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- furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded
young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches
himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship,
and in moody phrase ejaculates:—
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand
blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young
philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
“interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost
to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would
rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young
Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have
left their opera-glasses at home.
“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been
cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale
yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.”
Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in
the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of
vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep,
blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange,
half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every
dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him
the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by
continually flitting through it. 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.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a
gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from
the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on
ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your
identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And
perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled
shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no
more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
(_Enter Ahab: Then, all._)
It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning
shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the
cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that
hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in
the garden.
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over
dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did
you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also,
you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one
unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his
nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his
thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the
main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought
turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely
possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of
every outer movement.
“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks
the shell. ’Twill soon be out.”
The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the
deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the
bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and
with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody
aft.
“Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on
ship-board except in some extraordinary case.
“Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mast-heads, there! come down!”
When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not
wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike
the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly
glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew,
started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him
resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched
hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among
the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have
summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat.
But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:—
“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed
voices.
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the
hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically
thrown them.
“And what do ye next, men?”
“Lower away, and after him!”
“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
“A dead whale or a stove boat!”
More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to
gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they
themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly,
almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—
“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white
whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a
broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye
see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.”
While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was
slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if
to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly
humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and
inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his
vitality in him.
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast
with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the
other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises
me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes
punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me
that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they
hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
“It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the
topmaul: “a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for
white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.”
All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even
more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of
the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was
separately touched by some specific recollection.
“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that
some call Moby Dick.”
“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”
“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the
Gay-Header deliberately.
“And has he