Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

Call me Ishmael. Years ago, finding myself poor and aimless on land, I decided to sail and view the watery world. This is my method for curing melancholy and regulating my blood. Whenever my mouth grows grim, or my soul feels like a damp, drizzly November, I know it is time to leave. The urge becomes undeniable when I pause before coffin before warehouses, trail behind funerals, or feel a manic impulse to knock hats off in the street. Going to sea is my alternative to suicide. While Cato died on his sword with a flourish, I quietly board a ship. This impulse is not unique; almost all men feel a magnetic pull toward the ocean.

Consider Manhattan, an island ringed by wharves. On dreamy afternoons, thousands of men stand fixed in ocean trances like silent sentinels. Though confined all week in plaster offices, they drift toward the docks, pressing as close to the water as possible without falling in. This attraction is universal. Even in the countryside, a lost dreamer will inevitably lead you to water if it exists nearby. Thought and fluid are eternally linked. The myth of Narcissus, who drowned chasing his reflection, explains this: we seek the elusive, intangible essence of life found in rivers and seas.

I never voyage as a passenger, since I lack the funds, nor as an officer, for I despise the burden of command. I ship out as a common sailor before the mast. The work is hard and the orders constant, which stings my pride, yet I accept it. Who is not a servant in some grand sense? Furthermore, I insist on being paid for my trouble, a satisfaction far superior to spending money. I also crave the pure air of the forecastle, knowing the officers breathe only what filters down to them.

Why I chose a whaling voyage is a mystery only the Fates can fully explain. It seems to be a scripted interlude in the grand drama of Providence, sandwiched between elections and wars. My primary motive was the whale itself. Such a mysterious monster roused my curiosity, as did the remote, dangerous seas he inhabits. I am tormented by a craving for the distant. I love navigating forbidden waters and landing on savage shores. The flood-gates of the wonder-world opened, and into my soul swam endless processions of whales, dominated by one massive, hooded shape rising like a snowy mountain in the air.

Stuffing a shirt into his old carpet-bag, Ishmael left Manhattan for New Bedford, only to find the packet for Nantucket had already sailed. Stranded for a cold, dismal Saturday night with little money and no acquaintances, he faced the urgent problem of finding lodging. Though New Bedford now monopolized whaling, Ishmael insisted on sailing only from Nantucket, drawn by its ancient, boisterous heritage as the original Tyre of the whaling world.

Pacing the gloomy streets, he rejected “The Crossed Harpoons” and “The Sword-Fish Inn” as too expensive and jolly. Following a waterward instinct, he stumbled into a smoky building, hoping for cheap shelter, but instead found a negro church. Confronted by a hundred black faces and a preacher thundering about the blackness of darkness, Ishmael hastily backed out of the Trap.

Moving on, he discovered a dim light near the docks and a forlorn creaking sign reading “The Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.” The names seemed ominous, but the dilapidated, poverty-stricken look of the place suggested affordable lodgings. Standing in the biting wind, Ishmael reflected on the disparity between the rich, like Dives, who could admire the frost from behind glass, and the poor, like Lazarus, who suffered the full force of the tempestuous Euroclydon. Determined to escape the cold, he prepared to enter the ramshackle inn.

The Spouter-Inn thrust its gable-ended front against the night like a vessel run aground. Ishmael stepped into a wide, low entryway whose wainscoted walls recalled the rotting bulwarks of some condemned ship. One object demanded attention: a massive oil painting so obscured by smoke and age that its subject had become a riddle. At first the canvas seemed to depict nothing coherent—masses of shadow and half-formed shapes that might have been bewitched chaos itself. Theories came and went: a midnight gale on the Black Sea, the four primal elements locked in combat, a Hyperborean winter. But gradually the central mystery resolved. That dark mass hovering over three dim vertical lines took shape as a whale—the great leviathan caught in the act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads of a half-foundered ship, a Cape Horner wrecked beneath an exasperated beast.

The opposite wall offered no comfort. There hung a savage arsenal of clubs studded with glittering teeth, blades tufted with human hair, and one vast sickle-shaped implement that suggested the swath a mower might cut through grass. Mixed among these were broken harpoons bearing violent histories—one lance had killed fifteen whales between sunrise and sunset; another had traveled forty feet through a whale’s body before being recovered years later.

Passing through a low arch, Ishmael entered the public room with its heavy beams and warped planks that made him feel as though he walked the cockpit of some ancient craft. The bar projected from one corner, a crude construction resembling a right whale’s head. The vast arched bone of the jaw stood wide enough to drive a coach beneath, and within this maw bustled a wizened little man the sailors called Jonah, pouring poisons from deceptive glasses that tapered to cheating bottoms.

When Ishmael requested lodging, the landlord delivered unwelcome news: every bed was taken. He must share a blanket with a harpooneer. Ishmael hesitated but agreed, provided the stranger proved decent. Supper offered small comfort—cold food, a colder room, no fire, only two dismal candles. The landlord remarked that the harpooneer ate nothing but rare steaks, a detail that settled into Ishmael’s mind like a splinter. A dark-complexioned man who preferred his meat bloody. He resolved that if they must share a bed, the stranger would undress first.

The evening brought a brief distraction when the crew of the Grampus burst through the door, fresh from a three-year voyage, roaring in like bears from Labrador with ice-crusted beards. Ishmael watched them drink and caper, noting one quiet figure among them—a tall Southerner who stood apart before slipping away into the night. His shipmates called after him—Bulkington!—but he was gone.

When the noise faded, Ishmael’s dread returned. The harpooneer had still not appeared. The landlord responded with maddening riddles about peddling heads: the harpooneer had arrived from the South Seas with embalmed New Zealand heads, curiosities he sold about the town. He had gone out this Saturday night to unload his final specimen before the Sabbath made such business impossible. A man who traded in human heads—this was the creature with whom he must share a bed.