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.
Ishmael defends the story of Jonah against the skepticism of Sag-Harbor, a fellow whaleman. Like ancient doubters of Hercules whose skepticism never made the story false, Sag-Harbor’s doubts do not negate fact. He points to his Bible’s illustration of a whale with two spouts—a Right Whale whose throat is too small to swallow a man. Ishmael counters with Bishop Jebb’s theory that Jonah lodged in the whale’s mouth instead. To gastric objections, he offers learned alternatives: Jonah hid in a dead whale, escaped to a ship named “The Whale,” or clung to a life-preserver. When Sag-Harbor argues that no whale could travel from the Mediterranean to Nineveh in three days—the rivers too shallow—Ishmael proposes a route via the Cape of Good Hope, citing a Portuguese priest who saw this as magnifying the miracle. He condemns such skepticism as impious pride, pointing to Turkish faith and a Mosque honoring Jonah.
Whalers grease boat bottoms like carriage axles to reduce friction. Queequeg crawls beneath the hull, rubbing oil into the keel with unusual intensity, as if obeying some unspoken foreboding. His presentiment proves warranted when whales flee in disordered panic—like Cleopatra’s barges from Actium. Tashtego plants an iron in one, but the stricken whale refuses to sound, continuing its desperate horizontal flight. Hauling alongside is impossible; the line will tear free unless the whale can be lanced from distance—demanding pitchpoling, a last-resort art for running whales already fast to a harpoon.
Stubb stands in the tossing bow, examining his lance—lighter and longer than a harpoon, with a warp for retrieval. He raises the weapon like a juggler’s staff, then sends it arcing to find its mark. The whale’s spout turns from water to blood, and Stubb jokes of Fourth of July fountains running wine. Again and again he throws and retrieves the lance, the weapon returning like a trained greyhound. The whale enters its death flurry while Stubb drops astern and watches in silence—his jokes giving way to mute attention as the creature dies.
For six thousand years whales have spouted across the world’s seas, yet whether the spout is water or vapor remains unsettled—a remarkable ignorance given how closely whalers have observed these creatures. Ishmael pins his inquiry to a precise moment: December 16, 1851, past one o’clock in the afternoon.
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