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.
Rushes of wild exaggeration followed. Sailors have always been prone to superstition, and whalemen more than most, for they work alone in the remotest waters where the mind grows fertile with strange imaginings. Soon the White Whale was said to be everywhere at once, present in opposite hemispheres at the same instant. Some declared him immortal, his body impervious to harpoons, his wounds mere illusions. The mysterious speed of the Sperm Whale, vanishing into depths and reappearing leagues away, fed these beliefs—just as captured whales had been found with harpoon barbs embedded from distant oceans, proving passages no ship could navigate.
Yet even stripped of supernatural dread, the whale commanded terror. His snow-white wrinkled forehead rose like a pyramid from the waves, and his mottled body left a milky wake visible for miles. More frightening than his size or hue was the calculated malice of his attacks. He would flee before pursuing boats as if in panic, then wheel suddenly and smash them to splinters, leaving men to swim through the wreckage of their comrades.
It was in such a moment that Ahab lost his leg. His three boats already destroyed, the captain had seized a knife and charged the whale like a duelist, maddened by the carnage around him. The great jaw swept up and took the limb cleanly. From that instant, Ahab’s soul began to fuse with his wound.
The monomania did not take hold immediately. On the long voyage home, as the ship rounded the howling Patagonian cape, Ahab lay in his hammock and suffered. Physical agony and spiritual rage seeped together until they became indistinguishable. He raved so violently that his officers had to bind him. When they reached calmer waters, the delirium seemed to pass, and he emerged pale but composed. Yet the madness had not departed—it had only concentrated, narrowing like a river through a gorge, growing deeper and more unfathomable. His considerable intellect now served a single purpose.
Ahab concealed this condition with cunning. To the Nantucketers, he seemed a man naturally sobered by catastrophe, perhaps even sharpened by it. Some thought his suffering qualified him uniquely for the hunt. No one guessed that he had arranged this entire voyage for one object alone: to find and kill the White Whale.
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