CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
The chapter opens with the Pequod sailing in concert with a brisk wind, soon sighting a distant unknown whale ship. After exchanging private signals of the American Whale Fleet to confirm the stranger’s identity, the vessel is identified as the Jeroboam of Nantucket, which squares its yards and bears down alongside the Pequod.
Approach of the Jeroboam
The Pequod’s crew raises its private whale ship signal to hail the distant unknown vessel, and after the stranger returns a matching signal, they confirm the ship is the Jeroboam of Nantucket. The Jeroboam adjusts its rigging to bear down, ranges alongside the Pequod’s lee, and lowers a boat toward the Pequod, though its captain waves off the Pequod’s offer of a side ladder for boarding.
Epidemic Quarantine
The Jeroboam’s captain, Mayhew, refuses all direct contact with the Pequod, as the Jeroboam is carrying a malignant epidemic on board. Despite Mayhew and his boat crew being uninfected, and a half-rifle-shot distance and open sea and air between the two vessels, he adheres strictly to maritime quarantine protocols to avoid infecting the Pequod’s crew. The Jeroboam’s boat maintains a small buffer of a few yards between itself and the Pequod, using occasional oar strokes to stay parallel to the Pequod as it cuts through fresh wind and heavy seas, with only rare interruptions from large rolling waves during their sustained long-distance conversation.
The Figure of Gabriel
A man rowing in the Jeroboam’s boat has a striking, unusual appearance even for the rough, diverse whaling life: he is short, youngish, covered in freckles, with thick, abundant yellow hair, wearing a long, faded walnut-colored coat with overlapping sleeves rolled up to his wrists, and his eyes hold a deep, settled, fanatic delirium. Stubb immediately recognizes him as the strange “scaramouch” the crew of the Town-Ho had previously told the Pequod about, a man rumored to wield unusual power over the Jeroboam’s crew.
Gabriel’s History
Gabriel was originally raised among the fanatic Neskyeuna Shakers, where he worked as a self-proclaimed prophet, claiming to have descended from heaven via a trapdoor bearing the seventh vial of the apocalypse (supposedly filled with laudanum, not gunpowder) to announce the end of the world. He left the Shakers for Nantucket, hiding his insanity to pass as a steady, common-sense green hand hired for the Jeroboam’s voyage. Once the ship was out of sight of land, his madness broke out fully: he declared himself the archangel Gabriel, ordered the captain to jump overboard, and proclaimed himself the deliverer of the sea isles and vicar-general of all Oceanica. His unflinching, fervent declarations and the preternatural terror of his delirium convinced the ignorant, superstitious crew to worship him as a sacred figure, and they forced the captain to keep him on board with complete freedom and no work requirements. Since the epidemic broke out on the Jeroboam, Gabriel has only grown more powerful, claiming the plague is under his sole command, and the crew cringes and pays him personal homage as if to a god.
The White Whale
Ahab calls to Mayhew to come aboard the Pequod, but Gabriel interrupts to warn of yellow and bilious fevers and the “horrible plague.” When Ahab asks if the Jeroboam has sighted the White Whale, Gabriel warns of stoven whale boats and the whale’s deadly tail. Mayhew then tells Ahab the Jeroboam’s history with Moby Dick: after leaving port, the Jeroboam’s crew learned of Moby Dick’s destructive reputation, and Gabriel warned them against hunting the whale, claiming the White Whale was the Shaker God incarnate. Despite Gabriel’s repeated prophecies of doom, the Jeroboam’s chief mate Macey burned with desire to hunt the whale, and convinced five crew members to man a whale boat for the hunt, with the captain’s reluctant approval. Gabriel positioned himself on the main-royal masthead, hurling frantic prophecies of perdition for the “sacrilegious assailants” of his divine whale. As Macey stood in the bow of his boat poised to throw his lance, Moby Dick rose suddenly from the sea, the broad white shadow of his body temporarily knocking the breath out of the oarsmen. The whale then struck Macey bodily, sending him flying through the air in a long arc before he fell into the sea 50 yards away and drowned permanently. No part of the whale boat was damaged, nor were any of the oarsmen harmed, and when Macey’s body was later recovered, it bore no marks of violence, a type of fatal accident that is nearly as common as any other in the sperm whale fishery. Gabriel shrieked that his vial had been opened, and the terrified crew refused to hunt the whale further, cementing his total control over the Jeroboam.
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