- end_line
- 7611
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-18T02:42:19.342Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 7582
- text
- only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one
of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking
in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have
wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on
profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the
mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural
revenge.
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses
a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, 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 recklessness in
Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. 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 great demon of the seas of life,—all this to
explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean
miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by
the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the
irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand
still? 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.
- title
- Chunk 7