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 whale possesses lungs rather than gills and must surface to breathe through its spiracle alone. Its windpipe connects only to this aperture atop its head, not to its mouth. Within its body lies a labyrinth of vessels that store oxygenated blood, allowing it to remain submerged for an hour or more—a camel-like reserve of vitality. This anatomical fact explains the whale’s obstinate regularity: it insists on completing its full count of breaths before descending, a rhythm that exposes it to the hunter’s harpoon. Not the hunter’s skill, but the whale’s own necessities deliver the victory.
Whether water mixes with the spout remains unclear. If it did, perhaps the whale’s obliterated sense of smell would be explained—its spout-hole serves as its only nose, perpetually clogged with two elements. The whale has no voice; its windpipe opens only into the spouting canal, leaving it silent unless one counts its rumblings as speech through the nose. That canal runs horizontally beneath the upper surface of the head, like a city gas-pipe laid along a street—but whether it also serves as a water-pipe remains the unanswered question. What has the whale to say? Profound beings seldom have anything to say to this world.
Determining the spout’s nature proves impossible. Close observation is thwarted by the whale’s violent commotion when near, the cascading water, the sparkling mist that wraps the central jet. Even in calm, the whale carries a small basin of water in the fissure of its spout-hole—any moisture might come from this reservoir. The spout is dangerous, too: acrid, capable of peeling skin and blinding eyes. Whalemen avoid it as poisonous.
Unable to prove his case, Ishmael offers a hypothesis grounded in the whale’s inherent dignity. The Sperm Whale is no shallow creature; it lives in deep water, never near shore. It is ponderous and profound. From the heads of all profound beings—Plato, Dante, the Devil—there rises a semi-visible steam when thinking deep thoughts. Ishmael claims to have seen such vapor in his own mirror while composing on eternity.
The chapter closes with a vision: the whale sailing through calm tropical seas, its vast head overhung by a canopy of vapor, sometimes glorified by a rainbow as if heaven placed its seal upon its incommunicable contemplations. Through the mists of earthly doubt, divine intuitions shoot like heavenly rays. Ishmael confesses his condition: doubts of all things earthly, intuitions of some things heavenly—a combination that makes neither believer nor infidel, but one who regards both with equal eye.
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