Only slightly lower in rank than the mates stand the savage harpooners: Queequeg, and Tashtego, a Gayhead Indian from the Vineyard, and Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro savage, with a lion-like tread, moving about the deck in all the pomp of his six feet five in his socks. “A white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.” As for the crew itself, they were not merely islanders, usually; they were Isolatoes, each man living on a separate continent of his own. Above them all towers Captain Ahab. The first time he appears on deck, a foreboding shiver runs over Ishmael. “Reality outran apprehension.... He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.” One of Ahab’s legs has been snapped off by a whale: he stands on a stump made of whale ivory, with a crucifixion in his face, in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. “A Khan of the plank and a king of the sea and a great Lord of Leviathans was Ahab.” In his presence, his mates shrivel and crumple up, like a paper in a fire. Compared with Ahab’s titanic pride, their decent professional self-respect is nothing. There is madness in that pride, the madness of a tormented soul.
What goads Ahab? What goads him is the memory of his encounter with that white whale, Moby-Dick, who, in malice or play or accidental defence, had bitten off Ahab’s leg and left him humiliated and crippled, for long months of days and weeks, stretched in one hammock, his torn body and gashed soul bleeding into one another, and so interfusing, making him mad.... “Ever since that almost fatal encounter, 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 the 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 reverence 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 that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled up on the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”
Ahab assembles his crew, and after working them up with a reminder of their common duties, to sing out, to lower away, to get a dead whale or a stove boat, he nails a gold-piece to the main mast and in a high, raised voice exclaims: “Who ever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw ... shall have this gold ounce.” Daggoo recognizes Moby-Dick. Ahab, surprised, confesses his past humiliation and announces his purpose. “This is what we have shipped for, men! to chase the white whale on both sides of the land, and over all sides of the earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out!” The crew is seized with Captain Ahab’s wild purpose. Starbuck alone, prudent, thoughtful, pious, remonstrates with his captain. “‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cries Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.’” And Ahab answers:
“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! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is what I chiefly hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man: I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealously presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.”
Ahab pledges his crew; they drink and swear death to Moby-Dick. Ahab withdraws to his cabin, to contemplate his own madness, maddened: there he defies the great gods themselves, mere cricket players and pugilists. “I will not say as schoolboys do to their bullies--Take some one of your size: don’t pommel _me_! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again, but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags!... Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me.” The crew, lightened by drink, burst into revelry: they jig and frolic and dream about girls. Ishmael’s shouts go up with the rest: his oath had been welded to theirs; a wild mystical feeling is in him: Ahab’s quenchless feud seems his. With greedy ears he learns the story of the monster against whom he and his shipmates have taken the oath of Ahab’s revenge.
4
And now comes Moby-Dick. In all the sperm whale fishery there is no whale more prodigious in magnitude or malignity. All whales are dangerous to hunt with harpoon and spear in a whale-boat; but Moby-Dick multiplies the vicissitudes of the chase: he turns on his pursuers, and again and again escapes them, with an apparently immortal destiny, however accurately the harpoons may have been planted in his side, and however strong the line that makes him fast. A wrinkled forehead, a high white hump, and a streaked and marbled body add to his formidable size: as sperm whales are more dangerous than Right or Greenland whales, so Moby-Dick is more terrifying than the usual sperm whale. The rumours about Moby-Dick raise to enormous dimensions what was already great enough in actuality; but the very whiteness of the whale adds something more.
While white, says Melville, has a hundred fine mythological allusions, conveying some special virtue or perfection to the elephant of Siam or the Imperial charger; while the white wampum of the red man was the deepest pledge of honour, and the most august of religions had made of it a symbol of divine spotlessness and power--for all these accumulated associations with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue which strikes more of a panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. The whiteness of the white shark, the whiteness of the white squall in southern seas, the terror of white breakers when a ship is skirting the coast--all these things gain an element of bleak terror from their cold hue. White is the terrible, elemental truth: all warmer hues and colours are but laid on from without: nature paints like a harlot, and beneath these happy colours is the ghastly white uniformity of the charnel-house. “Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us like a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured or colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things, the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
5
Night and day Ahab’s mind broods over Moby-Dick. In his cabin he pores over his charts, endeavouring to follow the seasonal tracks of Moby-Dick from one probable feeding-ground to another; but, as he knows his crew have common daily appetites, and the permanent constitution of the manufactured man is sordidness, although he may occasionally be fired into knight-errantry, on the first raising of a whale, the Pequod goes in pursuit.
In his virgin encounter with the whale, under the “prudent” Starbuck, Ishmael finds himself in a swamped boat, riding through the night in the hope of being picked up in the morning; and on top of the long vigil, the little whale-boat, lost in the mist, is run down by the Pequod, and all the cold, drenched hands take to the water for their lives. It is all in a day’s work. When terror and anguish become unbearable, what seems most momentous becomes part of a general joke. This humour of desperation colours and effervesces through all the bitter potions that the tale itself offers: it does not remove the bitterness, but, as sweet and bitter may mingle in the same draught, it offers a counter-taste: and it keeps the most frenzied blackness from having the unrelieved and inhuman quality of a maniac’s delirium. The men who face death and danger most constantly, the sailor, the miner, the soldier, the lonely pioneer, develop this shrug and grin at the very moment of encountering death--and in the whale fishery, these moments are plentiful. Little Pip, the negro, pops out of his boat in fright, and is left behind in the heat of the chase, and, though finally rescued, is turned into a blank idiot: Tashtego, ladling out the fragrant sperm from the dead whale’s head, falls into it, the entire mass drops into the sea, and the Indian is rescued only by a feat of almost obstetrical skill: any hour, one may drop from a lookout station or get tangled in the whale-line itself, as the whale races with it, and perish in the coils. But what of it? “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only in the swift, subtle turns of death that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror than though seated before your evening fire with a poker and not a harpoon by your side.”