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.
Yet these elaborate gradations of rank and the subtle interplay of deference that defined life aboard the Pequod were not merely abstract social structures to be contemplated from the quarter-deck. They manifested daily in the most ordinary of activities: the shared meal that brought officers and harpooneers together under Ahab’s silent sovereignty. At the cabin-table, the hierarchies discussed in the previous chapter became flesh and drama, with the captain’s withdrawn grandeur at the head of the table contrasting sharply against the ravenous appetites of his three harpooneers, and the reverent dread of the mates revealing how thoroughly the established order of precedence had been internalized by the ship’s officers. Here, in the intimate space of the captain’s cabin, the social architecture of the Specksnyder tradition revealed its full theatrical dimensions.
At noon the steward Dough-Boy thrusts his pale loaf-bread face from the cabin scuttle to announce dinner. Ahab, calculating latitude on his ivory leg after taking the sun, gives no sign of hearing. He swings to the deck, speaks a single word to Starbuck, and vanishes below. Only when the captain’s footfalls fade does the first mate stir, check the binnacle, and follow. Stubb descends next with casual delay. Flask, alone on the quarter-deck at last, kicks off his shoes and dances a silent hornpipe in sudden freedom. But at the cabin door he composes himself, exchanging his carefree manner for the look of a chastened servant before entering Ahab’s presence.
Something in the nature of command transforms men at their captain’s table. Ahab presides in silence like a weathered sea-lion among deferential cubs. The mates watch his every motion with anxious reverence, their eyes tracking his knife as he carves. Starbuck accepts his portion as one receives charity, eating with hushed care lest the blade graze the plate. No one speaks; even the sound of chewing seems profane. Flask suffers most keenly. As junior officer, he enters last and must leave first, his meal compressed by protocol into a few hasty mouthfuls. He confesses he has not known satisfaction since his promotion, dreaming wistfully of the forecastle where a man could fill his belly.
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