Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her.

  Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings—likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.

  For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.

  “Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—bring me a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker’s needles. Quick!”

  Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtle skill in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors without some shudderings and evil portents.

  “Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, “my men, the thunderstorm turned old Ahab’s needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own that will point as true as any.”

  Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But Starbuck looked away.

  With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with it—whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, none could tell—he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,—“Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”

  One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.

  In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.

  Chapter

  The Log & Line

  While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form’s sake than anything else, regularly putting down in the logbooks the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel of line and angular log attached to its end hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab as he happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.

  “Forward, there! Heave the log!”

  Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. “Take the reel, one of ye, I’ll heave.”

  They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship’s lee side, where the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.

  The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.

  Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to speak.

  “Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it.”

  “‘Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.”

  “I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of mine ‘tis not worth while disputing, ‘specially with a superior, who’ll ne’er confess.”

  “What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s granite-founded College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert thou born?”

  “In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”

  “Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”

  “I know not, sir, but I was born there.”

  “In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.”

  The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.

  “Hold hard!”

  Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was gone.

  “I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See to it.” The order given, Ahab lurched to his pivot hole.

  “There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?”

  “Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s missing. Let’s see now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no cowards here, though I am a bit peckish and gnawing on some coward flesh might be just the thing. Ho! there’s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off for sandwiches—we haul in no cowards here, lest we eat ‘em. Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.”

  “Peace, thou crazy loon!” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. “Away from the
quarter-deck!”

  “The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, again advancing. “Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?

  “Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!”

  “And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that flesh should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy?”

  “Zomby-boy, sir; ship’s-gnasher; gnash-gnash, chomp-chomp! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks cowardly, and best identified by the zomby bite on him—quickest known by that! Zombies want to eat his flesh! Who’s seen Pip the delicious coward?”

  “There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down.”

  “What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s hand, and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost to zombies! This hand seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. I do think I now hold the right hand of God. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go. ”

  “No boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye who believe that in gods reside all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy small dark hand than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”

  “There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness.

  Chapter

  Thus Falls Bulkington

  Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahab’s new log and line; the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.

  At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch—then headed by Flask—was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly—like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman—the oldest mariner of all—declared that the wild thrilling sounds we heard were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.

  Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. Ahab hollowly laughed, and thus explained the wonder.

  Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men.

  At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the ship; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

  And so it was that the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible confirmation in the fate of one of our number that morning. I was saddened to learn it was enigmatic Bulkington who had fallen. At sun-rise he went from his melancholy hammock to his stand his mast-head watch at the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with Bulkington there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry so freighted with rage and woe that it evoked in me a frisson of recognition though I knew not then from whence it came. With that frightful cry and a rushing whoosh—looking up, we saw a falling phantom in the air; and then looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.

  The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it from below, and the sun having long beat upon this cask, it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed poor Bulkington to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.

  And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man—mysterious Bulkington—was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it not as a foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.

  Chapter

  Zomby Brothel

  For some weeks I had felt a vague, disturbing memory work its way upward and outward from my innermost mind, as a sliver slowly works its way surfaceward from itchy livid skin. Bulkington was that sliver, I now knew, and events transpiring aboard the Pequod served to tweeze that memory from me, the first hint being Bulkington’s cryptic comment of our shared past. But of late, Bulkington had been savage moody—more so than usual. Prior to his fall had been caught slinking about the ship on more than one occasion, once during the darkest watch of the night. Cabaco, his dearest friend—the two were as close as close could be—had many times evinced his consternation regarding the agitated state Bulkington had attained.

  According to Cabaco—speaking earnestly with me even as he grieved for the loss of Bulkington—Cabaco related that Bulkington believed there were zombies aboard the Pequod—Bulkington insisted repeatedly that he could smell them—and he feared Ahab and Fedallah were both so afflicted. Such lunacy! or so I then thought, for Bulkington was ever queer, and fiercely quiet; he was also a more superstitious fellow than most; and in light of earlier revelations regarding the superstitious nature of whalemen, this then is no small thing. Cabaco believed Bulkington’s fearful suspicions had begun to form many months previous, when, early in the voyage Archy had heard those mysterious sounds from below, in the aft hold.

  Such a scream Bulkington made as he fell! Horribly enraged, and yet anguished beyond endurance; it grew in volume as he hurtled waterward and then with a wet finality, the sound cut short, as if severed by a boarding sword. A shuddering thrill of memory passed back into me upon hearing that scream, much as an approaching squall sends before it a riffled patch
of water. That scream, so chilling to hear; I had heard it before, and from the same throat.

  Bulkington’s wail did not alone account for the flickering return of memory. The mad ravings Ahab shouted from his febrile bed, so loud they could be heard aboveboard,—acknowledged by no sailor, yet the mates did glance worriedly askance when they heard them—this also played a role, for Bulkington, I now remembered, did also shout so when we first discovered him, shaking and naked in the bushes, raving in the depths of what I assumed was a laudanum fit, that tremblingly vomitous affair. At the time, I had only recently recovered somewhat from my own deep and abiding need for the foul stuff, and so, used some of my precious dwindling reserves to bring Bulkington to some semblance of rationality.

  For several days after Bulkington’s fall, when off watch, I pondered out the riddle of him in the empty starboard try pot—for therein did I do my best cogitating, snug in its enveloping shade, even as Bulkington, now fathoms upon fathoms behind and below the Pequod, still sank slowly downward.