Chapter Chapter 1 · Loomings.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having

little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me

on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part

of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and

regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about

the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever

I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and

bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever

my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral

principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and

methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to

get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I

quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they

but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other,

cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by

wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her

surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme

downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and

cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of

land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears

Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What

do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand

thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some

leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some

looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the

rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these

are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to

counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are

the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and

seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the

extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder

warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water

as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of

them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets

and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell

me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all

those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take

almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a

dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in

it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest

reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will

infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.

Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this

experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical

professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for

ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,

quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley

of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his

trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were

within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up

from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands

winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in

their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and

though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this

shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were

fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June,

when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among

Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop

of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel

your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon

suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy

him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian

trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a

robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?

Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a

mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out

of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did

the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely

all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that

story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild

image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that

same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image

of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin

to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my

lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a

passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a

purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers

get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy

themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger;

nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a

Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction

of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all

honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind

whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,

without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.

And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory

in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I

never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously

buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who

will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled

fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old

Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the

mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,

plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.

True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to

spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of

thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor,

particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the

Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if

just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been

lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in

awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a

schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and

the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off

in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom

and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed,

I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel

Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and

respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t

a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may

order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the

satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is

one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or

metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is

passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades,

and be content.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of

paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single

penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must

pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and

being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable

infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But _being

paid_,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man

receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly

believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no

account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign

ourselves to perdition!

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome

exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world,

head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if

you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the

Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from

the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not

so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many

other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But

wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a

merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling

voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the

constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in

some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And,

doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand

programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in

as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive

performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run

something like this:

“_Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States._

“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the

Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when

others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short

and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I

cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the

circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives

which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced

me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the

delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill

and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale

himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my

curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island

bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all

the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds,

helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things

would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an

everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and

land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to

perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let

me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of

the place one lodges in.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the

great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild

conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into

my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them

all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.