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.
Darkness fell before they reached the Pequod. Ahab met them with lanterns over the bulwarks, gave orders to secure the whale for the night, then vanished into his cabin. He had shown his usual fierce energy in the hunt, but now the dead body before him seemed to work some vague despair. A thousand whales would not advance his grand object; Moby Dick still lived. Heavy chains rattled across the deck as the crew moored the leviathan alongside—head to stern, tail to bows—so that in the darkness ship and whale lay coupled like twin beasts, one standing, one prone.
While Ahab brooded below, Stubb bubbled with victory. The second mate had a hearty appetite for whale meat and immediately called for a steak cut from the small of the creature. By midnight he sat eating at the capstan, his lantern-lit supper a scene of grotesque contentment.
He was not alone in his feasting. Thousands of sharks swarmed the carcass, tearing at the blubber with a fury that shook the hull and startled the sleepers below. They gouged out perfect hemispheres of flesh—a feat that seemed impossible at such a surface—and the night rang with their thrashing and snapping.
Stubb, irritated by the din, summoned the old cook. Fleece came shuffling from his galley, a grizzled black man with ailing knees, leaning on tongs fashioned from straightened hoops. Stubb ordered him to preach to the sharks, to quiet them with a sermon.
The cook limped to the bulwark and held his lantern over the churning water. He addressed the “fellow-critters” in his cracked voice, telling them to govern their woracious natures and eat civilly. Stubb crept behind to listen, interrupting to correct the old man’s swearing. Fleece tried again: if sharks could master the shark within, they would be angels. But the congregation would not hear—they were too busy gorging, their bellies bottomless. He pronounced a final blessing: let them eat until they burst, then die.
Stubb returned to his steak and called Fleece to stand before him. A mocking catechism followed. How old was the cook? Ninety, came the sullen answer. And after a century of life, he still could not properly cook a whale steak? Where was he born? On a ferry-boat, Fleece muttered. Then he must go home and be born again, Stubb declared, if he wished to learn his craft.
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