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.
At noon, with still no whale in sight, Ahab realized with a shock that he had oversailed Moby Dick in the darkness. The pursuer had become the pursued. He read this reversal as ill omen and ordered the ship about, steering back into her own white wake. Starbuck murmured that Ahab was steering for the open jaw.
An hour passed, stretched to ages by suspense. Then Ahab descried the spout, and three shrieks went up from the mast-heads as if tongues of fire had voiced them. Before descending, Ahab lingered aloft for one last look at the sea—the same sight he had known as a boy on Nantucket, unchanged since Noah. He noticed tiny mosses in the mast’s cracks, green life absent from his own aged head. He spoke aloud to the Parsee’s prophecy: his pilot would go before him, and he would see Fedallah again. But where? Would he have eyes at the bottom of the sea? He bid farewell to the mast-head and was lowered through the cloven blue air to the deck.
The boats were lowered. But as Ahab hovered at the point of descent, he paused and called to Starbuck. He spoke of ships that sail and are never seen again, of men dying at different tides. He felt like a crested wave. “I am old,” he said. “Shake hands with me, man.” Their hands met; their eyes locked; Starbuck’s tears became the glue of their final moment. The mate begged him not to go, but Ahab tossed the arm away and ordered the boats lowered.
As Ahab’s boat pulled from the ship, sharks rose from the dark water beneath the hull and followed, snapping at the oar-blades with every dip. They followed only Ahab’s boat—a dark escort for a dark journey. Starbuck watched from the deck, seized by a terrible premonition. He saw his wife Mary fading behind him, his boy’s blue eyes. A hawk tore at the ship’s flag and soared away with it. He cried to Ahab to shudder at the sight, but the boat leaped on.
The waters swelled and upheaved. Moby Dick rose from the deep, trailing ropes and harpoons, shrouded in mist, then falling back in a shower of foam. The boats darted forward to attack. But maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons corroding in his flesh, the whale seemed possessed by all the fallen angels. He churned among the boats, flailing them apart, staving in the mates’ vessels while leaving Ahab’s nearly unscarred.
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