The coin gleamed with the purity of virgin gold drawn from Andean heights. Though surrounded by rusted bolts and weathered copper, it held its luster through every dark night and ruthless handling. The crew had come to treat it as sacred—talisman of the white whale they hunted. Stamped along its border were the words of Ecuador, and upon its face: three mountain peaks, one spouting flame, another bearing a tower, the third topped by a crowing rooster. Above them arched the zodiac, with the sun poised at Libra’s equinoctial threshold.
Ahab stood before it and read his own nature in every symbol. The proud peaks reminded him of Lucifer. The tower was Ahab. The volcano was Ahab. The victorious cock was Ahab. The round coin became a magician’s glass, reflecting each man’s mysterious self back at him. The sun entering the sign of storms confirmed what he already knew: life moves from tempest to tempest, and man must suffer to his end.
Starbuck watched the captain depart, then approached the coin himself. Where Ahab saw pride, the first mate glimpsed the Trinity in those three peaks—a dark valley of Death where God’s presence encircled them. The sun of Righteousness offered hope, yet Starbuck trembled at the thought that such light might not always be reachable. He turned away before truth could shake him falsely.
Stubb arrived with his almanac, decoding the zodiac as a map of human life. Each sign marked a stage: birth under Aries, the bumps and bruises of Taurus, the struggle between virtue and vice, the dragging weight of Cancer, Leo’s fierce wounds, first love in Virgo, Libra’s weighing of happiness, Scorpio’s sting, the archer’s arrows, the goat’s battering charge, the water-bearer’s flood, and finally Pisces—sleep. The sun wheeled through it all, and so would jolly Stubb.
Flask saw none of this. To him the doubloon meant sixteen dollars, which meant nine hundred and sixty cigars. He climbed aloft to spot the whale that would make that gold his.
The old Manxman studied the signs and remembered a witch’s prophecy from Copenhagen. The white whale would rise when the sun entered a certain sign—the lion, the devouring beast. His ancient head shook at the thought.
Queequeg compared the coin’s markings to his own tattooed skin, puzzling over meanings he could not read, deciding the gold resembled a king’s discarded button. Fedallah simply bowed before the sun stamped at the coin’s heart—a fire worshipper’s silent prayer.
Then came Pip, the broken boy, reciting grammar’s conjugations like an incantation. I look, you look, he looks. All of them bats, and he a crow perched atop his pine tree, cawing into the void. He called the doubloon the ship’s navel, said the crew burned to unscrew it. But unscrew your navel and what remains? When something gets nailed to a mast, desperation has taken hold. His laughter rang out across the deck as he delivered his prophecy: the white whale would nail old Ahab too.
The Pequod encounters an English whaleship, the Samuel Enderby of London. From his quarter-boat, Ahab trumpets his eternal question across the water: Hast seen the White Whale? The stranger captain, a weathered man of sixty, lounges carelessly in his bow and answers by withdrawing a prosthetic arm from his jacket—white whalebone ending in a wooden mallet-head. Ahab orders his boat lowered immediately.
Boarding proves awkward. Since losing his leg, Ahab has never climbed another ship’s side; the Pequod alone has the special rigging he needs. He stares up at the rolling bulwarks, humiliated by his helplessness while officers offer useless man-ropes. The English captain sees the trouble and orders the blubber-hook swung over. Ahab hooks his thigh into the curve and is hoisted aboard like cargo, deposited on the capstan.
The two maimed captains face each other. Boomer extends his ivory arm; Ahab offers his ivory leg. They cross like dueling blades. Brothers in mutilation—arm that cannot shrink, leg that cannot run. But Ahab wants only one thing: where did you see him?
Captain Boomer tells his story. Last season on the Line, he was working a pod when a massive whale surfaced—white head, white hump, scarred with wrinkles. Harpoons jutted from his flank. Ahab recognizes his own irons. Boomer had attacked, but Moby Dick’s tail rose and smashed his boat to splinters. The second harpoon’s barb caught Boomer below the shoulder and dragged him under. Only when the iron tore free along the length of his arm did he surface, half-drowned and bleeding.
Dr. Bunger, the ship’s surgeon, recounts the aftermath. The wound blackened with gangrene. He amputated, but the ivory arm was Boomer’s own notion—a hammer-headed club the captain meant for cracking skulls.
Ahab cuts through the banter. What became of the White Whale? Boomer admits he crossed the whale’s wake twice since, but chose not to strike. One limb is surely enough. Moby Dick does not bite so much as swallow. Bunger offers a macabre joke: give the whale your left arm as bait to recover the right. Boomer refuses. The whale is welcome to what he has taken. No more White Whales. There would be glory in killing him, and a shipload of sperm, but he is best left alone—is that not so? He glances at Ahab’s ivory leg.
Ahab agrees the whale is best left alone. Yet he will still be hunted. What should be avoided often exerts the strongest pull. The White Whale is all magnet. Which way was he heading?
Bunger circles Ahab suspiciously, sniffing. This man’s blood boils—his pulse makes the deck planks thrum! He approaches with a lancet. Ahab shoves him against the bulwarks and roars for his boat. The English captain whispers to Fedallah: Is your captain mad? Fedallah presses a finger to his lip and slips over the side. Ahab swings himself into the tackle, drops to his boat, and stands in the stern with his back to the Samuel Enderby, his gaze fixed hard toward the Pequod, steering east.
After Ahab departs with his answer and his obsession
The Samuel Enderby takes her name from the London merchant who founded the whaling house of Enderby & Sons—a dynasty rivaling the Tudors and Bourbons in historical consequence. In 1775, this house dispatched the first English vessels to hunt the sperm whale regularly. The Nantucketers had pioneered the chase half a century earlier, but in 1778 the Amelia, fitted out by the Enderbys alone, rounded Cape Horn and became the first ship of any nation to lower a whale-boat in the South Sea. Her hold returned full of precious sperm, and her success opened the Pacific grounds to the world.
The house pressed further. They persuaded the British government to send the Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery, and in 1819 they fitted out the Syren for the remote waters of Japan. Thus the great Japanese Whaling Ground entered general knowledge. All honor to the Enderbies.
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