my most prized possessions. Hummel requested the use of the axehead design, it being such a fine one for that grisly task, and I assented. From all appearances, Hummel made no small fortune from my largesse, for this axe has become a veritable symbol of that war,—at least within the Militia—and many are the men and some few women who yet wield it.

  Though anxious to embark upon my newfound fatalist quest for zomby slaughter, I first stopped to visit Augie Kohler, a bosom friend who had long been a railroad man, riding many a time into the wilds of the western territories. I inveigled him to sell to me a new pair of clear-lensed cinder goggles, forcing the money upon him, for he did not want to take it.

  Cinder goggles—as you no doubt know if you have traveled by steam train—serve to keep from your eyes the burning cinders that fly backwards from the smokestack of the stoked locomotive. As window glazing has but recently been included on only the most luxurious passenger cars, most are open to the air and to blinding danger; many are the passengers who cry out as a hot cinder is blown burningly back to their compartment. Cinder goggles were ideal for protecting one’s eyes from the spattering of infectious zomby gore. Coupled with a prodigious bandana which I snugly wrapt round my nose and mouth, I was thus girded for further battle.

  From that day forth, Ishmael gave way to fate, letting those three sisters weave me where they would. Soon, no longer so sickened by lack of laudanum, a Militia band took me in, and before three months had elapsed, I became its leader, my reputation spreading near as rapid as the plague, for trusting in the Fates lends one a Power undreamt by the more timid. It would take more than a year before I found myself with the strength to return to that cabin hewn with these rough hands, and there to finish what should have been done ere I fled. Of that deed I will not yet write, for I cannot; it remains beyond my strength and beyond any inner vision. When I try to conjure forth those days prior to shipping aboard the Pequod, I remember only staring for long hours into the churning, bubbling current of the brook that burbled just north of our cabin; nothing more will come to me, and yet I sense it lurking there, in wait.

  Bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes then; like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to the present moment. And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror. All of that past time was dashed from my mind as I gazed down astounded at the whale’s vast bulk.

  But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapoury jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with three notes from aloft including my own startled shout, I say these voices burst forth with the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air.

  “Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the tiller.

  The sudden exclamations
of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.

  “There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by Stubb’s producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker’s boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honour of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.

  Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he was going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast which he brewed.[1]