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.
On a saint’s eve in Lima, Ishmael sits among Spanish cavaliers on the gilded piazza of the Golden Inn, smoke curling from their pipes as the Pacific glimmers beyond. The young Dons Pedro and Sebastian lean close, their questions punctuating the narrative he unfolds—a tale of the Town-Ho, a Nantucket sperm whaler encountered in waters not far from this very coast. The ship had been cruising with a persistent leak, her captain convinced that fortune awaited him in those latitudes. But the leak worsened, and what should have been a routine passage to harbor became instead a tragedy of tyranny and vengeance, centered on two men: Radney, the brutal mate from Martha’s Vineyard, and Steelkilt, a wild Lakeman from the shores of Lake Erie.
Steelkilt was an unlikely whaleman, born inland yet tempered by the freshwater seas that stretch across America’s northern frontier. Those vast lakes possessed an ocean’s character—archipelagoes, savage coasts, naval battles, and shipwrecks that drowned midnight crews. From this inland sea came a mariner of audacious spirit, a man with a Roman profile and a golden beard who carried himself with natural nobility. Radney, by contrast, was coarse and malicious, ugly of face and stubborn of temper. He could not abide a subordinate who surpassed him in presence and pride, and the antipathy between them festered.
The rupture came during the passage, when the Town-Ho’s leak demanded constant pumping. Steelkilt, the strongest of the crew, led one of the pump gangs, his body taxed by the labor. One evening, as he sat exhausted on the windlass, Radney approached and ordered him to sweep the deck and remove filth left by a wandering pig. The command was an intentional degradation—such work belonged to boys, not to seasoned seamen, and certainly not to a man of Steelkilt’s standing. The mate pressed a cooper’s hammer into the air between them, shaking it near the Lakeman’s face as he shouted his orders. Steelkilt retreated once around the windlass, warning his persecutor to stand back. When Radney followed and brought the hammer against his cheek, Steelkilt’s fist struck with the force of a piledriver. The blow crushed the mate’s jaw and sent him sprawling across the hatch, blood pouring from his ruined mouth.
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