บทที่ บทที่ 44 · The Chart.

Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that

took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his

purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the

transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea

charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating

himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various

lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady

pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At

intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein

were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former

voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.

While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his

head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever

threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till

it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and

courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing

lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.

But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his

cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were

brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and

others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before

him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to

the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.

Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,

it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary

creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem

to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby

calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling

to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular

latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to

certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that

ground in search of his prey.

So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the

sperm whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe

that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;

were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully

collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to

correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the

flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to construct

elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*

*Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by

an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National

Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that circular, it

appears that precisely such a chart is in course of completion; and

portions of it are presented in the circular. “This chart divides the

ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of

longitude; perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve

columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of which

districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that have

been spent in each month in every district, and the two others to

show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been

seen.”

Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the

sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret

intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in _veins_, as they are called;

continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating

exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one

tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the

direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s parallel,

and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own

unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary _vein_ in which at these

times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width

(more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but

never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads, when

circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at

particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating

whales may with great confidence be looked for.

And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate

feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing

the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his

art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be

wholly without prospect of a meeting.

There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his

delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,

perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons

for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the

herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,

say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were

found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and

unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In

general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the

solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that

though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what

is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on

the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to

visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she

would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding

grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed

only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his

places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s chances of accomplishing

his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to

whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a

particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities

would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every

possibility the next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and

place were conjoined in the one technical phrase—the

Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several consecutive years,

Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for

awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted

interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of

the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the

waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot

where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his

vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering

vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering

hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one

crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those

hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his

unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the

Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her

commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and

then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial

Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next

ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had,

perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very

complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and

sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead

of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;

if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote

from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow

off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any

other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas,

Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon,

might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the

Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it

not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one

solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of

individual recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti

in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar

snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be

unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to

himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he

would throw himself back in reveries—tallied him, and shall he escape?

His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep’s ear!

And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a

weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air

of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what

trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one

unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes

with his own bloody nails in his palms.

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid

dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through

the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them

round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing

of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was

sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up

from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked

flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap

down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild

cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would

burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on

fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms

of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the

plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the

scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab

that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to

burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living

principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated

from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its

outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the

scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it

was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless

leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s

case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme

purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced

itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent

being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common

vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the

unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that

glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room,

was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being,

a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and

therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts

have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus

makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that

vulture the very creature he creates.