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.
The heart of Ishmael’s affidavit addresses the whale’s capacity for intentional destruction. In 1820, the Essex of Nantucket, under Captain Pollard, pursued a shoal of sperm whales in the Pacific. After several were wounded, a massive bull broke from the group and charged the ship itself. He struck her hull with his forehead, opening her so completely that she sank within minutes. Owen Chace, the first mate, later recorded that the attack seemed anything but accidental. The whale made two separate approaches, both calculated to maximize damage. His manner suggested fury and a desire for vengeance. Pollard survived the ordeal, but after a second shipwreck on a later voyage, he abandoned the sea forever.
Other vessels met similar fates. The Union was lost off the Azores in 1807 after a whale attack. An American naval officer, having scoffed at the notion that any whale could damage his sturdy warship, was forced to seek emergency repairs after a sperm whale struck his hull at sea. Langsdorff’s voyage records a Russian ship lifted three feet from the water when it ran over an unseen whale. Lionel Wafer’s narrative describes a shock so violent that crewmen were thrown from their hammocks and the ship’s guns shifted in their mounts. Whales have pursued boats back to their parent vessels, withstood lance after lance hurled from the decks, and in some cases seized harpoon lines and towed ships through calm water as draft animals pull carts.
Ishmael closes with ancient testimony. Procopius, the sixth-century historian of Justinian’s reign, recorded a sea monster that haunted the Propontis for more than fifty years, destroying Roman vessels at intervals. Ishmael reasons that this creature must have been a sperm whale. The waters of the Propontis lack the food that sustains right whales, but they harbor the squid on which sperm whales feed. A sperm whale could enter those seas through the same passage that carries warships through the Dardanelles. The White Whale’s malice, then, is no invention or allegory but a pattern stretching back through centuries—proof that the deepest terrors of the ocean are older than any sailor’s memory.
Ahab understands that his obsession with Moby Dick threatens to fracture his command. Though Starbuck’s will bends to him, the mate’s soul recoils from the hunt, and a long interval without the White Whale might breed open rebellion. The crew cannot sustain their initial fervor indefinitely; they need nearer concerns to occupy their watches, lest prolonged meditation on the quest unnerve them.
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