Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

Ishmael fights through driving sleet to reach the New Bedford Whaleman’s Chapel, finding a scattered, silent congregation of sailors and widows sitting apart in insular grief. The worshipers steadfastly eye black-bordered marble tablets memorializing men lost overboard, towed away by whales, or killed in battle. Queequeg, unable to read the inscriptions, watches Ishmael with incredulous curiosity, while the women present seem before him to have old wounds bleed afresh. Ishmael meditates on the despair of these empty memorials and the deadly voids of those who perished without a grave, questioning the silence of the dead. Yet he asserts that Faith feeds among the tombs, gathering hope from these doubts. Reading the tablets on the eve of his voyage, Ishmael acknowledges the high probability of death but grows merry. He undergoes a philosophical reversal, deciding that his body is merely the lees of his better being. While the body may be destroyed, his soul remains invulnerable, leading him to cheer for Nantucket and his impending voyage.

Father Mapple enters the storm-pelted chapel, his venerable robustness suggesting a hardy old age merging into a second flowering youth—his wrinkles shining with a newly developing bloom. His waterlogged pilot cloth reveals his past as a harpooneer. As the congregation watches, he sheds his sailor’s garb and arrays himself in a decent suit. Ishmael examines the lofty pulpit, constructed like a ship’s mast-head with a perpendicular rope ladder. Father Mapple mounts this ladder with sailor-like dexterity, hand over hand, as if ascending the main-top. Upon reaching the top, he deliberately hauls the ladder up, isolating himself within the pulpit. Ishmael interprets this act as a symbol of the preacher’s spiritual withdrawal from the world to commune with God. The nautical theme continues with a painting behind the pulpit depicting a gallant ship in a storm, illuminated by an angel’s face beaming sunlight. The pulpit itself is shaped like a ship’s bluff bows, leading Ishmael to conclude that the pulpit is the earth’s foremost part, the prow of the world that must bear the earliest brunt of God’s wrath.

Father Mapple rose and ordered the scattered congregation to condense like a ship’s crew. Sea-boots rumbled among the benches, women’s shoes shuffled, and silence fell. He knelt in the pulpit’s bows, folded his brown hands, and offered a prayer so devout he seemed to be kneeling at the bottom of the sea.

In solemn tones like a bell tolling from a foundering ship, he began reading a hymn. But approaching the final stanzas, he burst forth with pealing exultation. The hymn told of Jonah’s terror in the whale’s belly—ribs and terrors arched in dismal gloom, the opening maw of hell—then deliverance: God bowed His ear, and the Deliverer’s face shone bright as lightning. The congregation joined singing, voices swelling above the howling storm outside.

Mapple declared the Book of Jonah—only four chapters, the smallest strand in Scripture’s cable—to be a two-stranded lesson: for sinners, and for him as a pilot of the living God. Jonah’s sin was willful disobedience. All that God commands is hard, because obeying God means disobeying ourselves.

With this sin upon him, Jonah sought to flee, thinking a ship could carry him where God did not reign. He skulked about Joppa’s wharves, seeking passage to Tarshish—Cadiz, far westward beyond the Mediterranean. Mapple painted him as a miserable fugitive with slouched hat and guilty eye, prowling like a burglar. Sailors marked him instantly, whispering—robbed a widow, bigamist, murderer from Sodom. One ran to check the bill posted for a parricide. They crowded round, prepared to seize him. Frightened, summoning boldness to his face, he only looked the more a coward. Finding him not the advertised criminal, they let him pass.

The Captain, whose discernment detected crime but whose cupidity exposed only the penniless, charged thrice the usual fare. Jonah paid without protest. He descended to his cramped cabin beneath the water-line, where the ceiling rested almost on his forehead. A swinging lamp oscillated from the axis, and as the ship heeled, the lamp maintained its obliquity—infallibly straight itself, it revealed the false, lying levels of the room. “Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!” Jonah groaned. “Straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!” His ponderous misery dragged him drowning down to sleep.

The ship cast off—the first recorded smuggler, Jonah its contraband. But the sea rebelled. A dreadful storm struck, planks thundering with trampling feet. Jonah slept his hideous sleep until the master’s cry: “What meanest thou, O sleeper! Arise!” He staggered to the deck and saw the bowsprit pointing wildly between sky and tormented deep. The sailors, certain of his guilt, cast lots. The lot fell on Jonah. He confessed: a Hebrew, fleeing the Lord God of heaven. He told them to cast him overboard. Mercifully they turned away, but the gale howled louder. They laid hold of Jonah and dropped him into the sea. Instantly calm spread from the east.

In the whale’s belly, Jonah prayed—not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. This was true repentance. God delivered Jonah from the sea. Sin not, Mapple warned, but if you do, repent like Jonah.

Then Mapple turned the lesson upon himself. God had laid one hand upon the congregation; both hands pressed upon him. As a pilot-prophet burdened with preaching unwelcome truths to a wicked world, he felt the weight. Woe to the preacher who seeks to please men rather than God, who pours oil upon waters God has brewed into a gale, who preaches truth while being himself a castaway.

Yet from woe came delight. Mapple’s face lifted, eyes shining with deep joy. On the starboard hand of every woe, he cried, there is a sure delight, higher than the woe is deep. Delight to him who stands forth his own inexorable self against the proud gods of this earth. Eternal delight to him who can say with his final breath: I have striven to be Thine more than this world’s. Mapple waved a benediction, covered his face, and remained kneeling until the chapel was empty.

Returning to the Spouter-Inn, Ishmael finds Queequeg alone before the fire, whittling his small idol with absorbed attention. The harpooneer then takes up a book and counts its pages with deliberate regularity, pausing at every fiftieth to whistle in apparent astonishment—a ritual both childlike and mysterious.

Watching him, Ishmael studies the savage’s tattooed face and sees past the grotesque exterior to something honest beneath. The shaven head and projecting brow strike him as noble, reminding him absurdly of George Washington’s bust. Queequeg’s complete indifference to those around him seems less rudeness than a kind of Socratic self-sufficiency—content in his own company twenty thousand miles from home.

In the firelit quiet, something melts in Ishmael. The world’s hypocrisies have wearied him, and here sits a man who has never cringed or owed a creditor. He decides to befriend this pagan. Drawing near, he makes friendly overtures; Queequeg responds by asking if they will share a bed again, and seems pleased at the answer.