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.
Ishmael seeks the source of this instinctive dread. He points to a young colt in Vermont, far from any predator, that will panic at the mere scent of a buffalo robe. The animal has no memory of danger, yet something in that wild musk triggers frantic terror. This brute instinct testifies to an innate knowledge of the demonism lurking in creation. The colt perceives the goring herds without experience, just as Ishmael senses nameless horrors in the white expanses of sea and snow. The visible world may seem formed in love, but the invisible spheres were shaped in fright.
He concludes that whiteness represents the visible absence of color—a blank void that suggests the heartless immensities of the universe. It is a colorless blankness from which we recoil, shadowing forth annihilation. If all other hues are merely surface deceptions, like cosmetics covering decay, then the principle of light itself remains cold and colorless. Without the medium of atmosphere, the universe would lie before us like a leper, and we would gaze ourselves blind at the white shroud wrapping all existence. The white whale thus becomes the symbol of this cosmic emptiness—and Ishmael wonders no longer at the fiery hunt against him.
Having descended from these lofty and terrible meditations upon the awful whiteness of his adversary, Ishmael finds himself now, as the Pequod sails onward through the silent watches, returned to the more tangible concerns of the vessel and its crew. The philosophic mind, having exhausted itself upon the cosmic implications of that colorless hue, must needs take up again the ordinary duties of shipboard life—the passing of water buckets across the moonlit deck, the muffled sounds of sleeping men below. And it is here, in this humble mid-watch stillness, that the terrors of abstraction give way to those of a more immediate and mysterious nature, as some stirring in the depths of the ship promises darker portents yet to come.
Under the hushed silence of the mid-watch, the crew passes water buckets across the moonlit deck. Archy pauses, whispering to his neighbor Cabaco that he hears mysterious coughing and sleepers turning over in the after-hold. He suspects a secret presence below, but Cabaco dismisses the noises as indigestion from supper and impatiently demands the bucket be passed along.
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