18. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 524-566

Chapter CXXIX: The Cabin; Chapter CXXX: The Hat; Chapter CXXXI: The Pequod Meets the Delight; Chapter CXXXII: The Symphony; Chapter CXXXIII: The Chase -- First Day; Chapter CXXXIV: The Chase -- Second Day; Chapter CXXXV: The Chase -- Third Day; Epilogue

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Ahab starts to leave his cabin, and when Pip follows, warns him not to do so. "There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health." In short, Ahab needs to be mad to proceed, and his affection for Pip weakens him. So Pip remains behind, in the captain's chair, and hears the ivory leg above on deck. "I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But there I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me."

Ahab's determination infects the crew: "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." But "even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable Parsee's glance awed his." Fedallah's mysterious hold over Ahab undermines one's sense of Ahab's indomitability, and though it doesn't quite make Ahab a sympathetic character, it humanizes him. Fedallah's "gift" of prophecy seems supernatural -- his predictions "come true," but as we'll see, they come true only because of Ahab's willingness to interpret events as fulfillments of them.

Three or four days pass with no sighting after the meeting with the Rachel, and Ahab becomes more impatient, determined that "Ahab must have the doubloon" for the first sighting of the white whale. He creates a "nest of basketed bowlines" and has himself hauled aloft for a better view, putting Starbuck -- "almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to deecision" -- in charge of the rope that suspends him, "freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's hands."

Suspended there, Ahab is swooped down upon by a seahawk who carries off his hat. Ishmael recalls the legend that an eagle removed the cap worn by Tarquin the Elder, flew around him three times, and replaced the cap, an omen that Tarquin's wife, Tanaquil, took to be a prophecy that Tarquin would be king of Rome. "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."

The Pequod encounters another ship, "misnamed the Delight." On deck is a splintered whale-boat. Ahab asks his usual question: "Hast seen the White Whale?" and the captain of the Delight points to the wrecked boat. When Ahab asks if they killed him, the captain replied, "The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that," and looks at a group of sailors who are sewing a dead comrade into his hammock. In fact, the Delight is a kind of hearse, but Ahab doesn't choose to interpret as a fulfillment of Fedallah's prophecy. He defiantly brandishes his blood- and lightning-tempered harpoon, but the other captain is unmoved: "I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb." And before Ahab's order to sail away can be accomplished, the corpse is committed to the sea, "not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled [the Pequod's] hull with their ghostly baptism." And as they sail away a voice from the Delight calls out, "In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!" -- Queequeg's coffin-turned-life-buoy that hangs from the ship.

"It was a clear steel-blue day," Ishmael begins, observing that both the "feminine air" and the "masculine sea" share the hue, the birds being the "gentle thoughts" of the former, and the "mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks ... the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea." Caught between the two is Ahab, who "From beneath his slouched hat ... dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop." Starbuck carefully approaches the captain, who, it turns out, is lost in memories of the first time he went to sea forty years ago, when he was "a boy-harpooneer of eighteen." He was "past fifty" when he married "and sailed for Cape Horn the next day.... I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck." He now recognizes his own madness: "more a demon than a man! -- aye, aye! what a forty years' fool -- fool -- old fool, has Ahab been!"

He looks Starbuck in the eye -- "a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God." And he tells Starbuck not to join him in the boats when he pursues Moby Dick:  "I see my wife and my child in thine eye.... That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!" Deeply moved, Starbuck once again tries to persuade Ahab to give up the chase; he tells him that his wife, Mary, takes their son to the top of the hill every day to watch for the returning Pequod. "Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket!" But Ahab is convinced that he is in the grip of an immutable destiny: "By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike." He addresses Starbuck again.

But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.

Starbuck, the better angel of Ahab's nature, loses to the fatal angel.  

The next morning "a long sleek on the sea" reveals the underwater presence of the whale. Ahab is hoisted in his basket, and two-thirds of the way through his ascent "he raised a gull-like cry in the air. 'There she blows! -- there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill. It is Moby Dick!" Only thirty pages before the novel's end, we get our first sight of the promised quarry.

Ahab claims the doubloon for himself, and orders three boats lowered. Starbuck is ordered to stay on board to "keep the ship." The sailors see that "the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back."

A gentle joyousness -- a might mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away from ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horn; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam. 

Here Melville has adopted an epic device, the rhetorical trick of elaborate negative comparison, found perhaps most famously in Milton's Paradise Lost:

                                Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs
Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Dis
Was gather'd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and th' inspir'd
Castalian Spring might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive.... 

Just as Milton exalts the biblical Garden of Eden by asserting that it excels the gardens of classical myth, so Melville bestows divinity on Moby Dick by comparing the whale to the transformed Jupiter, who took the form of a white bull in the rape of Europa.

Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1562

The whale even presents an aspect of peacefulness. "No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes."

Now "the grand god revealed himself, sounded and went out of sight." The three boats wait for an hour for the whale to reappear. Then suddenly Tashtego cries out, "The birds! -- the birds!" as the seabirds that had been hovering around the whale earlier begin flying toward Ahab's boat. "Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea." But then he glimpses a white spot "with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom."

Ahab tries to maneuver the boat out of harm's way, but "the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high p into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock." The whale's mouth is within six inches of Ahab, who grabs the jaw in his hands. "As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain." Ahab falls "flat-faced" into the water. Moby Dick swims around through the runs of the boat which "seemed to madden him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book of Maccabees." (1 Maccabees 6:34, "And to the end they might provoke the elephants to fight, they shewed them the blood of grapes and mulberries.") Ahab is unable to swim, but he keeps afloat. From what's left of the boat's stern, "Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him." The other boats don't dare approach the scene, but the Pequod sails in and drives off the whale so they can rescue the castaways. 

The exhausted Ahab is pulled into Stubb's boat. When he finally regains his strength, he asks first about his harpoon, which Stubb shows him, and then about the men in his boat, all of whom have survived. Once the crew from the boats and the parts of the wrecked boat are on board, the Pequod sails on after the whale. Ahab is hoisted back into his perch for a while, and then descends to pace the deck, where he scolds Stubb for making light of the wrecked boat and Starbuck for calling it an ill omen. "If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint." A curious position for a man to take who puts his faith in Fedallah's prophesies. 

When it is too dark for a sighting, Ahab points to the doubloon on the mast: 

"Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man's; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye!"

On the second day, the sighting of the whale is greeted with a universal enthusiasm: "The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison." This is Melville's curiously American version of an epic simile.

They were one man, not thirty.... all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.

In a marvelously simple sentence, a sharp counterpoint to Melville's usual biblical/Miltonic/Shakespearean diction, he writes: "The rigging lived." That is, the crew has taken to the rigging to sight the whale. "Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!"

The first cry of "There she blows!" is a false alarm -- "in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout" -- but when the real whale is sighted, "The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard." He is less than a mile away, and now he treats them to the "wondrous phenomenon of breaching."

Sperm whale breaching

Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk  into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles or more.

Moby Dick breaching, by Rockwell Kent

The boats are lowered, and once again Starbuck is left on the ship. The whale attacks the boats furiously, seeming "only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made." In the crossing and recrossing, he becomes entangled in the lines, and soon presents "a sight more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks!" The tangled line is full of "loose harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points." Ahab takes the boat-knife and reaches into the mass of sharp steel, cutting it loose so it sinks. But Moby Dick, fastened to the lines from the boats of Stubb and Flask, dashes the two boats together and then dives.

"Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for someone to ladle him up." Then Moby Dick surfaces underneath Ahab's boat, carrying it into the air. It falls gunwale downward and Ahab and his men struggle out from beneath it. The whale again seems to want to demolish what's left of the boats: "whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea."

The Pequod again comes to the rescue, bringing the men aboard. "Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and plans; all these were there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one." But Ahab's "ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter." Ahab proclaims himself "untouched.... Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being."

But suddenly Ahab realizes that Fedallah is not among the rescued. Stubb says that he was "caught among the tangles of your line -- I thought I saw him dragging under." The news that Fedallah was caught in Ahab's line leads him to the realization that his blood-forged harpoon is missing, too, still suck in the whale. Ahab orders everyone to work repairing the boats and the irons. "I'll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I'll slay him yet!"

"Great God! but for one single instant show thyself," cried Starbuck; "never, never wilt thou capture him, old man -- In Jesus' 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? ... Oh, oh, -- Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!" 

Ahab is unmoved. "Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders." And he invokes the old legend that drowning things rise three times before they drown. "So with Moby Dick -- two days he's floated -- to-morrow will be the third." Then he reflects on Fedallah's disappearance. In the prophecy, he "was to be seen again ere I could perish." How can that be? he wonders.

The carpenter makes Ahab a leg from the wood of his ruined boat, and he is there at dawn the next day looking for the whale. By noon it is still unsighted, and then Ahab realizes that the whale has been tangled in lines and has slowed down: the ship has passed him in the night. So he has the ship turned around and sails back to where he things he will see the whale. "'Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,' murmured Starbuck to himself." And he worries that he disobeys God by obeying Ahab.

The whale is sighted at last, and before Ahab gets in the boat he bids the ship goodbye: "Good bye, mast-head -- keep a good eye upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail." But he is less certain about his return when he speaks to Starbuck: "Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood; -- and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old; -- shake hands with me, man." Starbuck's eyes are full of tears as he shakes Ahab's hand. And as Ahab's boat pulls past the stern, Pip cries out from the cabin: "The sharks! the sharks! ... O master, my master, come back!" But Ahab, who is giving orders to his crew, doesn't hear.

The sharks, in fact, are following only Ahab's boat and not the others. Ishmael speculates that it was because "Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks" -- though as we learn later, Ishmael himself is part of that crew.

Ahab's thoughts are on Fedallah's prophecies still: "no coffin and no hearse can be mine; -- and hemp only can kill me!" The whale surfaces, and "maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven." He smashes in the sides of Stubb's and Flask's boats, but not Ahab's. And then everyone sees the whale's flank.

Lashed round and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds, his distended eyes turned full upon Ahab. 

Ahab realizes that the reappearance of Fedallah, with the whale as his hearse, fulfills those parts of the prophecy. "But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse?" He orders the other boats to return to the ship for repairs and then rejoin him, and threatens to harpoon any of the men in his boat if they try to leave.

Moby Dick now seems to be swimming away, passing the ship. As Ahab's boat draws closer to the Pequod, he sees Starbuck leaning over the rail and Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo climbing to the mast-heads. Stubb and Flask are on the deck, sorting through new harpoons and lances. Ahab also notices that the flag is gone from the main-mast-head, and shouts to Tashtego to descend for another flag and nail it to the mast. Sharks are biting at the oars of Ahab's boat, but he orders the crew to keep rowing even though the blades are getting smaller.

Ahab's boat gets near enough to Moby Dick that Ahab "darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale." The whale swamps the boat, tossing three of the men out of it, but two of them manage to get back in, "the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming." The line snaps, and Ahab cries, "What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!" The whale turns and sees the ship now, "seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it -- it may be -- a larger and noble foe." And so Moby Dick attacks the Pequod.

Ahab is blinded by the spray for a moment, and is horrified to see that the ship is being attacked. Tashtego, aloft, is nailing the flag to the mast-head, "and the red flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own forward flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he." Starbuck cries out, "Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo thy work." Stubb says, "I grin at thee, thou grinning whale," and tells the other mate, "Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!" Flask replies, "Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow," and hopes that his mother has drawn his part-pay already, because "the voyage is up."

As "the white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled," the water pours into the Pequod, and Ahab realizes that another prophecy has come true: "The ship! The hearse! -- the second hearse! ... its wood could only be American!" He realizes that he has been deprived of "the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains," the honor of going down with his ship. And so he turns his anger on the whale: "Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." He throws the harpoon, but the line "caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone." The final prophecy, death by hemp, is fulfilled.

The crew of the boat watches in horror as the ship sinks, "only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea." The sinking ship creates a great vortex into which everything is drawn and swallowed up. But Tashtego's arm rises above the water, still in the act of nailing the flag to the mast-head. A sky-hawk has flown around the sinking ship and now has its wing caught between the hammer and the wood:

the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Ishmael was the man who failed to get back into Ahab's boat, and as he is drawn toward the vortex, "the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side." Two days later, he is rescued by the Rachel, which, "in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."

12. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 328-360

Chapter LXXIV: The Sperm Whale's Head -- Contrasted View; Chapter LXXV: The Right Whale's Head -- Contrasted View; Chapter LXXVI: The Battering-Ram; Chapter LXXVII: The Great Heidelburgh Tun; Chapter LXXVIII: Cistern and Buckets; Chapter LXXIX: The Prairie; Chapter LXXX: The Nut; Chapter LXXXI: The Virgin

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More whale physiology from Ishmael, this time a bit of comparative anatomy: the sperm whale's head and the right whale's head. As far as Ishmael is concerned, the comparison is all to the benefit of the sperm whale, in whose head he finds "more character."

Sperm whale

Right whale

Both whales, Ishmael observes, have eyes placed where people have ears: on either side of the head. "The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him.... This peculiarity of the whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes." The phenomenon fascinates Ishmael:

True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then it is as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid.

Again and again, Ishmael makes an imaginative, empathic leap into the whale's existence. It's a reminder that the book is called Moby-Dick and not Ahab or Ishmael. The whale is the novel's true protagonist, and though Ishmael dubs him "monster" or "murderer," his sympathy for the whale runs as an ironic countercurrent throughout the book.

Unfortunately, he doesn't have much sympathy for the right whale, apparently because it's not as handsome as the sperm whale. But he finds something to admire in both: the way they face death. The sperm whale's "broad brow" seems to him "to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death." The right whale's head, with its full lower lip, demonstrates "an enormous practical resolution in facing death." So they are philosophical archetypes: "The Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years."

He is awed by the sperm whale's forehead: "a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever," it has "a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it." But "there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life." Of course this is where the goodies are, "the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state." (Most sources say that spermaceti is odorless, which is one reason why it was prized for use in candles.) A single whale, according to Ishmael, contains about five hundred gallons, though much of was lost in the process of harvesting it.  Ishmael likens the reservoir of spermaceti to the Great Heidelberg Tun, an enormous wine vat that also attracted Mark Twain's attention:

Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen hundred thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in, when you can get a better quality, outside, any day, free of expense.
- A Tramp Abroad

It is Tashtego's job to break into the "tun" and begin the process of retrieving its contents. He lowers a bucket into it with a pole, and by the end of his efforts, the pole is descending some twenty feet:

but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up -- my God! poor Tashtego -- like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!

Daggoo attempts to rescue Tashtego, but as he's making his attempt, "to the unspeakable horror of all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg." Daggoo thrusts the pole with the bucket into the head, hoping that Tashtego can grab onto it, but the rigging gives way and the head plunges into the sea, taking Tashtego with it. Daggoo is hanging by the tackles when Queequeg -- Ishmael refers to him as "my brave Queequeg" -- dives in for the rescue attempt.

They see "an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a strange sight to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave." And then "Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian." The head had sunk slowly, and Queequeg had been able to slash an opening in it and grab onto Tashtego. On his first contact he had seized Tashtego by the leg, but with "a dexterous heave and toss he had wrought a somerset upon the Indian, and brought him out headfirst.

And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather delivery of Tashtego was successfully accomplished.... Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.

Tashtego survives, but his experience reminds Ishmael of the story of a man who fell into a large store of honey in a hollow tree and "died embalmed." And of course Ishmael has to make a lesson out of it: "How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?" As usual, Ishmael is skeptical of any philosophical system, including Platonism.

He's also a little wary of phrenology, which he lampoons by observing how difficult it would be to read the bumps on the sperm whale's wrinkled head. He lauds the "high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow" of the whale, in which "you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature." And he observes that the "horizontal, semi-crescentic depression" in the whale's forehead "in a man, is [the physiologist Johann Kaspar] Lavater's mark of genius."

But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence.

(Recall once again Stubb's dream in which Ahab turned into a pyramid.) The whale's brain, Ishmael notes, is "at least twenty feet" away from his forehead. "The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world. And anyway, Ishmael doesn't believe that the brain alone is the locus of  intelligence: "For I believe that much of man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul." And the sperm whale has quite a spine:

"His cranial cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being eight in height.... For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord."

Now the Pequod encounters yet another whaler, the Jungfrau, and her captain, Derick De Deer. The captain comes aboard the Pequod bearing a container for whale oil, hoping to borrow some because he has yet to kill any whales: "his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin." But as the captain is leaving with his borrowed oil, both ships cite a pod of whales, and both launch boats for the chase.

Most of the whales leave in a hurry, but an elderly whale is slower than the others: "His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble." The old whale's gastric distress amuses Stubb, who jokes about the whale's "having half an acre of stomach-ache" and observing, "It's the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern."

They also observe that the whale is missing his "starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say." Derick, the Jungrau's captain, gets a start on the Pequod boats, and "with a deriding gesture shook his lamp-feeder" -- the oil container -- at them, spurring Starbuck to give chase. Stubb humorously chides his rowers for not pulling fast enough: "Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard -- we don't budge an inch -- we're becalmed.. Halloo, here's grass growing in the boat's bottom -- and by the Lord, the mast there's budding."

The Pequod's three boats overtake the German, causing his boat to overturn, and the three harpooners each land a hit on the whale. "Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded" and "the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them." The boats are in danger of being pulled under.

Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said -- "Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear?" 

The quotation is a conflation of several verses about Leviathan in Job 41. But this is an old, wounded, and possibly ill Leviathan, for he soon surfaces, and they can see that he is blind as well as crippled.

But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

Yes, Ishmael/Melville lays it on here with a trowel. But that makes it a key passage, underscoring the disproportionate effort of the whaling pursuit and the inhumane character of the hunt. And another key moment follows, as they discover an old sore spot low on the whale's flank.

"A nice spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."

"Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"

But humane Starbuck was too late. 

Flask, the mediocrity, prevails over the humane but ineffectual Starbuck. The old whale dies in agony as the spear enters the wound, but at least he capsizes Flask's boat. "It was most piteous, that last expiring spout." But the irony deepens when the whale begins to sink, "with all its treasures unrifled." Before the whale sinks, they find a stone lance-head in him. "It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was discovered." Highly doubtful, since the sperm whale's life span is about 70 years, but Ishmael probably didn't know that.

They have succeeded in tying the whale to the ship, but the body's tendency to sink threatens to overturn the Pequod, and finally Queequeg succeeds in cutting the fluke-chains. "With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank." And soon after the body sinks, the watch on the masthead reports that the Jungfrau is lowering her boat to chase a finback whale, which belongs "to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming.... Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend."

7. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 166-186

Chapter XXXVII: Sunset; The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out; Chapter XXXVIII: Deck; By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it; Chapter XXXIX: First Night-Watch; (Stubb solus, and mending a brace); Chapter XL: Midnight, Forecastle; Chapter XLI: Moby Dick

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Melville continues with his theatrical presentation of the narrative, with soliloquies by Ahab, Starbuck, and Stubb, and with a scene emphasizing the multinational character of the crew.

Ahab's soliloquy positions him in the role of tragic hero, but mostly emphasizes his megalomania when he imagines himself assuming the Iron Crown of Lombardy, which tradition held was shaped from one of the nails used in the crucifixion of Jesus. It was used in the coronations of Charlemagne and of Napoleon I.

The Iron Crown of Lombardy

Ahab feels the crown cutting into his head. He raves on, seeing himself "damned in the midst of Paradise," and defying his doubters:

What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do. They think me mad -- Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and -- Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. 

There has been no mention of a prophecy of Ahab's dismemberment to this point. But the key thing here is that Ahab accepts his madness, even prides himself in it. He also defies his opponents, including Starbuck, calling them "deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes." ("Bendigo," an English bare-knuckle boxer, William Abednego Thompson, fought James "Deaf" Burke for the heavyweight championship in 1839.) "The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' bed, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!" From ancient iron crown we have gone to modern iron horse.

Starbuck by the mainmast, by Rockwell Kent

Starbuck is tormented by his decision to help Ahab in his mad quest: The captain has "blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it." His only alternative is mutiny, and he won't consider it, deciding instead to put the matter in God's hands: "His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside." He hears the sound of the sailors in the forecastle and knows that he has no support from them: "Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon." Starbuck seems to have confused "demiurge" and "demogorgon" here, though his meaning is clear: The crew is in the service of some primal force. He shuns the crew's "infernal orgies" and tries to quell the "latent horror" he perceives in life itself, "yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!"

Stubb, meanwhile, has chosen to laugh the whole thing off: "Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left -- that unfailing comfort it, it's all predestinated."  His brief soliloquy, turning away from the hubris of Ahab and the attempt at a Stoic acceptance by Starbuck, serves primarily as a segue to the scene of the crew, which opens with a chorus of a song deftly alluded to in Jaws:



The scene on the forecastle mostly serves to introduce the multiethnic character of the "heathen crew" so mistrusted by Starbuck. There are sailors from the Netherlands, France, Iceland, Malta, Sicily, the Azores, China, the Isle of Man, India, Portugal, Denmark, England, Spain, Ireland, and elsewhere. As the wind rises and a squall comes up, there is a flash of lightning that reminds the Old Manx Sailor of the mark on Ahab's face: "Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in the sky -- lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black." The reference to blackness seems to offend Daggoo, which in turn causes a Spanish Sailor to refer to the lightning as "Daggoo showing his teeth." This precipitates a fight between Daggoo and the Spanish Sailor, but it's interrupted by the mate's call to prepare the sails for the squall. The crew scatters to its duties, leaving only the black cabin-boy Pip, who has been entertaining them with his tambourine and now hides under the windlass as the action proceeds. He links the white squall to the white whale, which "that anaconda of an old man swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!"

Ishmael, it seems, has not been immune to the enthusiasm that Ahab has inspired in the crew: "A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine." And so he assembles what is known about the white whale, which, it seems, has lately been spotted all over the world, with reports of "various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked," and widespread knowledge of Ahab's own "disastrous encounter" with the whale. As he notes, "in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to." And whalemen, who are "the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea," are particularly given to tales of wonder. So the stories about Moby Dick are "invested ... with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears."

Among these stories is "the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time." The stories are also fed by the general ignorance of the undersea world: "the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research." There are reports of whales who have been captured in the north Pacific bearing the harpoons of Greenland whalers. "Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days." Ishmael takes this as a clue that the Northwest Passage, "so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale." Others "go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time)."

Moby Dick is distinguished by "a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump." At this point we might remember Stubb's dream, in which not only is Ahab transformed into a pyramid, but the "badger-haired old merman" who tells Stubb that being kicked by Ahab is an honor also has a hump on his back. In other words, Moby Dick and Captain Ahab are one and the same, or at least inextricably linked. The chief characteristic ascribed to Moby Dick, however, is intelligence: "that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over evinced in his assaults." Ishmael is carried away into the anthropomorphizing of Moby Dick, who is also described as "treacherous." He credits the accounts of "the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent."

That the whale is something outside of nature is also reflected in the accounts of those who "swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal." Is it nature that exhibits an "exasperating" indifference to human suffering here, or is it that the whale's fury is at emotional odds with the serenity of the sunlight? In either case, things are out of joint.

As noted above, Stubb's dream suggests an identity of Ahab and Moby Dick, and Ishmael returns to that thought:

Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them, but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated against it. All ... the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. 

In pursuing Moby Dick, then, Ahab is pursuing the demon within himself. The Ophites in the passage revered the serpent of Genesis not as a thing of evil but as a symbol of divine knowledge, a comprehension of the infinite that was forbidden to humans. Ahab sees the whale as an embodiment of evil, and particularly the evil that he feels feeding within himself. The task is to eradicate the evil without eradicating oneself, and it is an impossible one.

Ishmael speculates that Ahab's "monomania" grew within him not "at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment" but on the long voyage home afterward: "then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another, and so interfusing, made him mad." The traditional Christian duality of body and soul breaks down within Ahab, and the mutilated body is reflected in a mutilated soul. On the voyage, his delirium is replaced by calm, but Ishmael observes, "Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted." In the process, the mad Ahab becomes stronger than the sane Ahab, possessing a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to to bear upon any one reasonable object."

Hôtel de Cluny

Thermes de Cluny

 The passage that follows about the medieval Hôtel de Cluny and the Roman baths, the Thermes de Cluny, on which it was built is one of Melville's maddening allusions, and commentary on it is endless. Melville visited it in 1849, and it stuck in his memory as an emblem of "an antique buried beneath antiquities" -- a not untypical American response to the layered history of older countries. In this context, the allusion is designed to comment in some way on "Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part" that "remains unhinted," but the hint -- perhaps about the pagan past that lingers within and informs the Christian world that succeeded it -- remains obscure.

In any case, Ishmael insists that Ahab was able to integrate both a sane exterior and a mad interior: "all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad," and that "so well did he succeed in that dissemblng, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him." So nobody gives a second thought to letting Ahab captain another whaling voyage. On the contrary, they reason that "he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales."

And so they let him assemble a crew, "chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals -- morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and idleness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask." Oh, how I love that phrase "the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness." What a scathing thing to say about anyone, especially the noble Starbuck.

Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire -- by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be -- what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding demon of the seas of life, -- all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go.

And yet, of course, he does go on, if not to explain the moral culpability of the officers crew, at least to tell of its consequences. And he notably and honestly includes himself: "For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill."

6. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 129-165

Chapter XXXII: Cetology; Chapter XXXIII: The Specksynder; Chapter XXXIV: The Cabin-Table; Chapter XXXV: The Mast-Head; Chapter XXXVI: The Quarter-Deck (Enter Ahab: Then, all)

_____

The first time I read Moby-Dick it was in an abridged edition that left out all the chapters like "Cetology" -- the ones that deal with whales and whaling lore. It's an easy trim: One misses none of the essential action. But one also misses the essence of the book, which is its portrayal of obsession -- not just Ahab's obsession, but the peculiarly focused lives of whale-hunters, and by extension the lives of anyone whose work centers on the mastery of some specialty. I have known college professors and newspaper editors as obsessive and as demanding (and a few as destructive of themselves and others) as Ahab. And the cetological material in the unabridged Moby-Dick is necessary to understanding the depth of that kind of obsession.

The "Cetology" chapter is not, however, to be taken seriously as an exploration of its purported topic, no matter how much Ishmael insists that he is helping the reader to "a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow." The general reader is likely to realize that much of what Ishmael says about whales is bogus when he insists on taking "the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish," even though he admits that whales have lungs and are warm-blooded, "whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded."

He supposedly quotes Linnaeus, "'On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their moveable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,' and finally, 'ex lege naturae jure meritoque.'"  The Latin here is mostly hocus-pocus stuff: "penem intrantem feminam" refers to the penis entering the female and "mammis lactantem" to breasts giving milk; but "ex lege naturae jure meritoque" means simply "out of the law of nature by right and merit," which is is a non sequitur. To counter Linnaeus's evidence that whales are mammals, and not fish, Ishmael takes the matter to what he considers a sounder authority: "my friends Simon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug." So he sticks to his definition of a whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail."

Of course, Ishmael tries to get himself off the hook by suggesting that his excursion into whale-science is "simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder." So he proceeds with a wholly whimsical "classification" of whales by size, using the language of printing: folio, octavo, and duodecimo -- from largest to smallest. (He omits "quarto" because the quarto doesn't retain the proportions of the folio, whereas the octavo does. Clearly, he knows more about books than about whales.) That the "Cetology" chapter is bunk doesn't mean, however, that it should be omitted or even skipped -- though skimmed is probably acceptable. The real purpose of the chapter is to give a whaler's-eye-view of the whale.

Ishmael is much better at describing the hierarchical structure of a whaler crew than he is at categorizing whales. He notes that the Dutch crews were headed by the captain and the "specksynder," a word that means "fat cutter" but refers to the chief harpooner. (Ishmael/Melville makes it "harpooneer"; I vacillate between the two, noting that my spellchecker prefers it with one e.) On the Pequod, the harpooner doesn't quite have that status, but he -- that is, Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo -- has a standing as a "professional superior" but a "social equal." On the ship, the officers live aft and the men forward, but the harpooners living in close proximity to the officers, with whom they also take their meals.

As for Ahab, "the only homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience," demonstrating what Ishmael calls a "certain sultanism." Because he "was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea," he is able to exert his authority, even though he exhibited only "Nantucket grimness and shagginess" and was just "a poor old whale-hunter" denied the "majestical trappings and housings" of emperors and kings, many of whom have "even to idiot imbecility ... imparted potency." His own potency is demonstrated at the table at which he dines with the mates, summoning first Starbuck, then Stubb, then Flask, in order of their rank. Out of Ahab's sight, Flask, the last to be alone on the deck, mockingly dances a little hornpipe before entering, but "then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab's presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave."

It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical.... For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial electors, so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb.

Even though there is no prohibition against serving yourself at the captain's table, it simply isn't done, so that Flask, who would like some butter, goes butterless. And because Flask is the lowest in rank of the three mates, he is also expected to leave the table first. Any sailor with a grudge against Flask, Ishmael observes, need only peep in "at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab." After the captain and the mates leave the table, the three harpooners dine there. "While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it."

Ishmael has his first duty on the mast-head, the three of which "are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours.... In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months." But Ishmael admits that he wasn't very good at the job: "With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I -- being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude -- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whaleships' standing orders, 'Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.'" It's no job for an intellectual wool-gatherer like Ishmael, who finds the height and the vastness of the scene too seductive: "In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over." Thomas Cranmer, burned at the stake by Mary I in 1556, was by no stretch of the term a pantheist, and the reference is as opaque as the one to "Descartian vortices" in the next paragraph. I suspect that Melville is having a little fun at Ishmael's expense, filling his head with intellectual gobbledygook. Or maybe at the expense of his readers, who have spent many hours unraveling such enigmas. It fits with the giddiness that Ishmael experiences atop the mast.

Then one morning Ahab summons the crew, even bidding the mast-heads to descend. At this point Melville turns the ship's deck into a stage: "(Enter Ahab: Then, all)," a narrative device -- stage directions and even dialogue markers -- that he uses for the next few chapters. And it is, in its overblown nineteenth-century way, certainly an "actable" scene. Ahab begins with a call-and-response: "What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?" "Sing out for him!" and so on. Then he nails a sixteen-dollar gold piece to the main-mast, and promises it to the man who "raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw."

Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg all know the whale he's talking about: "the same that some call Moby Dick." Tashtego knows him by the action of his fan-tail, Daggoo by his "bushy" spout, and Queequeg by the twisted harpoons still lodged in him, though he has trouble getting out the word he wants, miming the opening of a bottle:

"Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen -- Moby Dick -- Moby Dick!" 

It is Starbuck who asks if it is Moby Dick to whom Ahab lost his leg. 'Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up." But it is also Starbuck who tries to temper Ahab's mad enthusiasm: "I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."

Ahab then reveals that he's not interested in the money, which must come as a surprise to the crew who had signed up with no expectation of payment except for their share of the profits upon return. He wants vengeance at any cost, vowing, "my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!" Stubb notes, "He smites his chest, ... what's that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow." (Melville has slipped into Shakespearean mode. With a little work, the scene could be rendered in iambic pentameter.)

Starbuck persists: "Vengeance on a dumb brute! ... that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous." But Ahab has slipped into Transcendentalist mode: "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!" So for Ahab, the whale is not just a "dumb brute" subject to the instinct for self-protection, it is a mask behind which lies "an inscrutable malice." "That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him."

Starbuck's audacity in challenging his captain is the surprising element in this scene, and Ahab quickly tries to parry his mate's rebelliousness. "I meant not to incense thee," he tells Starbuck, observing, "my heat has melted thee to anger-glow." He points out a Turk and a Chilean in the crowd, claiming that they are "one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale." He plays on the mate's pride: Starbuck, Ahab says, is "the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back" when the rest of the crew is ready to hunt Moby Dick. He urges Starbuck to speak further, but the mate keeps his silence. Ahab is sure he has won: "Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion." But he doesn't hear when Starbuck murmurs, "God keep me! -- keep us all!"

And so Ahab resorts to ritual, to a kind of communion to seal the allegiance of the crew. He orders a pewter tankard filled, and has the harpooners bring their weapons and the mates their lances, and has the crew form a circle around them all. He has the tankard passed around from man to man. "Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!" Then he has the three mates extend their lances and "he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre." He glances "intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked them into the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life." The image is somewhat reminiscent of Jacques-Louis David's painting Oath of the Horatii:

But the effect isn't what Ahab hopes for: "Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright." Ahab resigns himself that if they had taken "the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps expired from out me. Perhaps, too, it would have dropped ye dead." He orders the three mates to act as "cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there -- yon three most honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers." He has the harpooners detach the metal heads from their harpoons. "Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter." Each officer gives the harpoon-cups to his harpooner.

"Drink, ye harpooneers; drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow -- Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered.

It's a great, theatrical, melodramatic scene.

5. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 105-129

Chapter XXIII: The Lee Shore; Chapter XXIV: The Advocate; Chapter XXV: Postscript; Chapter XXVI: Knights and Squires; Chapter XXVII: Knights and Squires; Chapter XXVIII: Ahab; Chapter XXIX: Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb; Chapter XXX: The Pipe; Chapter XXXI: Queen Mab

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Bulkington, whom Ishmael first glimpsed in New Bedford, is now a member of the Pequod's crew, causing Ishmael to remark on how short his stay on land was after a four-years' voyage. But his brief reappearance in the novel is his last: "this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington." He is there as the epitome of the seafaring man, the one to whom "The land seemed scorching to his feet." He is likened to the ship that must avoid getting too close to the land in a storm:

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. 

Perhaps Bulkington is fleeing from the law, but Melville doesn't supply a reason for his shunning the land, preferring to regard him as the embodiment of the attempt to remain unfettered: "all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore." Of course, as Moby-Dick will show, the sea has its own treachery. Bulkington takes his chances on the sea, just as the liberated imagination prefers to confront infinity rather than retreat into the knowable: "as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God -- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!" Bulkington will perish at sea, we are told, but in the process he becomes a "demigod":  "Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing -- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!" Still, the question abides: Why did Melville choose to load so much symbology on this most minor of characters? Bulkington, we hardly knew ye. One speculation is that Bulkington was originally intended to be Ishmael's bosom buddy instead of Queequeg. If so, he made the right choice.

In the next chapter, Ishmael takes time out for an apology for whaling, which he says "has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit." (Melville couldn't know how disreputable it would become in the next century, leading him to an observation that for us comes freighted with irony: "If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.") There is some facetiousness in the chapter, but it starts out with the semi-earnest comparison of whaling to warfare: "what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits?"

The facetiousness comes in when he tries to answer some straw-men objections, such is the assertion that no famous author has ever written about whaling, and cites Job, Alfred the Great, and Edmund Burke in his counter-argument. He claims that whalers have "good blood" because Benjamin Franklin's kin were harpooners, and that whaling is respectable because "By old English statutory law, the whale is declared 'a royal fish'" and the bones of a whale figured prominently in a Roman triumphal procession. Moreover, Cetus is a constellation in the Southern hemisphere. And in a "Postscript" chapter he adds that whale oil is the oil used at coronations. All this, of course, is in service of his (i.e., Ishmael's, though many have applied it to Melville) own credentials:

if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. 

And, having got all that off his chest, he turns to introducing the dramatis personae of this whaling pageant, particularly the mates Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, and their respective harpooners, Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo. Starbuck, the first mate, is a Nantucketer and a Quaker, a tall, thin man. "His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed to prepare to endure for long ages to come." He is superstitious, but his superstition seemed "to spring, somehow, from intelligence rather than from ignorance." Personally courageous, following a profession that took the lives of his father and his brother, he vows,"'I will have no man in my boat ... who is not afraid of a whale.' By this, he seemed to mean ... that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward." Again, as in his apotheosis of Bulkington, Melville lets Ishmael soar off into the empyrean:

But this abounding dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself!... Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

Even Walt Whitman never thundered so loud in democratic praise, and Whitman had Abraham Lincoln for a model, not the somewhat questionable Jackson.

Fortunately, Ishmael tones it down for Stubb and Flask. The former is a laid-back Cape Codder who "converted the jaws of death into an easy chair" and who, when getting dressed, "instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth." The latter is a native of Martha's Vineyard, "short, stout, ruddy" and "very pugnacious concerning whales," which he regarded as "but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil."

Starbuck had chosen Queequeg as his harpooner. Stubb's is the American Indian Tashtego, notable for his "long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes -- for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression." Daggoo, Flask's harpooner, is an African, "erect as a giraffe," who "moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks." Flask "looked like a chess-man beside him."

Though he dubs the mates and their harpooners "knights and squires," Ishmael sees this crew as something of a microcosm of America, though a hierarchical America rather than a melting-pot, with the immigrants subordinated to the native-born:

not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are.... The ... native American literally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.

(By "native American," of course, he doesn't mean Tashtego, the real Native American.) His purpose here is to celebrate the multicultural as long as it knows its place. The crew of many colors becomes

An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever come back.

(For "Anacharsis Clootz," or "Cloots," see the comments on Billy Budd here.)

Ahab, by Rockwell Kent

And finally Ahab appears. "He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them." The rest everyone knows: the white mark running from his hair down the right side of his face and into his clothes, the "barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood," the hole drilled in the deck into which he fits the point of the leg that "had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw." But we usually forget that in spring weather, "More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile." It's a perfunctory attempt to humanize a character that lends itself too easily to allegorizing.

In fact, Melville even attempts some black humor in portraying Ahab, as in his abstention from patrolling the decks at night, "because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks." When Ahab forgets, an awakened Stubb dares to challenge the captain, and is rebuked with "Down, dog, and kennel!" Stubb furiously protests, but backs off from Ahab's fury, grumbling about the insult and wondering, "is he mad? Anyway, there's something's on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then." The cabin-steward has told Stubb as much. "I guess he's got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row, they say -- worse nor a toothache." We will soon find out what Ahab's toothache, his tic douloureux is. Meanwhile, Stubb decides to obey his personal "eleventh commandment": "Think not."

For Ishmael, " Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab," and he is presumably present to witness as Ahab casts his pipe, the last attempt to achieve serenity, overboard. Stubb, meanwhile, is dreaming of being kicked by Ahab and returning the kick only to find Ahab transformed into a pyramid. There is too much temptation to linger on the symbolism here, as many have done, but the "sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back," who appears to Stubb in the dream deserves the last word:

"No, you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honor; I consider it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be your boast, Stubb, that you were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of." 

As Stubb is telling Flask of this dream, Ahab shouts out orders: "There are whales hereabouts! If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!" And the wise man Stubb recognizes the truth: "Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind."