Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.

Next day, the ship Rachel bore down upon them, her spars thick with men. As she neared, her sails fell blank. “Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the Manxman. Before her captain could hail, Ahab cried, “Hast seen the White Whale?” The captain said he had seen him yesterday, and asked if they had seen a whale-boat adrift. Ahab, throttling his joy, answered no. The captain, Captain Gardiner, had lost a boat with his son aboard, and another son was missing from a different boat. He begged Ahab to join the search for eight-and-forty hours. “My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I conjure—you must do this thing.” Stubb whispered that it was his son the captain mourned; the old Manxman said the drowned spirits were about them.

Ahab stood like an anvil. “I will not go. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.” He ordered Starbuck to warn off all strangers in three minutes. Gardiner silently returned to his ship, which yawed hither and thither at every dark spot on the sea, still searching. “By her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.”

CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.

Ahab moved to go on deck, but Pip caught his hand. “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady.” Pip begged to stay, to be used as Ahab’s lost leg. Ahab was moved. “Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.” He led Pip to his cabin, intending to leave him there. “Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.”

But Pip would not be left. “No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.” Ahab felt his purpose keel up in him. “Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.” Finally he left Pip in the cabin with a blessing. “God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall.”

Pip was left alone in the cabin, playing at being admiral, calling for captains, drinking shame to cowards, while the ship’s timbers creaked around him.

CHAPTER 130. The Hat.

Now that the Pequod had chased the White Whale into his own ocean-fold, Ahab’s purpose gleamed like the unsetting polar star. The crew’s bodings and fears hid beneath their souls; humor vanished; they moved like machines. Fedallah, the Parsee, seemed a shadow, never sleeping, always watching Ahab. Ahab himself stood in his scuttle day and night, his hat slouched over his eyes, his ivory heel on the deck. He ate in the open air but never touched supper; his beard grew gnarled like unearthed roots.

At the first faintest glimmer of dawn, his iron voice hailed the mast-heads. When three days passed after meeting Rachel with no spout seen, Ahab distrusted his crew’s fidelity. He rigged a basket at the main-mast head and hoisted himself aloft, giving the rope’s end into Starbuck’s hands—an act of strange trust in the man he most doubted. He gazed abroad upon the sea for miles.

A red-billed sea-hawk wheeled and screamed round his head, then darted upward and spiralized down. Suddenly the Sicilian seaman cried, “Your hat, your hat, sir!” The sable wing was before Ahab’s eyes; the long hooked bill struck his head; with a scream the black hawk darted away with his prize. The hat was never restored. Like Tarquin’s eagle, but without the replacing of the cap, the omen was dark. Ahab stood hatless, the wild hawk far ahead, and at last a black spot fell from that vast height into the sea.