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.
On the first count, fossil evidence tells a surprising story. Whales of the present day exceed their prehistoric ancestors in size—the largest Tertiary skeleton yet discovered measures under seventy feet, while modern sperm whales approach a hundred. Yet ancient naturalists claimed whales of impossible dimensions: Pliny wrote of creatures spanning acres, Aldrovandus of beasts eight hundred feet long. Ishmael rejects these fables. Egyptian mummies prove no taller than modern men; the prize cattle of England dwarf those carved on Egyptian tablets. Why should the whale alone have shrunk while every other creature has grown?
The graver question concerns survival. The American buffalo seemed numberless forty years ago; now they are gone from the prairies entirely. Does the whale face the same fate? The comparison fails. Forty whalers working four years count themselves lucky to take forty sperm whales; the same hunters on horseback would slaughter forty thousand buffalo. Moreover, the whale commands refuges beyond human reach. Driven from temperate seas, the great whales retreat to polar strongholds, diving beneath ice barriers into realms of perpetual winter where no ship can follow.
Consider the elephant: Eastern monarchs have hunted them for millennia, yet they thrive still. The whale’s domain covers twice the area of all continents combined. And because whales may live a century or more, multiple generations swim together at any moment, the living population bolstered by all who swam decades ago.
For these reasons, Ishmael declares the whale immortal as a species, whatever the fate of individuals. The whale swam before the continents rose from the sea, passed over the ground where palaces now stand. When Noah built his ark, the whale needed no shelter. If flood returns to drown the world, the whale will still breach the highest waves and spout his defiance at the heavens.
Ahab’s violent departure from the Samuel Enderby cost him more than dignity. Landing hard in his boat, then whirling on deck to bark orders, he felt his ivory leg take a splintering shock. The bone held, but he trusted it less now.
Small wonder he watched that dead limb so carefully. Before the Pequod sailed, he had been discovered unconscious one night, his prosthetic wrenched loose and driven nearly through his groin. The wound healed slowly, and Ahab understood that old sorrows breed new ones—grief’s lineage outlasts joy’s, trailing back to the gods themselves, who are not forever glad.
That accident explained his strange withdrawal before the voyage. He had hidden himself away like some Grand Lama, and those few ashore who glimpsed his condition whispered of supernatural vengeance. They conspired to muffle the truth, and only now did the story reach the Pequod’s decks.
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