บทที่ บทที่ 41 · Moby Dick.

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;

my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more

did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A

wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud

seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous

monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of

violence and revenge.

For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,

secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly

frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of

his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen

him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given

battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of

whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire

watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest

along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth

or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any

sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity

of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances,

direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole

world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings

concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels

reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or

such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity,

which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had

completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair

presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other

than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked

by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and

malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by

accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps,

for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred,

more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large,

than to the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous

encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly

regarded.

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance

caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one

of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any

other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue

in these assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken

limbs, or devouring amputations—but fatal to the last degree of

fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and

piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake

the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White

Whale had eventually come.

Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more

horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do

fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising

terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in

maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors

abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.

And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery

surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and

fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only

are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and

superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they

are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is

appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its

greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such

remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a

thousand shores, you would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or

aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and

longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is

wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many

a mighty birth.

No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over

the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in

the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and

half-formed fœtal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which

eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything

that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally

strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White

Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his

jaw.

But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.

Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm

Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the

leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are

those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous

enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would

perhaps—either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or

timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there

are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not

sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered

the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is

restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;

seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish

fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern

whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale

anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows

which stem him.

And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary

times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book

naturalists—Olassen and Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not only to

be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be

so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.

Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these or almost

similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron

himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks

included) are “struck with the most lively terrors,” and “often in the

precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks with

such violence as to cause instantaneous death.” And however the general

experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in

their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the

superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their

vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.

So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few

of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days

of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long

practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring

warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be

hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition

as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be

inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are

some remarkable documents that may be consulted.

Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things

were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who,

chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the

specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious

accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if

offered.

One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked

with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was

the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had

actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same

instant of time.

Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit

altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as

the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged,

even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm

Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to

his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious

and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning

the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he

transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant

points.

It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and

as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby,

that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose

bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland

seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has

been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could

not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been

believed by some whalemen, that the Nor’ West Passage, so long a

problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the

real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old

times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there

was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the

surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain

near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy

Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost

fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and

knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had

escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen

should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not

only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in

time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he

would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to

spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for

again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied

jet would once more be seen.

But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in

the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike

the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his

uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales,

but, as was elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled

forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent

features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he

revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the

same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive

appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by

his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue

sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden

gleamings.

Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his

deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural

terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to

specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults.

More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than

perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers,

with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known

to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their

boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.

Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar

disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in

the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale’s

infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death

that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an

unintelligent agent.

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of

his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed

boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the

white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating

sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the

eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had

dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly

seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the

whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping

his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away

Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk,

no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming

malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that 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 those 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 reverenced 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 demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy

Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby

Dick. He piled upon 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.

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at

the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the

monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate,

corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he

probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.

Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long

months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in

one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian

Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one

another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on

the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania

seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals

during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a

leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was

moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to

lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a

strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when

running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun’sails

spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances,

the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn

swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and

air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale,

and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the

direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self,

raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing.

When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some

still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly

contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows

narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his

narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been

left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural

intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living

instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy

stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its

concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost

his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold

more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one

reasonable object.

This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.

But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding

far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where

we here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it;—and take your

way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;

where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root

of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique

buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken

throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he

patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of

ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that

proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young

exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old

State-secret come.

Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means

are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or

change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long

dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling

was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.

Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when

with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him

otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the

terrible casualty which had overtaken him.

The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly

ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which

always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the

present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely,

that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on

account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent

isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons

he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full

of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and

scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable

idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart

his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes.

Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that,

yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on

his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is,

that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in

him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one

only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one

of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking

in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have

wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on

profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the

mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural

revenge.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses

a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made

up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled

also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in

Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in

Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so

officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality

to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so

aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their

souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the

White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to

be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious

understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have

seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,—all this to

explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean

miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by

the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the

irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand

still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the

place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see

naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.