Chương Chương 28 · Ahab.

For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was

seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the

watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed

to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from

the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was

plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and

dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to

penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.

Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly

gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague

disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the

sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at

times by the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly

recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived

of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was

almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish

prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or

uneasiness—to call it so—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look

about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such

emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,

were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the

tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me

acquainted with, still I ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the

fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation

in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the

aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was

most forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and

induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.

Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own

different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of

them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being

Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had

biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the

southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed,

gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable

weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey

and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the

ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping

and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of

the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the

taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension;

Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.

There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the

recovery from any. 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. His

whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an

unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out

from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his

tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you

saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that

perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a

great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and

without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from

top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still

greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or

whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could

certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or

no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once

Tashtego’s senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew,

superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did

Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the

fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this

wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman

insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out

of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless,

the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested

this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no

white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever

Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to

pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the

dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the

livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly

noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the

barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come

to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished

bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said

the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted craft, he shipped

another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.”

I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of

the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds,

there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the

plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and

holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out

beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest

fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and

fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor

did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest

gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not

painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not

only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion

in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some

mighty woe.

Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.

But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either

standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or

heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to

grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if,

when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry

bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it

came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet,

for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he

seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only

making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling

preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so

that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite

Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that

layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose

the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the

pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him

from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and

May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest,

ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some

few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did,

in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish

air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look,

which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.