This is the seventh of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

Having reintroduced Moby-Dick, Melville devotes the next sixteen chapters to whales and whale-hunting. This pattern—a gam between the Pequod and another whale-ship, followed by yarns of whaling, brief times of peace followed by long periods of war—will prevail for the second half of the book. It follows the refined understanding of the cosmos Ishmael introduced in the middle of his yarn, his suggestion that even chaos features a few safe harbors, a few island havens.

This set of chapters concerns bodies, and how it is the nature of things for bodies to devour bodies. He begins with three chapters on the bodies of whales as depicted in paintings and other visual media. “Such pictures of whales are all wrong”—”pictorial delusions” whose “primal source” or sources may be found among Hindu, Egyptian, and Greek sculpture. Those were “inventive but unscrupulous times” (as Melville has already asserted respecting ancient scriptures), and “ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not only in the most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him” drawn by men who were looking at beached whales mutilated and deformed by whatever catastrophes had killed them. A beached whale is the proverbial fish out of water, and so the whole of it as it is in life “must remain unpainted to the last.” “The only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself,” a hazardous expedition; “it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.” Experience is the best way of knowing, but, as Radney’s fate shows, getting close enough for detailed observation risks killing the observer. Among painters, the “less erroneous” efforts have been undertaken by the French generally, Ambroise Louis Garneray in particular. “The French are the lads for painting action,” evidently because they have long been the preeminent military power in Europe. Although Ishmael professes not to know it, Garneray, though never a whaler, served as an officer in the French navy during the Napoleonic Wars. By contrast, industrial and commercial “English and American whale draughtsman seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale.” Regimes enter into the souls of artists as much as they do the souls of whalemen.

Civilization itself may interfere with artists who attempt to capture the whale. The proof is our yarn-spinner, portrayer of whales in words. “Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage”—an outsider, an Ishmael. This matters, not necessarily (as one might suppose) because the primal, savage man best understands the primal, savage beast but because “one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry.” With that patience, “the white sailor-savage… will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield” and as “full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old German savage, Albert Dürer.” Ishmael and his maker, Melville, exhibit similar patience, similar barbarity or savagery “so-called,” similar attention to detail. Such men will show you the whale, without endangering your body although perhaps endangering your soul.

As for the whale’s body, the Right Whale nourishes it with brit, tiny crustaceans that live on the surface of the ocean. “Brit” is the chapter containing the middle pages of the book, and in them we learn that “to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling”; Columbus, for example, “sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one.” Such surface-sailing induces the illusion of mastery, seen especially in the modern attempt to conquer nature itself. But “however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make.” The illusion of modern science, of the civilization that preens itself on its supposed triumph over savagery, brings men to lose “that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.” We overlook what should be an obvious fact: “Noah’s flood has not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.” And that two-thirds of the world devours not only land and landsmen who venture onto it but itself. The sea “is also fiend to its own offspring,” “dash[ing] even the mightiest whales upon the rocks” along with wrecked ships. “No mercy, no power but its own controls it”: Where is God, Ishmael implies, on the ocean? Has He ever moved across the waters of the primeval cosmos? “The masterless ocean overruns the globe.” But more, the ocean’s power finds its match in the ocean’s “subtlety.” “Its most dreaded creatures glide under water.” Like the cosmos itself, its lovely, azure surface hides monsters, and those monsters themselves come in forms of “devilish brilliance and beauty.” Hobbes had it right: a place of “universal cannibalism,” the sea shelters creatures which “prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”

And then consider yourself, know yourself as well as a native of Lima knows his city. “Do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself” in this war of all against all, in and on the sea that surrounds the land? For as “this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti”—one place where desperate captains and their mutinous crewmen alike both find respite—”full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!” Who is the God who might preserve you in this Eden within yourself? He does not seem to be on the waters, but He does seem to be (even if only as a metaphor) in the cautionary words of Ishmael’s yarn, words both illustrating and exemplifying the deliberation and choice that can inflect if not master or rule fate and chance. Self-knowledge and consequent self-protection are still possible, even if the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate never really has been and never really will be. Central to Moby-Dick stands this challenge to the Bible and religions generally, and to American, Western, and modern rationalism, along with a classical, ‘ancient,’ and reasonable reply, wrapped though it may be in ‘Romantic’ rhetoric.

One may measure the difference between the Right Whale and the Sperm Whale by noticing that the former eats brit, the latter giant squid. As the Pequod sailed toward Java, the Spirit-Spout occasionally beckoning them on, Daggoo sighted what appeared to be Moby-Dick. It turned out to be a giant squid, basking on the surface. As with its enemy, the Sperm Whale, “few men have any but the most vague ideas concerning [the giant squid’s] true nature and form.” Sailors suppose that it clings to the bottom of the ocean with its giant tentacles, only to be pried loose and devoured by the Sperm Whale which, unlike the Right Whale, has the jaw and the teeth necessary for that task. But it is “only by inference” that “one can tell of what, precisely,” the Sperm Whale’s food consists. Ahab did not care. As soon as the squid was identified, he silently turned his boat back to the ship. Tyrant Ahab plots; he never wonders. Ever-observant, prudent Queequeg matter-of-factly remarked that where you see squid you will see the Sperm Whale.

Ishmael turns next to the business of killing whales. Each harpoon attaches to a “whale-line,” the rope that “folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction” like the deadly snakes draped around Indian jugglers. With a harpooned whale pulling it, the line may entangle a sailor and drag him overboard. This should terrorize the men, “yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?”—enables them to laugh and joke, even as the boat itself “rock[s] like a cradle,” pitching each one from side to side. Ahab understood the power of habit as a tool of everyday ruling; here it faces down the prospect of death. But consider yourself, Ishmael again recommends: “All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.” A philosopher would feel no more or less terror in a whale boat than in a chair before his hearth. The hemorrhage, the embolism, the seizure: just as each human being has his inner Tahiti, so has he his death-dealing, serpentine, inner chaos.

Queequeg was right. They sighted a whale. In the pursuit it dove, surfacing near Stubb’s boat. Ishmael provides a blood-soaked description of the kill, not omitting the whipping of the line in the boat. The whale’s “tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men,” their savage forebears in the whaling life. Stubb ordered the men to pull the whale to the surface, then took a lance and probed for its heart. “At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air”; Stubb’s lance had burst the whale’s heart. All in a day’s work for Stubb, who paused to dump the dead ashes of his pipe into the water, “thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.” It will soon transpire that he contemplated not the cosmos but the prospect of dinner.

The time between the kill and the meal gives Ishmael time to propose a modest reform in whaling practices. Harpooneers are expected not only to hit the whale but to join in rowing the whale-boat. This tires them, contributing to the poor percentage of kills—only five of fifty throws fastens the harpoon firmly on the whale. If the (as it were) spiritual side of Ishmael seeks its inner Tahiti, his practical side aims not at revolution but at reform. For him, given his assessment of nature, modest self-government prevails in thought and action.

Mr. Stubb concerned himself more with eating: brit for Right Whales, Squid for Sperm Whales, Sperm Whales for him. While Ahab viewed the kill with “some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair,” being no nearer to killing Moby-Dick, Stubb, “flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement.” (“Staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs”—a resignation to which that good man may too readily recur.) Temporarily free of rule by his two superiors, Stubb ordered Daggoo to cut him a steak from the prime section of the whale. He was not the only creature dining with relish, as the sharks swarmed around the carcass, gouging out their own filets. Ishmael sharply observed that sharks follow slave ships, too, devouring the bodies of dead slaves, tossed overboard. For his entertainment before dining, Stubb commanded the ship’s black cook, himself effectively a slave, to deliver a sermon to the sharks, to tell them to quiet their thrashing. Unamused by the command to perform what amounted to a minstrel show for the Second Mate, Christian “Fleece” had no choice but to obey, preaching very much along the lines Ishmael himself thinks. Addressing the sharks as “fellow-critters,” he admitted that their voracity “can’t be helped” because “dat is natur”; perhaps thinking more of Stubb than of the heedless sharks, he added that “to gobern wicked natur, dat is de pint,” since angels themselves are “not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.” And (again thinking of Stubb, who shared his meal with no one) could you not add a bit of charity and justice to your actions? Could the bigger sharks not bite off some of that blubber and feed the smaller ones? Turning directly to Stubb, Fleece announced that it was no use, that sharks “don’t hear one word,” and will feed until their bellies are full—except that their “bellies is bottomless.” This is the one lesson Stubb does take from the designated sermonizer: “Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion,” and so will go to dinner. After listening to several peremptory orders for more whale-meat tomorrow, Fleece judged Stubb to be no better than a shark.

Ishmael concurs, widening the lesson, Montaigne-like, to mankind generally. Just as we are all savages, beneath the civilizational surface, so we are all cannibals. “Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.” But why does that make men cannibals, rather than merely voracious?

Ishmael shows why he thinks so as he describes the “laborious” business of later generations of slaughterers decorously would call ‘processing’ the whale. Queequeg and another sailor killed some of the sharks, an effort which “brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe.” Sharks began to devour the bowels of the sharks ripped open by the whale-spades; more, the disemboweled sharks ate their own bowels “till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth.” Here is pantheism, indeed: nature is self-devouring; it cannibalizes itself and derives energy from that very cannibalism. “A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed.” No isolatoes in nature, but no sweet pantheism of peace, either: neither Percy Bysshe Shelley nor Ralph Waldo Emerson ever went to sea. Ishmael gives Queequeg the coda, a serious wisecrack: “Queequeg no care what god made him shark”—readers will recall Blake’s “tyger,” the animal to which Fedallah’s crew were compared—”wedder Feejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin”—savage, blood-red, like the faces of the sailors when the sun reflected the bloody water.

Attuned to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the whalemen ignored the Sabbath, working on the whale that Sunday, “every sailor a butcher,” bloodied. The Sabbath separates the day of rest from the days of work, even as the Creator-God of the Bible remains separate from His Creation. But in a pantheistic cosmos no genuine separation exists; one day is like another, distinguished only by the kind of actions undertaken on that day. The upper blubber-layer of the whale is called the “blanket-piece,” and indeed serves to insulate the whale in all hemispheres, and at all depths of the ocean. The blubber came off the corpse like an orange rind. This unforbidden fruit was thrown into the ship’s blubber-room. “Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands kept coiling away the long blanket-pieces as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents.” In the pantheistic cosmos, fruit and Serpent are essentially the same thing, things to be ‘processed’ and re-‘processed.’ In the pantheistic chaos, all persons, animals, and things are at least in some measure blood-red dam Ingins.

The Sperm Whale’s thick, dense blubber does act like a blanket “or, better still, an Indian poncho.” “Crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight lines” resembling hieroglyphs, the pattern reminds Ishmael of “those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids” (in Egypt, where God’s people were enslaved) and also “the old Indian characters chiseled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi.” “Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.” If God is indeed “a dam Ingin,” His inscrutable actions (whether in making tigers, lambs, or sharks) match the inscrutability of the markings He leaves. His Word is no-word, or at least no word understandable to any person now alive.  But the whale also shares with humans lungs and warm blood. The blanket protects “the great monster” from the cold of deep and far-northern waters and the tropical heat. “It does seem to me,” Ishmael testifies, “that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.” “In all seasons retain a temperature of thine own.” Here is the lesson of Fleece’s sermon, heard not by a shark but by a fellow-human. Once again, Ishmael commends defense of the inner Tahiti against chaos. Melville’s contemporary, Nietzsche, would soon call for a pessimism of strength; Melville’s Ishmael already has a (pantheistic) pessimism of strength.

He returns to his account of whaling’s laborious business. The sailors separated the body of the whale from its valuable head, cutting the body loose from the ship and leaving it to drift. It was white, like “a marble sepulcher” and of course like the living death, Moby-Dick. “Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives,” flesh consumed by sea-gulls, “the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled,” examples of the “horrible vulturism of earth from which not the mightiest whale is free.” The whale lived on, however, in the superstitious minds of sailors. Seen from afar by “some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel,” the “whale’s unharming corpse” is often mistaken for a shoal or a rock, the region set down in a log book as a danger zone, avoided for years by other ships, which “leap over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held.” Sheep bring Christians to mind, and indeed, Ishmael scornfully exclaims, “There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!” It is a funeral dirge not for the whale but for religion. “Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world”—specifically, the world of those who believe unwittingly false reports carefully written down as well-intended warnings to the flock. Ghostly horror-stories, like idealistic fantasies, like the beautiful surface of the world itself, only mask reality, diverting men from attention to what they most need to know.

Ahab thought of the whale-head as a sphinx. Reversing the legend, it never interrogated him; he interrogated it, or rather entreated and even prayed to it. “Tell us the secret thing that is in thee,” what you have learned, you who have “moved amid this world’s foundations,” the primeval water over which the God of the Bible moved. You have seen not only the foundation of the world but the human beings who have lived and died above it: the drowned sailors; the lovers who jumped from the burning ship; the murder-victims of pirates. “O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham,” the most faithful of the faithful, “and not one syllable is thine!” In the legend, the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle is “Man.” In this more real world, the Sphinx remained silent, giving no answers. Lapsed-Quaker Ahab longed for St. Paul to come, “and to my breezelessness bring his breeze,” the Holy Spirit. “O nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies!”—those parallels between the atomistic material of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the mind of man. In the materialist and pantheist chaos there is no creating Logos, no understandable Word of God. Only silence.

The next gam closes this account of cosmic cannibalism with an ironic answer to Ahab’s prayer. The Sphinx did not speak, but it had a sort of prophet. The crew sighted the Jeroboam, another whale-ship out of Nantucket. The Captain Mayhew refused to board the Pequod, as his own crew suffered from an epidemic. He preferred to converse with Ahab from a whale-boat. The original Jeroboam, the evil king of southern Israel portrayed in I Kings 11-14, has his counterpart not in the captain but in a crazed Shaker who accompanied him on the boat, a man with “deep, settled, fanatic delirium” in his eyes, who has neutralized the legitimate rule of the captain and his officers by terrifying the crew with end-times prophecies. The madman came from the “crazy society of Niskayuna Shakers,” who settled in that upstate New York village in 1774, in order to bring the sect’s founder, Mother Ann Lee, recently arrived from England via New York City, to a safe haven. (Judging from one extant portrait, Mother Lee, it might be noted, had an extraordinarily prominent forehead, rather resembling that of a sperm whale.) At Niskayuna, this man had “announced the speedy opening of the seventh vial” of the Book of Revelation, which was in this case “supposed to be charged with laudanum.”  But he soon departed for Nantucket, seized with still another “strange, apostolic whim.” “With that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common sense exterior,” enabling him to sign on to the whale ship; safely out of sight of land, he “announced himself as the archangel Gabriel [meaning “God is my strength”], guardian angel of Israel and trumpeter of the world’s doom, “command[ing] the captain to jump overboard.” Although the captain disobeyed, he found himself increasingly powerless, as “the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness” and feelings of terror. “Jeroboam” means “the people contend,” and so they did, effectively mutinying, changing the regime of the ship from a monarchy to a popularly-supported tyranny. (The name “Mayhew” might be a sly reference to Jonathan Mayhew, an eminently respectable New England clergyman of the Founding era who blended liberal Christianity with sober Lockeanism, the sort of man who may indeed influence the course of events on stable, dry land but might find himself all at sea, when at sea with a self-proclaimed prophet of God.) The epidemic only increased ‘Gabriel’s’ usurped authority, as he “declar[ed] that the plague, as he so called it” (following Biblical language) “was at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure.” After proclaiming Moby-Dick to be God, ‘Gabriel’ correctly prophesied the death of the First Mate, who had announced his intention to kill the Whale; this confirmed his authority over the “poor devils,” the crew. From then on, the crew “sometimes render[ed] him personal homage, as to a god,” of whom they begged for mercy. In the Bible, Jeroboam leads Israelites in idolatrous worship of the Golden Calf.

All of which parallels much of Ahab’s own tyranny, From his feigned sanity to gain access to the ship, to his usurpation of the authority of the owners of the Pequod once safely offshore, to his dominance over the officers by mesmeric words of monomaniacal ardor that bring the crew under his tyrannical rule, “Gabriel” does indeed answer Ahab’s prayer by holding a mirror up to him. After hearing Ahab also intends to kill the Whale, he prophesied Ahab’s destruction: “Beware the blasphemer’s end!” “The crazy sea… seemed in league with him”—a just ‘analogy,’ indeed, as ‘Gabriel’ will prove a true prophet not of God but of chaos, even as he ruled superstitious men by means of an idolatrous, self-divinizing cult. The Biblical Jeroboam waged constant war with the house of Judah, the king of Northern Israel. Both Israels finally deviate from the God of the Bible, as indeed the “houses” of the Pequod and the Jeroboam now have done. “Curses throttle thee!” Ahab shrieked in reply. The war of the two false Israels continued.

This is the sixth in a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

“Isolatoes” may populate this novel, but social and political relations persist. The “gam”—a social meeting between two or more whale-ships at sea—endures as a tradition no other type of ocean-going ship upholds. Typically, sailors on the outward-bound ship give letters to the homeward-bound ship for delivery to families and sweethearts in Nantucket; in exchange, the homeward-bound sailors offer information on whales they’ve seen on their voyage. It is almost needless to say that Ahab has no use for such social exchanges, unless the other captain has seen Moby-Dick. But such single-minded and unsocial behavior can exact a political price.

“The Town-Ho’s Story” is the longest chapter of the book. A yarn within the yarn, it consists of a story Ishmael tells to a pair of “Spanish friends” at the Golden Inn in Lima, Peru, some time after the voyage of the Pequod. [1] A whale-ship out of Nantucket, manned mostly by Polynesians, the Town-Ho‘s name derives from another whaling tradition: Before whalemen shouted “There she blows” upon sighting a whale, they shouted “Town-Ho.” “Town” is an Indian word, originally signifying that the speaker had seen a whale twice—a confirmed sighting. In English it originally referred to a closed-in garden, and eventually to a small, urbanized community as distinguished from a village and from the countryside. All of these threads play into the yarn. As for “Ho,” it’s another ‘H’-expulsion of breath, as is the word for the monster whose presence it signifies.

Ahab does want to talk with the captain of this ship because the crew has encountered Moby-Dick. But there was “a secret part of the tragedy” that Ahab and his officers never learn, a part “which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men.” Tyrants and oligarchs alike isolate themselves from their subjects, even as they rule them. As a result, they fail to learn some things. They often attempt to overcome this handicap by forming a network of spies—secrecy against secrecy. Ahab and the officers seem not to have taken this precaution.

Cruising the Pacific Ocean, the Town-Ho had developed a slow leak, which its crew attributed fancifully or playfully to a swordfish. There was no real emergency, as the pumps kept the ship afloat. Most captains stay at sea under these conditions, as long as they are fairly close to land. Only when they are far out at sea does a captain begin to worry, and set sail for some harbor. The choice is thus a matter of prudential judgment made within the constraints of geographic location and the condition of the ship. A few decades later, when thinking about ‘ships of state,’ scholars would begin to call such matters ‘geopolitics.’ Such judgments are what rulers are expected to make; to question their judgment is to question their authority to rule, to threaten revolution, regime change—mutiny.

Regime conflict arose from a private conflict between Steelkilt, a “desperado” from Buffalo, New York, a “Lakeman”—a man who sailed the Great Lakes before signing on to the whale-ship—and Radney, the first mate, a sharp-edged Nantucketer. Ishmael explains to Pedro and Sebastian that the Great Lakes are “grand fresh-water seas,” having “many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and climes.” These include “two great contrasting nations”—sharply contrasting indeed, as in the 1850s veterans of the War of 1812 still lived who remembered naval battles on those seas. On shore there are still military batteries, “wild barbarians,” and beasts of prey; on the seas, shipwrecks occur every year. “Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured.” For his part, though a townsman, not a lakeman, Radney “was quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives.” Just as Radney had “some good-hearted traits” to go with his asperities, so Steelkilt “had long been retained harmless and docile,” and might have remained so, if treated with “inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave’s right.” But Radney proved a poor ruler, “doomed and mad.” In this, he resembles Ahab, albeit with neither the intelligence nor the megalo-monomania. Radney was a tyrant, but a petty tyrant.

Somewhat concerned, Radney ordered the sails hoisted to speed the journey to the ship’s “island haven.” Because he was no coward, the sailors suspected his worry arose because he was a part-owner of the ship; so they joked, amongst themselves. The choice to change the ship’s course belongs to the captain; presumably, Radney persuaded him. But Radney had a problem in ruling, not with his captain or the sailors as a group but with one sailor in particular. “As you well know,” Ishmael tells his friends, “it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make a little heap of dust out of it.” So Radney regarded Steelkilt, that “tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman” and “a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him… which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne’s father.” Nature made Steelkilt a king, indeed an emperor, king of kings; chance and convention made him a subject, a sailor. By nature but not by convention, a Steelkilt should rule a Radney (a man “ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious”). Rule by convention is both necessary—a means of ruling the unruly—and at times unnatural, unjust, at least to the extent that justice may be said to retain some foothold in a ‘nature’ chaotic as the sea. Rule by convention is necessary because, as an earlier chapter taught us, many human beings will not obey rulers consistently without the habituation custom induces. The natural ruler who challenges conventional rule threatens the necessary conditions of any rule within a real, non-utopian human community. America’s Declaration of Independence, its founding revolutionary statement, acknowledges this: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Given this morally compromised, politically tense, and emotionally grating circumstance, Radney “did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.” Steelkilt did enjoy a small measure of conventional authority as the leader of the pump gang which keeps the ship afloat. Seeing Radney draw near while they worked, he pretended not to notice him, bantering with his mates about Radney’s “investment,” his “estate” in the ship and his supposed over-caution motivated by that self-interest. For his part, Radney pretended not to hear the chatter; taking refuge in his conventional right to command, he angrily ordered the men to pump harder. They did. Radney then foolishly pressed his advantage. When the crew took a rest break, he ordered the exhausted Steelkilt to to sweep the deck, a menial task for boys; “plainly [he] meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face.” Steelkilt exhibited his natural superiority by remaining calm and attempting to take refuge in a countervailing convention, pointing to the three boys who were the “customary sweepers.” Radney persisted, repeating his command and threatening Steelkilt with a hammer. Neither man backed down, Steelkilt warning Radney not to touch him with that hammer; when Radney did, Steelkilt broke his jaw with a punch. That would make it harder for Radney to issue orders, for a while.

Though justified by natural right, Steelkilt had no illusions about the hazards of having violated the legal conventions of the ship. He went for reinforcements from his two “comrades”—”Canallers,” that is, sailors who worked on the Erie Canal and would thus have a certain social connection with a sailor who had worked on the Great Lakes. This requires Ishmael to offer another explanation to his Spanish friends, who have never ventured into North America. The Erie Canal has many of the characteristics of the Great Lakes. It may be narrow but it is very long—360 miles “through the entire breadth of the state of New York,” with cities and villages, swamps and “affluent, cultivated fields,” vast forests, “noble Mohawk counties” but also “rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones.” “Snow-white” gives the reader pause, and indeed there is a touch of the Whale’s chaos even in them. The Canal consists of “one continuous stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life,” a point on which Ishmael does not fail to recur to his schoolmasterly inclination to offer a lesson: “There howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.” At this point, a silent and unnamed listener interrupts to confirm Ishmael’s understanding of fatality. Acknowledging the guest’s courtesy in referring to “distant Venice” instead of “present Lima,” this self-professed native of Lima cites “the proverb all along this coast—’Corrupt as Lima.'” The citizens of Lima have self-knowledge, perhaps more than the citizens of the United States. The man is a sailor, too, saying he’s seen Venice—indeed as corrupt as Ishmael has claimed: “The holy city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it!” he exclaims. Dominic founded a new and austere order within the Catholic Church, a new regime within that regime. Does New York State need a new regime? Can a redirected “Young America” give it one?

His veracity affirmed and encouraged, Ishmael continues his portrait of Canallers, men as “abundantly picturesque and wicked” as heroes in dramas; “like Mark Antony” (another revolutionary) along the Canal, the Yankee Nile, the Canaller “indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra”; Shakespeare describes the original Cleopatra as having her cheeks alternately cooled and warmed by the fans her slaves wave over her. (It must be admitted that this wasn’t the last time a sailor would hail a whore aboard ship, in the hope of having his breath taken away.) “But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed,” as he plays the “terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats.” Nonetheless, as with so many rough-edged men, including Steelkilt and even Radney, the Canaller has his “redeeming qualities,” proving as ready “to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one.” One such befriended Ishmael, who evidently got himself into a strait at some point. Given these characteristics, Canallers are as much “distrusted by our whaling captains” as Aussies, proverbially a rough lot.”To many thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.”

Don Pedro understands. “No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.—But the story,” he reminds Ishmael, who has digressed, with no shortness of breath.

In the ensuing brawl, Steelkilt and the Canallers fought two junior mates and four harpooneers, with other sailors joining in. Safely removed to the sidelines, “the valiant captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious scoundrel,” but without much effect, as “Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all.” Barricading himself and his allies, Steelkilt opened negotiations, offering to return to work if the captain guaranteed no flogging: “Treat us decently,” he told the captain, “and we’re your men.” Faced with this dilemma of authority, this conflict of natural justice with the need to enforce convention, the captain refused; eventually Steelkilt and the other (now) nine mutineers agreed to be confined to the forecastle, where over the next five days the captain starved out all but the original three. At this point, Steelkilt proposed a breakout and a shipboard rampage but the Canallers betrayed him, tied him up, handed him over. For their pains, all of them were tied to the mizzen rigging, where the Canallers hung on either side of Steelkilt, like “the two crucified thieves” around Christ. Ishmael thus presents his Spanish-Catholic friends with a serious parody of the Crucifixion, a version suggesting that the Apostles deserted Christ (as indeed one of them, Peter, did). The parody preserves the nobility of the would-be savior of the ship from the tyrannical first mate and lackluster captain. But that nobility has a serpentine quality; this ‘Christ’ has a certain deviltry in him. As the captain prepares to flog the offender against the law of the ship, Steelkilt “hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain,” who hesitates and then desists. At this, Radney arose from his berth; hissed at similarly by Steelkit, he hesitated but flogged him anyway. What is the meaning of this serpentine hiss?

It may have something to do with the result of Steelkilt’s apparently failed revolution. Could he have whispered to the officers that his flogging would cause a violent revolt? However this may be, he had now won over the crew, effecting a real revolution underneath the superficial return to order. At his insistence, however, the sailors did not mutiny overtly, in action. He persuaded them rather to desert the ship after it reaches port and in the meantime to refuse to shout out if they sight a whale. In thus subverting the purpose of the regime by the means of a new social compact, Steelkilt destroyed the rule of his erstwhile masters. There shall be no “Town-ho!” cry on the Town-Ho, the men agreed. Thoreau-like civil disobedience will preserve the ship physically, maintain its regime nominally, while ending the regime effectively. Steelkilt has exacted public revenge on tyranny, with the prudence of a natural ruler.

However, as a man of still excessive spiritedness, an imperfect founder, Steelkilt wasn’t done with his private enemy. He plotted to murder Radney by smashing his head with an iron ball. Here the promised “wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God” occurred. “A fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed he planned,” but simultaneously provided him with the means of “complete revenge.” Revenge is mine, saith the LORD of the Bible; “by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have done.” This begins with the action of the salvific fool, “forgetful of the compact among the crew,” who saw none other than Moby-Dick, and blurted out, “There she rolls!” Social compacts can prove vulnerable in the passion of the moment. This cry united the crew, sailors and officers alike, “anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish.” Ishmael again calls attention to the “strange fatality pervad[ing] the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted”—as if providential, as if planned as Ahab in his cabin had planned, and as God does plan, according to the Bible. Fatality evidently works through the natural human desires for fame and fortune.

The whale-boats dropped into the sea and pursued the Whale. Radney ordered his crew to row right up to it, and Moby-Dick killed him for his zeal. Chaotic nature has its graces, even as rough Lakemen and Canallers have their virtues. Steelkilt, who crewed on Radney’s boat, cut the harpoon line, setting Moby-Dick free—one good turn deserving another. For his part, Moby-Dick eluded the other boats and disappeared; having done injury only to the petty tyrant who threatened him, the Whale injured no one else. Chaotic nature even has its justice, on occasion.

Steelkilt would need one more intervention from providential chaos. Safely reaching the island, he and several others did indeed desert. Undermanned, the beleaguered captain set out for Tahiti, some 500 miles distant, “to procure a reinforcement to his [depleted] crew.” Steelkilt intercepted his boat, forced the captain to delay his mission for six days, then set out for Tahiti himself. He and his just secessionist-revolutionaries found two ships soon to sail for France, land of revolutionaries, ships whose captains “providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor headed.” Ten days later, the captain arrived on his boat, recruited some Tahitians, returned to his island-haven, and “resumed his cruisings.” In effect, Steelkilt (with an assist from chaos) had saved both himself from hanging and the whale ship from tyranny. The “town” or confirmed whale sighting on the Town-Ho aids revolution of the ‘town’ or regime of the ship itself. (As for the earliest English-language meaning of the word, ‘town’ as ‘garden,’ it will figure later in Ishmael’s yarn.)  Six is the number of God’s initial days of work. An inversion, indeed: Steelkilt required of the captain six days of rest in order to complete his own prudential and provident revolutionary action.

No one knows where Steelkilt is now, Ishmael reports. In Nantucket, Radney’s widow mourns her lost husband; she might have been among the worshippers at the Whalemen’s Chapel. Ishmael swears in front of a priest, on a copy of the Gospels, that his yarn is “in substance and its great items, true”; he knew members of the Town-Ho‘s crew, and had met and talked with Steelkilt himself. It is of course questionable how seriously Ishmael would swear upon the Gospels, that most telling yarn which he has parodied in his own. But in substance and its great items, there is no reason to doubt that his yarn weaves true to his own considered convictions.

At last the secret is out. The sailors on the Pequod prudently kept this yarn from the sight or hearing of Ahab and his officers because it shows not only that revolution against tyranny can succeed but how it can succeed. Regime change requires courage, prudence, and assistance from fellow-subjects and from a force larger than any human reckoning can control. But it can be done. Steelkilt did not aspire to rule the whale ship, only to get free of its tyrannical regime, a regime that invited him to revolt in a manner similar to that described by Hegel in his passage on the struggle for “recognition” between slave and master. Success here required not isolation but alliance, and indeed loyalty in combat. The wrong of private revenge was prevented by a sort of predestination, whether providential or fated. Ishmael here calls it providence, but he’s talking with pious Spanish Catholics. This notwithstanding, there is a sort of justice in small parts of the chaotic war of all against all that animates life both at sea and on land. If that were not so, could we trust Ishmael the yarn-spinner at all, or Melville? Could we trust ourselves to learn from them?

 

Note

1. Readers of Melville’s later novella, Billy Budd, will recognize in the characters Steelkilt and Radney certain parallels with Billy Budd and First Mate Claggart. The circumstances and the actions narrated also ‘rhyme,’ if not exactly. Melville has spun Ishmael’s yarn in a similar but not identical direction, tracing a somewhat different dimension of political rule.

This is the fifth of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

If the palsied universe lies before us like a leper, what shall we do? What way of life, what regime, should human beings follow?

Democracy would be one. The principle of democracy is equality, and if we all are equally illumined not by the light of the Gospels, nor that of the Enlightenment, but by the colorless, all-color of atheism, no one, no few, among us deserves to rule the others. Such pretensions belong among the pretensions Nature paints, in painting herself like a harlot. Nor should democrats be dismissed as entirely ignorant. They hear things. If they are beneath some in civil society, this does keep their ears to the ground, or in this instance the deck. A sailor believes he’s heard something below the deck of the Pequod, something or someone not yet seen on deck. He does not know what or who it is, and the crew both discounts his opinion and passes it around. (Readers know he heard the mysterious stowaways; Melville titles the chapter “Hark!” but the herald angels aren’t singing.) Democrats hear things, even if they might not immediately know what they are. Ishmael never suggests that the officers have heard anything below-deck. Superior rank makes rule easier in one way, harder in another.

Tyranny is another way of life, represented in Ahab. Ishmael shows him poring over his sea charts, calculating where Moby-Dick might most likely be found, given the known, regular migrations of sperm whales—their ‘fatedness.’ This instances the way in which Ahab’s intellect serves his ruling passion, “threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of the monomaniac thought of his soul,” forming a “delirious but still methodical scheme.” In the meantime (and here chance might intervene amidst the workings of fatality and the human will) Moby-Dick might turn up anywhere, long before the ship reaches the most likely hunting ground; Ahab will keep the crew vigilant. As for himself, he remains superficially rational but tormented, awakening from fitful sleep with “his own bloody nails in his palms,” self-crucified. The “hell in himself” drives him from his state room to pace every part of the deck. The “eternal, living principle or soul in him,” his heart, in a state of “horror” at the underlying ‘nature of nature,’ conflicts with his mind, whose “sheer inveteracy of will” drives him to confront and attempt to destroy that nature. More, his heart is “horror-stricken” by the very mind that sets his purpose. His “tormented spirit” may be “a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, 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.” Rarely does skeptical Ishmael go so far as to appeal to God, but he sees the whiteness of the whale, a “blankness,” in the soul of his captain, and doubts that any human word or deed can help him, or the regime he has founded. Ahab’s tyranny is contra natura in two ways: against what he takes to be the malicious underlying nature of nature; against his own soul, his life-principle.

Ishmael admits that Ahab does understand something about nature. In another of his ‘down-to-earth’ chapters, he testifies to the fact that Moby-Dick, if a prodigy, nonetheless has had predecessors for elusiveness and ferocity among the sperm whale species. Ishmael protests that his yarn is no “monstrous fable, or worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.” Sperm whales have indeed attacked whaling boats and ships, but land-dwellers seldom hear of these incidents and have little comprehension of the “powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious” character of the monster, which “acts not so often with blind rage, as with willful, deliberate designs of destruction to his pursuers,” behavior attested to as early as the sixth-century historian Procopius of Constantinople. Wise Solomon was right: “Verily there is nothing new under the sun.” Deploying understatement to drive home the plausibility of what he reports, Ishmael writes, “I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.”

His own credibility (and not incidentally, his own sanity) confirmed, Ishmael returns to the mind of the tyrant, whose rationality of method entails not only calculations concerning the Whale but ruling calculations concerning his officers and crew. “To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.” Although for the moment Ahab has lodged “his magnet in Starbuck’s brain,” he knows that the soul of First Mate Starbuck “abhorred his captain’s quest,” and might challenge his rule; the conflict between mind and life-principle or soul which torments Ahab also torments Starbuck, thanks to Ahab, but in Starbuck his mindset was not self-generated, and so might slip. More, the length of the voyage might detach the souls of his crew from the regime. He has brought them to a high pitch of excitement and resolution with his demagoguery, but he knows that this mood cannot endure through long months at sea. More, “he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation,” giving his officers and crew a right to revolution, should they so choose. “The subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby-Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested in it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action).” Therefore, action they will have, “some nearer things to think of than Moby-Dick,” “some food for their common, daily appetites”—namely, cash. Even the doubloon will not suffice, here, but rather the continuance of “the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod‘s voyage”— whale-hunting and whale-processing for salable commodities.

The lull before action affords Ishmael an opportunity further to picture his own understanding of the human condition. On deck on the ship in a quiet sea, he and Queequeg weave a sword-mat, a sturdy cloth designed to protect sails and riggings at chafing points. “It seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.” The warp (the set of vertical threads, called the “longitude” by weavers) represents necessity or fate; “with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads”—free will and liberty of action. “Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword”—the piece of wood so called, which opens a space in the woof (the horizontal threads or “latitude” of the mat)—”sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly,” represents chance. Longitude and latitude: terms not only of weaving but of mapping; Ishmael and Queequeg’s actions parallel Ahab’s. Their purpose contrasts with his, as protection contrasts with destruction. Against Shelley’s thoroughgoing determinism in “Queen Mab,” Ishmael asserts a limited but still significant role for free will and chance in the workings of fate. Despite his earlier appeal to God, Ishmael leaves no apparent role for providence.

Fate then intervenes. Tashtego sights a school of sperm whales. At this, Ahab is “surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air,” rather like demons in the Bible. These are those whom Ishmael had seen in the dusk, as he walked to board the ship in Nantucket, the ones the sailor heard below deck. They unhitch a fourth whale-boat, which the sailors had assumed to be only a spare; Ahab himself will join the hunt with these confederates. The dominant one, Fedallah, whose name means “in the hands of God” or perhaps “gift of God,” speaks in a serpentine half-hiss; tall, dark-skinned, garbed in black, his head is crowned with the whiteness associated with the whale—long, white hair braided and curled atop his head like a turban. He is a Parsee—that is, a Zoroastrian fire-worshipper whose race once lived in Persia before being driven to India by Muslim persecutors who did not regard Zoroastrians as gifts from God. The Satan-figure’s confreres are Manilans of “tiger-yellow” complexions; Ishmael calls the Filipinos of Manila “a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtlety,” whom “some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil.” While by his irony Ishmael distances himself from such superstition, he does not distance himself from the symbolic significance of Ahab’s chosen close collaborators—a sort of substitute set of officers he has placed at the heart of his usurping regime.

The ship’s formal officers react in accordance with their several characters. Devil-may-care Stubb shouts to his men, “Never mind the brimstone—devils are good fellows enough”; he urges on his rowers with talk of riches in “a tone… strangely compounded of fun and fury.” Starbuck finds relief in the whale-sighting: “This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand!” Flask gets up on Daggoo’s shoulders for a better look at the prey; “the bearer looked nobler than the rider,” as if “Passion and Vanity [were] stamping the living magnanimous earth,” to little effect. On the pursuit, Stubb is cheerful, Starbuck quiet, Flask voluble. As for Ahab, he addresses his boat-crew with “words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land.” All set off amidst “the vast swells of the omnipotent sea,” soon roiled by a squall.

In Starbuck’s boat, Ishmael witnesses the interplay of chance, fate, and choice the sword-mat symbolized. Starbuck orders Queequeg to throw the harpoon (ruling choice, chosen obedience), but a wind-swelled wave (chance) jostles the boat, causing the harpoon to miss its target. The storm (fate) intensifies; they lose sight of the other boats and of the ship. Hoping for rescue, Starbuck lights a lantern, which Queequeg holds. “There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.” They don’t find the ship until the fatality of natural necessity brings the dawn.

Melville titles the next chapter of Ishmael’s yarn “The Hyena”—a jarring title in a maritime narrative. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke,” one “at nobody’s expense but his own.” “There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy”—a sort of thoughtful Stubbism. Safely back on ship, Ishmael asks Queequeg whether such near-calamities “did often happen,” and is calmly assured that they do. He asks Starbuck if lowering whale boats in “a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion”; yes, “careful and prudent” Starbuck answers, having “lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.” And you, Flask? “Yes, that’s the law.” Constrained by fate, chance, and custom, Ishmael nonetheless has a choice to make, and so he does. He draws up his last will and testament, with Queequeg serving as “lawyer, executor, and legatee.” And he feels better for doing so; “a stone was rolled away from my heart.” He concludes that “the hyena” is life itself, the cosmos itself, a “laughing hyena”—a jolly beast, but ready to tear you apart. The best an individual can do is to make prudent choices against necessity and mischance, with the help of a trusted friend. Ishmael thus avoids the maddened libido dominandi of the tyrant’s soul, the decent but weak conventionality of Starbuck, the thoughtless bravado of Stubb, the inanity of Flask, and what he judges to be the evangelical or Christian hope of landlubbers who ignore the harshness of reality.

He remains under the rule of Ahab, where this modest morality will do only a little good. In one of his cheerier moments, Stubb marvels to Flask about peg-legged Ahab’s courage at setting off in a whale-boat. “Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!” Never one to miss a chance to exhibit stupidity, Flask observes that it’s not “so strange,” really, because Ahab has “one knee, and good part of the other left.” Stubb ripostes: “I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.” Surely not. Ishmael, who doesn’t pray much, either, instead considers Ahab’s political responsibility: Should the ship’s captain risk his life? The fact that he does, and the fact that he has engaged his own whale-boat crew, “never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod,” nor does it much trouble many of its sailors or its officers.

As for Ahab’s picked crew-mates, Fedallah “remained a muffled mystery to the last,” with “some sort of a half-hinted influence” or “even authority” over the captain. Fedallah “was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams,” “the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities”—”insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal recollections,” memories of a time when “according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men,” and “the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.” If lands untouched by civilization, or by modern notions of progress, no longer produce such remarkable men, the original earth, still preserved in remote places, brings forth ‘Rousseauian’ noble savages like Daggoo, Queequeg, and Tashtego, but also sinister beings like Fedallah, whom Rousseau would have dismissed as unlikely. Melville is a Rousseau for realists.

Such persons thrive on the chaos of the sea. It was primitive men (Tashtego’s ancestors) who first ventured out on it to hunt whales. Fedallah is the first to see the Spirit-Spout, a will-o’-the-wisp whale-spout that vanishes when whaling boats chase it. “And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought in him… two different things were warring,” his live leg and his dead, peg-leg. “On life and death this old man walked.” “There reigned… a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might round on us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.” Savage persons on the savage sea; the more-or-less civilized sailors, split-souled Ahab included, associate the Spirit-Spout with Moby-Dick. They reach the Cape of Good Hope, which Ishmael, lost to hope, calls Cape Tormentosa, for its “demoniac waves.” There they have their first encounter with another whale ship, “The Albatross,” as white as its namesake, “long absent from home.” Ahab tries to hail it, hoping for news on the Whale, but it drifts off, birdlike. In Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the albatross is the bird of good omen. Ahab doesn’t kill it, as the Mariner does; for him and his crew, it is simply unreachable.

Ahab commands the helmsman to sail on, “round the world.” Ishmael reflects: “Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.” If the world were “an endless plain,” at least there could be progress, “promise in the voyage.” “But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.” Given the futility of progress on a round globe, where should the ship of state sail? Should it sail at all, or only keep to port?