The wreckage of the second day’s pursuit floated in the minds of the crew as much as it did upon the waters. Stubb and Flask had survived their boats’ destruction, their bodies battered but their resolve perhaps strengthened by the very terror they had endured. Fedallah, however, had not been so fortunate—his fate remained sealed in the depths, claimed by the very lines that had been meant to claim the whale. Through the long watches of that night, the Pequod had been transformed into a vessel of grim purpose, her carpenter fashioning new weapons while Ahab sat in the darkness of his cabin, perhaps contemplating the prophecy he had spoken: that the third day would bring an end to this chase, one way or another. The men moved with a quiet solemnity, their fear not diminished but compressed into something harder, more resolve, as dawn approached and with it, the final confrontation that had been ordained since the moment Moby Dick had first been sighted on these seas.
The morning of the third day dawned with deceptive beauty. Crowds of lookouts replaced the solitary night-watch, dotting every mast and spar, but the whale was nowhere in sight. Ahab, alone with his thoughts—or rather, as he confessed, with his feelings—delivered a fractured soliloquy on the nature of wind, thought, and his own driven soul. He declared that he never thinks, only feels, and his mind ranged wildly: the tainted wind that had blown through prisons and hospitals before reaching him, the frozen calm of his cracking skull, the hair growing like stubborn grass in volcanic lava. The Trade Winds, at least, he found glorious—blowing straight and steadfast, carrying his keeled soul toward its mark.
At noon, with still no whale in sight, Ahab realized with a shock that he had oversailed Moby Dick in the darkness. The pursuer had become the pursued. He read this reversal as ill omen and ordered the ship about, steering back into her own white wake. Starbuck murmured that Ahab was steering for the open jaw.
An hour passed, stretched to ages by suspense. Then Ahab descried the spout, and three shrieks went up from the mast-heads as if tongues of fire had voiced them. Before descending, Ahab lingered aloft for one last look at the sea—the same sight he had known as a boy on Nantucket, unchanged since Noah. He noticed tiny mosses in the mast’s cracks, green life absent from his own aged head. He spoke aloud to the Parsee’s prophecy: his pilot would go before him, and he would see Fedallah again. But where? Would he have eyes at the bottom of the sea? He bid farewell to the mast-head and was lowered through the cloven blue air to the deck.
The boats were lowered. But as Ahab hovered at the point of descent, he paused and called to Starbuck. He spoke of ships that sail and are never seen again, of men dying at different tides. He felt like a crested wave. “I am old,” he said. “Shake hands with me, man.” Their hands met; their eyes locked; Starbuck’s tears became the glue of their final moment. The mate begged him not to go, but Ahab tossed the arm away and ordered the boats lowered.
As Ahab’s boat pulled from the ship, sharks rose from the dark water beneath the hull and followed, snapping at the oar-blades with every dip. They followed only Ahab’s boat—a dark escort for a dark journey. Starbuck watched from the deck, seized by a terrible premonition. He saw his wife Mary fading behind him, his boy’s blue eyes. A hawk tore at the ship’s flag and soared away with it. He cried to Ahab to shudder at the sight, but the boat leaped on.
The waters swelled and upheaved. Moby Dick rose from the deep, trailing ropes and harpoons, shrouded in mist, then falling back in a shower of foam. The boats darted forward to attack. But maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons corroding in his flesh, the whale seemed possessed by all the fallen angels. He churned among the boats, flailing them apart, staving in the mates’ vessels while leaving Ahab’s nearly unscarred.
Then a cry went up. Lashed to the whale’s back by the tangled lines, the half-torn body of Fedallah was revealed—his sable raiment shredded, his distended eyes fixed on Ahab. The first hearse of the prophecy had appeared. Ahab’s harpoon dropped from his hand. He recognized the fulfillment but pressed on, defiant, sending the damaged boats back to the ship for repair. He would continue alone.
Moby Dick swam past the Pequod, seemingly intent only on escape. From the deck, Starbuck cried that the whale sought Ahab not—it was Ahab who madly sought the whale. But Ahab ordered the ship to follow at a distance. He saw the crew hammering at broken boats, and the sound struck him like nails driven into his heart. He rallied and ordered a new flag nailed to the mast.
The sharks still followed, their jaws crunching the oars to jagged splinters. Ahab joked that the teeth made better rowlocks than water, but wondered whether they came for the whale or for him. His boat closed with Moby Dick’s flank. He steered into the smoky mist of the whale’s spout and hurled his iron and his curse into the white whale. The line snapped in the empty air.
Moby Dick wheeled and caught sight of the black hull of the Pequod. Seeming to recognize the source of his persecution, he bore down on the ship, smiting his jaws amid showers of foam. Ahab cried to save his ship, but his own boat was foundering, water pouring through burst planks.
From the deck, Starbuck and Stubb saw the whale coming. Each mate faced death in his own voice—Starbuck in desperate prayer, Stubb in dark jokes about cherries and dying in his drawers, Flask in practical regret for wages unpaid. The crew stood frozen, their enchanted eyes fixed on the whale. Moby Dick’s solid white forehead smote the starboard bow. Men and timbers reeled. Through the breach, waters poured like mountain torrents.
Ahab recognized the second hearse. He turned from the sun and delivered his final defiance: “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquered whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” He hurled his last harpoon. The line ran foul. He stooped to clear it, but the flying turn caught him round the neck and shot him voicelessly from the boat—strangled by the very rope meant to bind his enemy.
The Pequod sank in a great vortex that drew in the remaining boats, the floating oars, every chip of the ship. Tashtego, nailing the flag to the subsiding mast, caught a sky-hawk between hammer and wood. The bird, with archangelic shrieks, went down with the ship—like Satan, dragging a living part of heaven to hell. The gulf closed. The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had rolled five thousand years before.
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