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.
The crew itself draws from every corner of the globe. While the officers are Americans, the men before the mast are nearly all Islanders—“Isolatoes,” Ishmael calls them—each living on a separate continent of his own, now federated under one keel. They form a deputation from all the ends of the earth, accompanying Ahab to lay the world’s grievances before a bar from which few return. Among them is Black Little Pip, the Alabama boy. He went before, Ishmael notes—called a coward on the grim Pequod, but hailed as a hero in glory, beating his tambourine in eternity.
For days after departing Nantucket, Captain Ahab remains sequestered below, his presence felt only through commands relayed by the mates. Ishmael’s unease deepens with each watch, his mind returning to the ragged prophet Elijah’s cryptic warnings on the wharf. The steady competence of the three American mates offers some reassurance, but the invisible commander’s absence breeds apprehension.
On a gray morning as the Pequod drives southward, Ishmael climbs to the deck and feels a sudden chill of recognition. There, upon the quarter-deck, stands Ahab at last.
The captain appears hewn from bronze, immovable and weathered. A pale line traces down his tawny face from hairline to collar, resembling the scar lightning leaves on a tree trunk—peeling bark without felling the wood. Crew superstition offers conflicting accounts: an old Gay-Head Indian insists the mark came from a supernatural battle at sea when Ahab was forty, while a Manx sailor darkly hints it was present from birth.
More striking still is the white prosthetic leg, carved from sperm whale jawbone, that Ahab plants in a hole bored into the deck. He stands rigid, one hand gripping a shroud, staring fixedly ahead. His expression carries such profound suffering that the officers fall silent beneath its weight, conscious of serving a man haunted by terrible purpose.
As the ship escapes winter’s grip and the weather softens, Ahab emerges more frequently from his cabin. At first he remains motionless and mute, present but offering nothing. Yet gradually the warming air works upon him. The genial days coax something almost tender from his stony demeanor—occasional glances that suggest a smile struggling toward the surface.
The Pequod glides through tropical waters where spring reigns perpetual and the days shimmer with crystalline warmth. This languorous beauty works upon Ahab’s spirit, stirring something restless within him.
Like many old seafarers, Ahab cannot sleep. Each night he climbs from his cabin, muttering that descending those narrow steps feels like entering a grave. He typically avoids the quarter-deck, knowing his ivory leg would thunder against the planks and shatter the crew’s rest. But one night his mood overrides such consideration, and he paces the deck with heavy, clanking steps.
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