Before he could assert mastery, Pip appeared in his madness. The Manxman tried to drive him off. Ahab advanced: “Hands off from that holiness!” He looked into Pip’s vacant pupils and saw no reflection.
Then Ahab made his declaration: “Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth. Thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings.” Pip felt Ahab’s hand—“velvet shark-skin”—and begged to have their hands riveted together.
Ahab led him away: “I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”
The Manxman watched them go. “There go two daft ones now. One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness.”
The Pequod sailed south-eastward toward the Equator, her course fixed by Ahab’s levelled steel. Through unfrequented waters, driven by trade winds over mild waves, all seemed strangely calm—as if preluding some desperate scene.
In the pre-dawn dark, the watch was startled by a wild, unearthly cry. The Christian crew said mermaids and shuddered; the pagan harpooneers remained unmoved. The grey Manxman declared the sounds were voices of newly drowned men. At dawn, Ahab hollowly laughed: seals that had lost their dams or cubs. But the crew’s superstitious dread of seals—their human-looking faces, their peculiar tones—only deepened the omen.
At sunrise a sailor fell from his mast-head. Looking up, they saw a falling phantom; looking down, white bubbles in the blue. The life-buoy was dropped, but the sun-shrunken cask filled and sank. The first man to mount the mast on the White Whale’s own ground was swallowed up. The crew regarded it not as foreshadowing, but as fulfilment of an evil already presaged—now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks.
No cask could be found to replace the lost buoy. They were about to leave the stern unprovided when Queequeg hinted concerning his coffin.
“A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting. After a melancholy pause: “Bring it up. Rig it, carpenter.”
The carpenter mimed each motion—nailing the lid, caulking the seams, paying with pitch. Starbuck flinched. “Away! Make a life-buoy, and no more.” He went off in a huff.
The carpenter muttered that Starbuck could endure the whole but baulked at the parts. He grumbled at this cobbling work—undignified, not his place. He liked clean mathematical jobs, not work “at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end.” But he would do it. He would hang thirty Turk’s-headed life-lines all round—“thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin!”
The coffin lay on line-tubs while the Carpenter caulked its seams. Ahab approached, sent Pip away, and nearly stumbled at the hatchway. “Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.” He accused the worker of being an unprincipled jack-of-all-trades, a leg-maker and undertaker now crafting a life-buoy. The mallet rang on the lid, a sounding-board with naught beneath. When the Carpenter spoke of faith, Ahabbed seized the word. Left alone, the worker muttered that an Equator cut the old man, who was always fiery hot under the Line. Ahab watched, likening the sound to a woodpecker tapping a hollow tree. He saw the dreaded symbol of death transformed into a sign of hope, wondering if it were an immortality-preserver. Yet he rejected the thought, too gone in earth’s dark side to see the theoretic light. Driven mad by the sound, he ordered the Carpenter stop and went below to Pip, seeking wondrous philosophies from the boy’s unknown conduits.
The Rachel bore down on the Pequod, her spars thickly clustered with men. As the broad-winged stranger shot nigh, the Pequod’s sails fell together like burst bladders. “Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. Before her commander could hail, Ahab’s voice rang out: “Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”
Ahab throttled his joy. The stranger captain sprang to the Pequod’s deck—a Nantucketer Ahab knew. No formal salutation. “Where was he?—not killed!”
The story emerged: three boats engaged with whales miles from the ship when Moby Dick loomed to leeward. A fourth boat—the swiftest keeled—gave chase. The mast-head watcher saw the diminished boat, a swift gleam of bubbling white water, then nothing. The Rachel searched all night, crowding stunsail on stunsail, kindling fires in her try-pots for a beacon, but found no trace.
The stranger begged Ahab to join the search, sailing parallel lines. Stubb whispered to Flask about a stolen coat—until the captain cried out: “My boy, my own boy is among them!” Stubb’s cynicism collapsed. “His son! We must save that boy.” The fuller story: two sons had been separated in the chase; one saved, one still missing—a lad of twelve.
The stranger beseeched Ahab. “For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab—a child of your old age. Yes, yes, you relent—”
“Avast. Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.”
Ahab descended to his cabin. The two ships diverged. Long as the Rachel was in view, she yawed hither and thither at every dark spot on the sea, her yards swinging round, tacking starboard and larboard, her masts thick with men like cherry trees when boys cluster the boughs. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
Ahab moved to go on deck; Pip caught his hand. “Thou must not follow Ahab now. There is that in thee too curing to my malady. For this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.”
Pip clung: “Use poor me for your one lost leg; so I remain a part of ye.”
Ahab was moved. Pip promised never to desert him as Stubb had. Ahab’s purpose wavered, then hardened. He threatened, then blessed: “God for ever save thee, let what will befall.”
Ahab went. Pip stood alone, speaking of himself in third person. He sat in Ahab’s chair, imagining admirals with gold lace, toasting shame upon cowards. Above, he heard the ivory foot. “Master, I am down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and oysters come to join me.”
Ahab had driven the white whale into an ocean-fold. The Rachel had spoken of Moby Dick the day before, and now the Pequod drifted over the exact coordinates where Ahab’s wound had been inflicted. Something in the old man’s eyes had become unbearable—fixed and relentless as the polar star that burns through the arctic night. His purpose gleamed down upon the crew, and all their fears retreated into silence.
Humor vanished from the deck. Stubb abandoned his jests; Starbuck stopped checking them. Every emotion seemed ground to powder in the mortar of Ahab’s iron will. The crew moved like machines, ever conscious of their captain’s despotic eye.
Yet even Ahab could not escape Fedallah’s glance. The Parsee invested the ship with gliding strangeness—ceaseless shudderings, eyes that never closed, a form the men could not determine as flesh or shadow. He never slept, never went below. His wan eyes seemed to say: we two watchmen never rest.
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