Ahab abandoned the cabin entirely. He stood motionless in his pivot-hole or paced between mast and mizen, hat slouched low. Dew gathered on his stone-carved coat at night; the sun dried it by day. His whole existence narrowed to a single watch.
At times captain and Parsee stood far apart in starlight, staring at each other—each seeming to find in the other his forethrown shadow or abandoned substance. They rarely spoke, yet moved as though yoked to the same unseen tyrant.
When days passed without a spout, Ahab’s distrust deepened. He would trust no eyes but his own. He rigged a basket to the mast-head and declared he would have first sight of the whale himself.
He surveyed his crew—lingering on the harpooneers, avoiding Fedallah—then fixed on Starbuck. “Take the rope, sir—I give it into thy hands.” The one man who had dared oppose him now held Ahab’s life in his grip.
Ten minutes aloft, a red-billed sea-hawk came screaming round his head. The Sicilian lookout shouted warning, but the black wing swept before Ahab’s eyes. The hawk seized his hat and vanished.
An eagle once stripped Tarquin’s cap and returned it—a good omen. Ahab’s hat was never restored. Far ahead of the prow, a black spot fell from the sky into the sea.
The Pequod sighted the Delight. Upon her shears lay the shattered ribs of a whale-boat. “Hast seen the White Whale?” The captain pointed to the wreck. “The harpoon is not yet forged that will do that.”
Ahab snatched Perth’s iron. “Here I hold his death!”
“I bury but one of five men lost yesterday. You sail upon their tomb.” He began the burial.
“Brace forward!” Ahab fled. But the corpse’s splash sprinkled the Pequod’s hull. As the life-buoy-coffin swung at her stern, a voice cried: “Ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!”
A clear steel-blue day. Sky and sea merged in azure, distinguished only by sex—the pensive air feminine and soft, the robust sea heaving with masculine strength. The sun joined them at the horizon like bride and groom.
Ahab stood forth in the morning light, his splintered helmet of a brow lifted toward heaven, his eyes glowing like coals in the ashes of ruin. He leaned over the rail, watching his shadow descend into the depths. The gentle air seemed to soften the bitterness in his soul. The world, long cruel, now embraced him. A tear fell from beneath his hat into the Pacific.
Starbuck approached, hearing in his heart the measureless sobbing within the serenity. Ahab turned and confessed: forty years of whaling, forty years of privation and peril. Scarcely three years ashore. He had wedded a young woman past fifty, then sailed away the next morning—leaving her a widow while her husband lived. He called himself an old fool, grey-haired, bent beneath the weight of centuries like Adam himself.
He asked Starbuck to stand close. In the mate’s eye he saw his wife and child reflected. Stay aboard, he urged—let me chase the whale alone.
Starbuck begged him to turn homeward. Wife and child were Starbuck’s too—the wife and child of his youth, just as Ahab’s were of his old age. How cheerily they would bowl along to see old Nantucket again! For a moment Ahab wavered, speaking of his boy waking from naps, his mother promising that father would return. Starbuck pressed: the child’s face at the window, his hand raised on the hill.
Then Ahab looked away. He trembled like a blighted tree dropping its last withered fruit. Some nameless power drove him onward against all natural love. Did he command his own arm, or did God—or Fate?
He spoke of mowers sleeping in hayfields. But Starbuck had already fled, blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair.
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over the other side—and started at two fixed eyes reflected in the water. Fedallah stood motionless at the rail, waiting.
In the mid-watch, Ahab emerged from the scuttle and thrust his face into the darkness, drawing in the sea air with the instinct of a hound. A whale was near. Soon the peculiar odor of the living sperm whale became palpable to all, and Ahab ordered the ship’s course altered, the sail shortened. His instinct proved true. At daybreak, a long sleek stretched across the water ahead, smooth as oil, marking the passage of something vast beneath the surface.
Ahab commanded all hands to the mast-heads. When the lookouts reported nothing, he ordered every sail set aloft and alow, then cast loose the life-line that would hoist him to the main royal-mast head. Before he reached his perch, while still climbing, he cried out: “There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” The men rushed the rigging to witness the whale they had pursued across half the world. Tashtego claimed he had sighted it the same instant, but Ahab would not yield the moment. The doubloon was his; Fate had reserved it for him alone.
The whale was preparing to sound. Ahab ordered the boats lowered and commanded Starbuck to remain aboard the Pequod. Three boats dropped away, Ahab heading the assault. Fedallah’s sunken eyes held a pale death-glimmer, his mouth working with hideous motion.
The boats sped like nautilus shells across a sea grown impossibly smooth, a noon-meadow of tropical tranquility. Moby Dick’s dazzling hump slid through the water, ringed in finest greenish foam. A shattered lance projected from his back, perch for the white birds that hovered above him. A gentle joyousness invested his gliding—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness that had beguiled and destroyed many hunters before. Not even Jove swimming away with ravished Europa could surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.
Then the fore part of him rose from the water, his whole marbleized body forming a high arch like Virginia’s Natural Bridge. Warningly waving his bannered flukes, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and vanished. The white sea-fowls lingered over the agitated pool he left behind. An hour passed. Ahab stood rooted in his boat’s stern, waiting.
The breeze freshened. Tashtego cried out: “The birds!” In long Indian file, the white birds flew toward Ahab’s boat, wheeling with joyous, expectant cries. Ahab peered into the depths and saw a white living spot uprising with wonderful celerity—two long crooked rows of glistening teeth. Moby Dick’s open mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb. Ahab whirled the craft aside.
But the whale, with malicious intelligence, shot his pleated head lengthwise beneath the hull. He took the bows full within his mouth, the scrolled lower jaw curling into the air. The White Whale shook the cedar craft as a cat shakes a mouse. Ahab seized the jaw with naked hands, striving to wrench it free. The gunwales bent, collapsed, snapped. Both jaws bit the craft completely in twain. Ahab fell flat-faced upon the sea.
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