“Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. But ere her commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”
Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question; and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain himself, having stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descending her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod’s main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew, but no formal salutation was exchanged.
“Where was he?—not killed!—not killed!” cried Ahab, closely advancing. “How was it?”
It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while three of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat—a reserved one—had been instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat—the swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in fastening—at least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and, forced to go far to windward to first pick up her three other boats ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction—the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that final missing boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail on stunsail—after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent sailors when last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.
The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.
“I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask, “that some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat; mayhap, his watch—he’s so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks—pale in the very buttons of his eyes—look—it wasn’t the coat—it must have been the—“
“My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I conjure”—here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily received his petition, all the while receiving baleful, nigh-indescernable shakings of Fedallah’s turbaned head. “For eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship—I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it—if there be no other way—for eight-and-forty hours only—only that—you must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.”
“His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take back the coat and watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.”
“He’s drowned with the rest on ‘em,” said the old Manx sailor standing behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their spirits.”
The captain, for some unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness did he allude to his missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer’s paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his ancestors. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years’ voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman’s career shall be unennervated by any chance display of a father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.
Meantime, now the grief-stricken captain was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.
“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a child of your old age, too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.”
“Avast!” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”; then in a voice that prolongingly moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time I do not have to lose. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.”
Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship.
Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot on the sea, however small. This way and that her yards were swung round; starboard and larboard she continued to tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it; and all the while her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship fairly wept with spray, and yet remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her murdered children.
Chapter
From that
Vast Height
And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely there; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;—and now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which, through the long arctic six months’ night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings and fears were fain to hide beneath their souls and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf, as the Esquimaux beneath his umiak hunkers in the midst of Hyperborean blizzards.
In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like zombies themselves, they a
ll dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was unblinkingly upon them.
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that, even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous and equally unblinking eyes did plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or inexactly lurching the planks between two undeviating limits,—the main-mast and the mizzen-mast; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,—his dead foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the days and nights were added on that he had not swung in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent Fedallah for.
He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals—breakfast and dinner: supper he never touched—nor reaped his beard; which whitely grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure, and that naked base all clustered round with corpse-pale mushrooms.
But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck, as though avoiding some calamity below; and though the Parsee’s mystic watch was as without intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary, as when Ahab desired some thing from his cabin.
Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night, both men were dumb, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance.
And yet, somehow did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates—Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab.
At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft,“Man the mast-heads!” And all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman’s bell, was heard—“What d’ye see?—sharp! sharp!”
But when, after meeting the children-seeking Rachel, no spout had yet been immediately seen, the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.
“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said. “Aye! Ahab must have the doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his large hempen basket, prepared a pin for the other end in order to fasten the rope at the rail. This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, and Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, Ahab said, “Take the rope, sir—I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles—ahead, astern, this side, and that—within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.
When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the deck. So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to be that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree—one of those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat; it was strange therefore, that this was the very man Ahab should select for his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person’s hands.
Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his head.
But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.
“Your hat, your hat, sir!” cried the Sicilian seaman, who, being posted at the mizzen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than his level, with a deep gulf of air dividing them.
But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long hooked bill at his head. With a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.
An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab’s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.
Chapter
The Delight
The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling swells and hours went by; the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship—most m
iserably misnamed the Delight—was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few splintered planks of what had once been a whale-boat; now like the bleached skeleton of a horse.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
“Hast killed him?”
“The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accurséd life!”
“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to the hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” Then he turned to his crew and began a brief benediction.
“Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale Page 49