The typhoon struck the Pequod in the Japanese seas, tearing away her canvas and leaving her bare-poled under the full fury of wind and thunder. Lightning blazed through darkness, revealing disabled masts and the rags of sail left for the storm’s sport. Starbuck stood watch on the quarter-deck while Stubb and Flask struggled to secure the boats—but a massive sea stove in Ahab’s boat at the stern. Stubb sang wildly to mask his terror, but Starbuck seized him: the gale blew from the eastward, the very course Ahab had sworn to follow toward Moby Dick. The mate saw salvation—the same wind that hammered them could drive them homeward around the Cape. To windward lay blackness and doom; to leeward, a light that was not lightning.
Ahab emerged from darkness, calling himself Old Thunder. When Starbuck ordered the lightning rods dropped, Ahab forbade it—fair play, even from the elements. Then the corpusants ignited: pallid fire tipped every yard-arm and burned from each mast-end like three gigantic altar candles. The enchanted crew stood clustered on the forecastle, their eyes gleaming like a far-away constellation. Daggoo loomed gigantic against the glow; Tashtego’s teeth gleamed as if tipped with fire; Queequeg’s tattoos burned like blue flames. When the vision faded, Stubb interpreted the masts as spermaceti candles—a promise of fortune.
The flames returned redoubled. Fedallah knelt at the mainmast’s base, head bowed away from Ahab. The captain seized the lightning-rod links and stood before the triple flames, addressing the fire spirit directly. He had once worshipped it as a Persian; now he knew defiance as the only true worship. He was darkness leaping out of light, and he claimed kinship with the foundling fire.
Ahab’s harpoon caught the pale fire, burning like a serpent’s tongue. Starbuck seized the captain’s arm: God himself opposed this voyage—turn homeward while they could. The panic-stricken crew moved toward the braces, raising a half-mutinous cry. Ahab dashed down the lightning links, snatched the burning harpoon, and waved it among the crew like a torch, threatening to transfix any man who tried to abandon ship. All their oaths to hunt the White Whale were as binding as his own. He extinguished the flame with a single breath. The sailors retreated from him in terror, as men flee a lightning-marked tree in a hurricane.
Starbuck urged Ahab to strike the loose yard and secure the anchors. Ahab refused: lash everything, stir nothing. His brain-truck sailed amid the cloud-scud; only cowards sent down their topmost spars in tempest time.
Stubb and Flask mounted the forecastle bulwarks, passing lashings over the anchors in the typhoon. Flask challenged Stubb’s changed tune—hadn’t he once said Ahab’s ship should pay extra insurance, as though loaded with powder barrels and lucifers? Stubb deflected: the drenching spray made ignition impossible. As for lightning rods, what was the difference between holding one and standing by a mast without? He mocked Flask’s timidity.
Stubb reflected on the anchors they lashed. It seemed like tying a man’s hands behind him. He wondered whether the world was anchored anywhere—if so, she swung with an uncommon long cable. He joked about long-tailed coats shedding water. Then his tarpaulin blew overboard. The winds from heaven were unmannerly—a nasty night.
Tashtego passed lashings aloft, muttering for rum, not thunder.
After midnight the storm subsided, allowing the crew to clear away the
The typhoon hurled the helmsman repeatedly to the deck while compass needles spun at every shock—the Pequod a tossed shuttlecock to the blast.
After midnight the storm abated. Starbuck and Stubb cut away the shivered sails, which eddied to leeward like albatross feathers. New canvas was bent and reefed. Watching the compass, the helmsman saw the foul breeze shift fair. The yards squared to the crew’s joyful song; evil portents seemed falsified.
Following Ahab’s standing order, Starbuck descended to report. He paused before the captain’s door. The cabin lamp swung fitfully, casting shadows. A humming silence reigned within the roar. The loaded muskets shone against the bulkhead—and from Starbuck’s heart an evil thought evolved.
He lifted the very musket Ahab had once leveled at him. His hands shook though he had handled deadly lances before. Loaded, powder in the pan. He thought of Mary, his wife, his boy. Ahab would drag them all to doom—refusing to strike spars, smashing his quadrant, rejecting lightning-rods. Starbuck leveled the piece at the thin door. One touch, and he might hug his family again. “Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall I?”
From within, Ahab’s tormented sleep cried out: “Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!”
The musket shook like a drunkard’s arm. Starbuck wrestled with an angel—then placed the death-tube in its rack and left. He met Stubb on deck: “He’s too sound asleep. Go thou down, and wake him.”
The morning after the typhoon, the sea rolled in long billows pushing the Pequod like giants’ palms. Ahab stood in enchanted silence, exulting: “I bring the sun to ye!”
Suddenly he rushed to the helm, demanding the heading. “East-sou-east,” said the steersman. “Thou liest!” Ahab smote him. With the sun astern, they should be heading West. Thrusting his head into the binnacle, Ahab saw both compasses pointing East while the ship went West. He nearly staggered.
Before alarm spread, he laughed rigidly: “Last night’s thunder turned our compasses.” Starbuck, pale: “Never before has it happened to me.”
Ahab took the sun’s bearing, confirmed the needles were inverted, and ordered the course changed. The Pequod thrust her bows into the opposing wind—the “fair” wind had been juggling them.
Walking the deck, Ahab slipped on the crushed quadrant he had destroyed yesterday. “Yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet.” He called for a lance, maul, and sail-maker’s needle.
Before the crew’s fascinated eyes, he hammered the needle upon an iron rod, magnetizing it through percussion. He suspended it over the compass-card. It quivered, spun, settled. “Look ye—Ahab is lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”
One after another the crew peered into the binnacle, then slunk away. In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, they saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.
With the compass restored to working order, Ahab turned to check the ship’s speed, only to find the log and line had deteriorated beyond use. The loss of this ancient navigational instrument came as the log
The log and line had hung untouched for most of the voyage, rotted by the elements. But after the magnet scene, Ahab remembered his destroyed quadrant and his oath. “Heave the log!”
The Manxman warned the line was far gone. Ahab deflected with wordplay—learning the old man was born in the Isle of Man, he made dark sport: “a man from Man, now unmanned of Man.”
The log was heaved. Snap! The line sagged; the log was gone. “I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all.”
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