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.
Beneath, another world met their eyes. Suspended in watery vaults floated nursing mothers. The lake was exceedingly transparent. One infant, hardly a day old, measured fourteen feet, its fins still retaining the crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears. Queequeg cried out: two whale, one big, one little! Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged in this enchanted pond.
But the calm was shattered. A whale wounded by a cutting-spade, entangled in the harpoon-line he towed, now dashed among the revolving circles like a lone mounted desperado, tossing the keen spade about him, wounding his own comrades. This terrific object recalled the herd from their stationary fright. The lake began to heave; the submarine nurseries vanished; whales swam in contracting orbits. The entire host came tumbling upon their inner centre.
Starbuck seized the helm, intensely whispering oars, stand by! The boat was all but jammed between two vast black bulks. By desperate endeavor they shot into a temporary opening. After many hair-breadth escapes, they glided into what had been an outer circle. This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg’s hat, taken clean from his head by the air-eddy of broad flukes.
Riotous and disordered as the commotion was, it resolved into systematic movement. Having clumped together in one dense body, the whales renewed their flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats lingered to pick up drugged whales and secure one Flask had killed. The result illustrated that sagacious saying in the Fishery—the more whales the less fish. Of all the drugged whales only one was captured. The rest escaped, only to be taken by some other craft than the Pequod.
Beyond the vast armadas, smaller bands of whales occasionally appear—schools divided strictly by sex. The female school travels under a single full-grown male, a luxurious Ottoman swimming among his delicate concubines. Vastly larger than his ladies, he plays the cavalier: at any alarm, he falls to the rear to cover their flight. Like fashionables, the harem migrates from northern summers to Equatorial feeding grounds, then to Oriental waters, forever seeking comfort.
This lord is a jealous bashaw. When young males approach, he attacks with prodigious fury. Whales fence with their jaws like elks locking antlers; many bear the scars of these battles. Yet he has no taste for the nursery—his anonymous babies are left to maternal care, every child an exotic.
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