Bab Bab 134 · The Chase—Second Day.

At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.

“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light

to spread.

“See nothing, sir.”

“Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought

for;—the top-gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her all

night. But no matter—’tis but resting for the rush.”

Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular

whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, is

a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is

the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible

confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket

commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last

descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty

accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to

swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of

progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a

pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he

well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at

some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes

the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more

certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be

visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for

after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of

daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future

wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious

mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this

hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in

water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the

steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway

is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their

hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly

say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a

spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions

when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep,

according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so

many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have

about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to

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. That instant, the White Whale made a

sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so

doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask

towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a

surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a

boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of

the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly

stirred bowl of punch.

While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after

the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while

aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching

his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was

lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old

man’s line—now parting—admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to

rescue whom he could;—in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand

concreted perils,—Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards

Heaven by invisible wires,—as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly

from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its

bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell

again—gunwale downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from under

it, like seals from a sea-side cave.

The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as he

struck the surface—involuntarily launched him along it, to a little

distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his

back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from

side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip or

crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and

came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work

for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the

ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his

leeward way at a traveller’s methodic pace.

As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again

came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the

floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at,

and safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists,

and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances;

inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these

were there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen

any one. As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly

clinging to his boat’s broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy

float; nor did it so exhaust him as the previous day’s mishap.

But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as

instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of

Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory

leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.

“Aye, aye, Starbuck, ’tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he

will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”

“The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up; “I

put good work into that leg.”

“But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern.

“Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d’ye see it.—But even with a

broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of

mine one jot more me, than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white whale,

nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and

inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape

yonder roof?—Aloft there! which way?”

“Dead to leeward, sir.”

“Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of

the spare boats and rig them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat’s

crews.”

“Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.”

“Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the

unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!”

“Sir?”

“My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that

shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet.

By heaven it cannot be!—missing?—quick! call them all.”

The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the

Parsee was not there.

“The Parsee!” cried Stubb—“he must have been caught in——”

“The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin,

forecastle—find him—not gone—not gone!”

But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was

nowhere to be found.

“Aye, sir,” said Stubb—“caught among the tangles of your line—I thought

I saw him dragging under.”

“_My_ line! _my_ line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?—What

death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.

The harpoon, too!—toss over the litter there,—d’ye see it?—the forged

iron, men, the white whale’s—no, no, no,—blistered fool! this hand did

dart it!—’tis in the fish!—Aloft there! Keep him nailed—Quick!—all

hands to the rigging of the boats—collect the oars—harpooneers! the

irons, the irons!—hoist the royals higher—a pull on all the

sheets!—helm there! steady, steady for your life! I’ll ten times girdle

the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I’ll slay

him yet!”

“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried Starbuck;

“never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more of

this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove

to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil

shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—what more

wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he

swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the

sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety

and blasphemy to hunt him more!”

“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that

hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this

matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this

hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This

whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion

years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act

under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand round

me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered

lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ’Tis Ahab—his body’s part; but

Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel

strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a

gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and till

ye hear _that_, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe

ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore!

For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface;

then rise again, to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick—two days he’s

floated—tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men, he’ll rise once more,—but

only to spout his last! D’ye feel brave men, brave?”

“As fearless fire,” cried Stubb.

“And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he

muttered on: “The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same

to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek

to drive out of others’ hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine!—The

Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he was to go before:—but still was

to be seen again ere I could perish—How’s that?—There’s a riddle now

might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line of

judges:—like a hawk’s beak it pecks my brain. _I’ll_, _I’ll_ solve it,

though!”

When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.

So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as on

the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the

grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by

lanterns in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and

sharpening their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken

keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while

still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his

scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its

dial; sat due eastward for the earliest sun.