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- moby-dick
- text
- render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the
sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for of what present avail to the
becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is
exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable
from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the
chase of whales.
The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a
cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level
field.
“By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck
creeps up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two
brave fellows!—Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise,
on the sea,—for by live-oaks! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait
that leaves no dust behind!”
“There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was now the
mast-head cry.
“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on and split
your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your
trump—blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller
shuts his watergate upon the stream!”
And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. 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. The hand
of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the
previous day; the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed,
unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging
towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled
along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the
vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of
that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;
though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple,
and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each
other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced
and directed by the long central keel; even so, 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.
The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were
outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one
hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others,
shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking
yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for
their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to
seek out the thing that might destroy them!
“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, after
the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.
“Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd
jet that way, and then disappears.”
It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some
other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for
hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its
pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the
air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as—much nearer to the ship
than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead—Moby Dick
bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not
by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the
White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous
phenomenon of 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 and more. In those moments,
the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases,
this breaching is his act of defiance.
“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his
immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to
Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved
against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised,
for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and
stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling
intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour
and thy harpoon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the
fore. The boats!—stand by!”
Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like
shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and
halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped
from his perch.
“Lower away,” he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat—a spare one,
rigged the afternoon previous. “Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine—keep
away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!”
As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first
assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the
three crews. Ahab’s boat was central; and cheering his men, he told
them he would take the whale head-and-head,—that is, pull straight up
to his forehead,—a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit,
such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale’s sidelong
vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three
boats were plain as the ship’s three masts to his eye; the White Whale
churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were,
rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered
appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him
from every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank
of which those boats were made. But skilfully manœuvred, incessantly
wheeling like trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while
eluded him; though, at times, but by a plank’s breadth; while all the
time, Ahab’s unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.
But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed
and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three
lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves,
warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now
for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more
tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more
line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again—hoping
that way to disencumber it of some snarls—when lo!—a sight more savage
than the embattled teeth of sharks!
Caught and twisted—corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons
and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing
and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab’s boat. Only one
thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached
within—through—and then, without—the rays of steel; dragged in the line
beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice sundering
the rope near the chocks—dropped the intercepted fagot of steel into
the sea; and was all fast again.