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.
Dr. Bunger, the ship’s surgeon, recounts the aftermath. The wound blackened with gangrene. He amputated, but the ivory arm was Boomer’s own notion—a hammer-headed club the captain meant for cracking skulls.
Ahab cuts through the banter. What became of the White Whale? Boomer admits he crossed the whale’s wake twice since, but chose not to strike. One limb is surely enough. Moby Dick does not bite so much as swallow. Bunger offers a macabre joke: give the whale your left arm as bait to recover the right. Boomer refuses. The whale is welcome to what he has taken. No more White Whales. There would be glory in killing him, and a shipload of sperm, but he is best left alone—is that not so? He glances at Ahab’s ivory leg.
Ahab agrees the whale is best left alone. Yet he will still be hunted. What should be avoided often exerts the strongest pull. The White Whale is all magnet. Which way was he heading?
Bunger circles Ahab suspiciously, sniffing. This man’s blood boils—his pulse makes the deck planks thrum! He approaches with a lancet. Ahab shoves him against the bulwarks and roars for his boat. The English captain whispers to Fedallah: Is your captain mad? Fedallah presses a finger to his lip and slips over the side. Ahab swings himself into the tackle, drops to his boat, and stands in the stern with his back to the Samuel Enderby, his gaze fixed hard toward the Pequod, steering east.
After Ahab departs with his answer and his obsession
The Samuel Enderby takes her name from the London merchant who founded the whaling house of Enderby & Sons—a dynasty rivaling the Tudors and Bourbons in historical consequence. In 1775, this house dispatched the first English vessels to hunt the sperm whale regularly. The Nantucketers had pioneered the chase half a century earlier, but in 1778 the Amelia, fitted out by the Enderbys alone, rounded Cape Horn and became the first ship of any nation to lower a whale-boat in the South Sea. Her hold returned full of precious sperm, and her success opened the Pacific grounds to the world.
The house pressed further. They persuaded the British government to send the Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery, and in 1819 they fitted out the Syren for the remote waters of Japan. Thus the great Japanese Whaling Ground entered general knowledge. All honor to the Enderbies.
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