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 second mate Stubb emerges from below, still groggy, and attempts a joke—perhaps the captain might wrap his leg in tow to muffle the sound. The suggestion ignites Ahab’s fury. He turns on Stubb with contempt, calling him dog, ordering him to his kennel, threatening to erase him from existence. When Stubb protests, Ahab advances with such malevolence that the younger man retreats below, shaken and confused.
In his hammock, Stubb wrestles with what just happened. He cycles through indignation, fear, and a strange urge to pray for this tormented captain. He puzzles over Ahab’s symptoms: the sleepless nights, the sweat-soaked hammock, the mysterious visits to the hold. Something gnaws at the old man—conscience, perhaps, or madness.
Unable to make sense of the encounter, Stubb concludes it must have been a dream. He resolves to sleep and let daylight bring clarity to the bewildering night.
After Stubb departs, Ahab seats himself on his ivory stool like a Norse king upon a throne of bones. Finding the pipe no longer soothes his turbulent spirit, he deems it unsuited to his iron-grey locks. Rejecting this symbol of serenity, he tosses the still-lighted pipe into the sea. As the fire hisses out, Ahab resumes pacing the deck with a slouched hat and a lurching gait.
Stubb recounts a bizarre dream to Flask in which Ahab kicked him with his ivory leg. When Stubb tried to kick back, he kicked his own leg right off, yet reasoned that a false leg could not deliver a true insult—there was a difference between a living thump and a dead one. As he continued battering at what seemed a pyramid, a humpbacked merman with marlinspikes embedded in his back intervened. The creature argued that being kicked by Ahab’s ivory leg was a high honor, comparable to being knighted by a queen, and advised Stubb to accept the blows without retaliation. Waking convinced of this wisdom, Stubb tells Flask to ignore the Captain completely. But Ahab suddenly shouts from the quarter-deck, ordering the crew to look sharp for whales and screaming to split their lungs if they see a white one. Stubb notes the queer nature of the order, sensing something bloody on Ahab’s mind, and falls silent as the Captain approaches.
Before the Pequod plunges deeper into the trackless ocean, Ishmael pauses to construct a systematic exhibition of the whale. He surveys the troubled state of Cetology, noting that while countless authors from Aristotle to Cuvier have written on the subject, the science remains in disarray. The great authorities themselves confess the field is strewn with thorns, its waters unfathomable, its knowledge veiled. Of all those who have written, only a handful have seen living whales, and fewer still understand the sperm whale.
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