by Scott O'Dell
Caleb slowly turned away from me and again began to study the chart.
“Do you remember,” I said in desperation, “at the end of the book where Ahab has finally come upon Moby Dick, the whale boats are wrecked and the Parsee drowned and the ship itself is in danger from the White Whale’s fury, at that time his good friend Starbuck spoke to him. He pled with Ahab, saying…”
Caleb looked up. “Aye, his words I recall. ‘Never, never wilt thou capture him, old man,’ cried Starbuck. ‘In Jesus’s name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased. Twice stove to splinters. Thy very leg once more snatched from under thee. Thy evil shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings—what more wouldst thou have? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!’ Aye, ’tis…”
“And there’s another thing that Starbuck said,” I broke in. “He said, near the end, before the ship went down with all hands, save Ishmael…”
“Aye, Ishmael was saved by the dark canoe.”
“Starbuck cried out to Ahab, whom he loved,” I went on. “‘Oh! Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!’”
“Aye, ’twas his good, dear friend, Starbuck, who spoke to him thus, as thou now speak to me.”
Caleb left the chart table and made his way to the porthole. As he looked out toward Rehusa Strait, as the big white cat hopped to his shoulder and nestled there, he said:
“To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress…
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear.”
I opened the cabin door and went on deck. There was nothing more that I could say.
23
Alert sailed promptly on a light wind and the turning tide.
Caleb was at the helm. Standing at his side, watching as he moved the big wheel and shouted a final command to the men aloft, I could not tell where we were bound, whether homeward or to the far waters of the Pacific. His eyes were shadowed beneath his heavy brows, fixed upon something that I could not see. His jaw was firmly set. There was no sign.
Under half-sail we moved down Magdalena Bay, past its stony promontories and through the shallows of Rehusa Strait.
A mile or more from the strait, as we met the first Pacific surge, Caleb asked me to call the crew to the quarterdeck. When the men were gathered around him, he ordered the life buoy lowered. Mr. Blanton gladly swung the davits, for the buoy was dripping water on his freshly swabbed deck. It met the sea and as the men who unloosed it scrambled back, the buoy trailed out astern, held by a stout line.
Caleb handed the wheel to me. He then drew a knife from his belt, limped to the rail, and with one swift stroke cut the line that held the buoy fast.
Twisting in the breeze, the freed line dropped away. The buoy rolled and righted itself and at last settled down upon the gentle sea. Caleb watched it fall astern, until it was but a speck to my straining eyes, before he looked around at us and spoke.
“The dark canoe,” he said, “moveth with the wind and the waves and the moon’s constant tides. It moveth at its own pace, slower by far than this stout bark which bears us homeward. Yet in time it will outpace our many sails and make ports that we shall never see.”
The sun had reached the horizon and for a moment or two floated there, casting a bright glow across the deck, upon all our faces. Caleb glanced at each of us in turn.
“Dost thou doubt me, Mr. Blanton?” he said. “Dost think that thou canst hold the wind in thy hand and cup the surging wave and snare the speeding moon? Dost believe, Tom Waite, only that which thou canst put in thy mouth and chew upon, which thou canst touch with thy finger? There’s more to things than that. Aye, more!”
Blanton coughed. Tom Waite turned his eyes from Caleb and winked at me. Falling silent, Caleb hobbled to the rail. In the descending dusk, the men drifted away one by one, except for Old Man Judd. When they were gone my brother came and looked down at the compass.
“Thy course,” he said to me, “ranges south by southeast. Hold steady and mind the sails. Watch the ship’s white wake. It will tell thee where thou hast been and where thou goest.”
With a last glance astern, he left us. Thin light still lingered overhead. I turned to look for the dark canoe. It was gone.
Judd said, “This book you’ve been reading, I forget its name…”
“Moby-Dick.”
“Sometime I’d like to look at it.”
“You can have it now,” I said. “It’s on my bunk.”
Rehusa Strait was black against the sky. Beyond it stood the peaks of Isla Ballena. I regretted that we could not take Jeremy back to Nantucket and bury him among the elms. But if one must die, I thought, what better place to be than on a windy headland where sea-birds nest and you are worshiped as a god.
Our sails held the wind. The light shining on the compass rose showed that the course was homeward, the course that Caleb and I, the two of us, had laid out together. The night wind freshened and fair Antares glowed in the west.
About the Author
Scott O’Dell is the author of many timeless children’s tales including the Newbery-award-winning Island of the Blue Dolphins, Zia, The King’s Fifth, the Newbery Honor book The Black Pearl, and Black Star, Bright Dawn. He was the first American to ever be awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Children’s Literature. The Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction was created in his honor.