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.
The typhoon struck the Pequod in the Japanese seas, tearing away her canvas and leaving her bare-poled under the full fury of wind and thunder. Lightning blazed through darkness, revealing disabled masts and the rags of sail left for the storm’s sport. Starbuck stood watch on the quarter-deck while Stubb and Flask struggled to secure the boats—but a massive sea stove in Ahab’s boat at the stern. Stubb sang wildly to mask his terror, but Starbuck seized him: the gale blew from the eastward, the very course Ahab had sworn to follow toward Moby Dick. The mate saw salvation—the same wind that hammered them could drive them homeward around the Cape. To windward lay blackness and doom; to leeward, a light that was not lightning.
Ahab emerged from darkness, calling himself Old Thunder. When Starbuck ordered the lightning rods dropped, Ahab forbade it—fair play, even from the elements. Then the corpusants ignited: pallid fire tipped every yard-arm and burned from each mast-end like three gigantic altar candles. The enchanted crew stood clustered on the forecastle, their eyes gleaming like a far-away constellation. Daggoo loomed gigantic against the glow; Tashtego’s teeth gleamed as if tipped with fire; Queequeg’s tattoos burned like blue flames. When the vision faded, Stubb interpreted the masts as spermaceti candles—a promise of fortune.
The flames returned redoubled. Fedallah knelt at the mainmast’s base, head bowed away from Ahab. The captain seized the lightning-rod links and stood before the triple flames, addressing the fire spirit directly. He had once worshipped it as a Persian; now he knew defiance as the only true worship. He was darkness leaping out of light, and he claimed kinship with the foundling fire.
Ahab’s harpoon caught the pale fire, burning like a serpent’s tongue. Starbuck seized the captain’s arm: God himself opposed this voyage—turn homeward while they could. The panic-stricken crew moved toward the braces, raising a half-mutinous cry. Ahab dashed down the lightning links, snatched the burning harpoon, and waved it among the crew like a torch, threatening to transfix any man who tried to abandon ship. All their oaths to hunt the White Whale were as binding as his own. He extinguished the flame with a single breath. The sailors retreated from him in terror, as men flee a lightning-marked tree in a hurricane.
Starbuck urged Ahab to strike the loose yard and secure the anchors. Ahab refused: lash everything, stir nothing. His brain-truck sailed amid the cloud-scud; only cowards sent down their topmost spars in tempest time.
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