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.
Tashtego raised his knife over the taut line. Pip’s strangled face begged. Stubb shouted: cut. The whale escaped. Pip lived.
Stubb delivered his ultimatum: stay in the boat, or be left behind. A whale brought thirty times what a slave would fetch in Alabama—remember that.
But fate governs all men, and Pip jumped a second time. The line stayed in the boat. When the whale fled, Pip floated alone on a glittering sea, his dark head bobbing like a clove. Stubb kept his word. Within three minutes, a mile of shoreless ocean separated them.
The awful lonesomeness of that heartless immensity—the concentration of self in boundless vacancy—no words convey. Stubb assumed the boats behind would collect Pip, but they spotted whales and gave chase. Only chance brought the Pequod to his rescue.
The boy who climbed aboard was not the boy who had jumped. His body survived, but the sea had drowned something infinite within him. He had descended into abyssal depths where ancient shapes drifted past, where he witnessed coral spirits building worlds and saw God’s foot upon the loom’s treadle. His shipmates called him mad. Yet what men name insanity may be heaven’s sense.
Do not judge Stubb too harshly. Such abandonment is common in that fishery—and in the sequel, a similar fate befell the narrator himself.
Stubb’s whale, dearly purchased, was brought alongside the Pequod and stripped of its treasures. While some baled the Heidelburgh Tun, others dragged tubs of sperm to be worked before the try-works.
The sperm had cooled and crystallized into lumps rolling in liquid. Ishmael squeezed them back into fluid—a sweet, unctuous duty. His fingers grew serpentine in soft globules that broke like ripe grapes discharging wine. He snuffed the uncontaminated aroma, like spring violets, and lived as in a musky meadow. He forgot the horrible oath and felt divinely free from all ill-will.
Squeeze, squeeze, all morning long. He squeezed till a strange insanity came over him, and he found himself squeezing his co-laborers’ hands, mistaking them for the gentle globules. Let us squeeze hands all round, he thought—let us squeeze ourselves into the very milk of kindness. He had perceived that man must lower his conceit of attainable felicity to the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country. He saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with hands in a jar of spermaceti.
Now other substances: white-horse, tough congealed tendons cut into oblongs like marble; plum-pudding, that mottled flesh with crimson and gold which he tasted like a royal cutlet; slobgollion, the oozy stringy membranes found after squeezing; gurry, the dark glutinous scrapings from right whales; nippers, tendinous strips used to clean oily decks.
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