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.
Father Mapple enters the storm-pelted chapel, his venerable robustness suggesting a hardy old age merging into a second flowering youth—his wrinkles shining with a newly developing bloom. His waterlogged pilot cloth reveals his past as a harpooneer. As the congregation watches, he sheds his sailor’s garb and arrays himself in a decent suit. Ishmael examines the lofty pulpit, constructed like a ship’s mast-head with a perpendicular rope ladder. Father Mapple mounts this ladder with sailor-like dexterity, hand over hand, as if ascending the main-top. Upon reaching the top, he deliberately hauls the ladder up, isolating himself within the pulpit. Ishmael interprets this act as a symbol of the preacher’s spiritual withdrawal from the world to commune with God. The nautical theme continues with a painting behind the pulpit depicting a gallant ship in a storm, illuminated by an angel’s face beaming sunlight. The pulpit itself is shaped like a ship’s bluff bows, leading Ishmael to conclude that the pulpit is the earth’s foremost part, the prow of the world that must bear the earliest brunt of God’s wrath.
Father Mapple rose and ordered the scattered congregation to condense like a ship’s crew. Sea-boots rumbled among the benches, women’s shoes shuffled, and silence fell. He knelt in the pulpit’s bows, folded his brown hands, and offered a prayer so devout he seemed to be kneeling at the bottom of the sea.
In solemn tones like a bell tolling from a foundering ship, he began reading a hymn. But approaching the final stanzas, he burst forth with pealing exultation. The hymn told of Jonah’s terror in the whale’s belly—ribs and terrors arched in dismal gloom, the opening maw of hell—then deliverance: God bowed His ear, and the Deliverer’s face shone bright as lightning. The congregation joined singing, voices swelling above the howling storm outside.
Mapple declared the Book of Jonah—only four chapters, the smallest strand in Scripture’s cable—to be a two-stranded lesson: for sinners, and for him as a pilot of the living God. Jonah’s sin was willful disobedience. All that God commands is hard, because obeying God means disobeying ourselves.
With this sin upon him, Jonah sought to flee, thinking a ship could carry him where God did not reign. He skulked about Joppa’s wharves, seeking passage to Tarshish—Cadiz, far westward beyond the Mediterranean. Mapple painted him as a miserable fugitive with slouched hat and guilty eye, prowling like a burglar. Sailors marked him instantly, whispering—robbed a widow, bigamist, murderer from Sodom. One ran to check the bill posted for a parricide. They crowded round, prepared to seize him. Frightened, summoning boldness to his face, he only looked the more a coward. Finding him not the advertised criminal, they let him pass.
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