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.
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.
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