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.
Ishmael hesitates at his handspike, unnerved by the thought of starting a voyage with such a devil for a pilot. A sharp pain in his rear interrupts his reverie—Peleg has driven his leg into him. Spring, you sheep-head, the captain roars, and Ishmael springs. The anchor rises, sails fill, and the Pequod glides into the freezing Atlantic on a short, cold Christmas. Spray coats the vessel in ice, the bulwarks gleaming like teeth in moonlight, great icicles hanging from the bows. Yet as Bildad sings of sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Ishmael feels a sudden hope—visions of pleasant havens and eternal spring amid the frigid spray.
When the pilot boat draws alongside to retrieve the owners, Bildad cannot bring himself to leave. He paces the deck with anxious strides, runs below for another farewell word, gazes toward land and sea and sky as though memorizing the world he is leaving. Thousands of dollars are invested in this ship; an old shipmate sails into danger. At last he grasps Peleg’s hand, trying to look heroic. Peleg, for all his philosophy, betrays a glistening eye.
Bildad’s farewell tumbles out in fragments—mind the cooper’s staves, the sail-needles are in the green locker, don’t whale too much on the Lord’s day but don’t reject Heaven’s gifts, watch the molasses tierce, beware fornication at the islands, don’t keep the cheese too long or it will spoil, be careful with the butter at twenty cents a pound—until Peleg cuts him short and hauls him over the side. The boats separate. A gull screams overhead. The crew raises a mournful cheer, and the Pequod steers into the vast and lonely ocean.
On a freezing winter night, Ishmael discovers Bulkington at the Pequod’s helm—fresh from a four-year voyage yet unable to endure the land’s stinging comfort. A storm-driven ship finds its greatest peril not in waves but in the welcoming shore; it must flee all safety, battling winds that would push it homeward. True independence dwells only in the boundless deep, where Bulkington stands as a demigod, choosing destruction in the open sea over the coward’s refuge of solid ground.
Ishmael steps forward as advocate for a profession landsmen dismiss as unpoetical and disreputable. The charge of butchery he grants—but notes that military commanders, butchers of the bloodiest badge, receive the world’s honors. As for filth: the sperm whale-ship ranks among the cleanliest things on earth, while soldiers returning from carrion-strewn battlefields drink in ladies’ plaudits. And if peril ennobles the soldier, let any veteran who has marched on a battery meet the sperm whale’s vast tail fanning the air above him. The terrors of God outstrip the terrors of men.
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