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.
Before alarm spread, he laughed rigidly: “Last night’s thunder turned our compasses.” Starbuck, pale: “Never before has it happened to me.”
Ahab took the sun’s bearing, confirmed the needles were inverted, and ordered the course changed. The Pequod thrust her bows into the opposing wind—the “fair” wind had been juggling them.
Walking the deck, Ahab slipped on the crushed quadrant he had destroyed yesterday. “Yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet.” He called for a lance, maul, and sail-maker’s needle.
Before the crew’s fascinated eyes, he hammered the needle upon an iron rod, magnetizing it through percussion. He suspended it over the compass-card. It quivered, spun, settled. “Look ye—Ahab is lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”
One after another the crew peered into the binnacle, then slunk away. In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, they saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.
With the compass restored to working order, Ahab turned to check the ship’s speed, only to find the log and line had deteriorated beyond use. The loss of this ancient navigational instrument came as the log
The log and line had hung untouched for most of the voyage, rotted by the elements. But after the magnet scene, Ahab remembered his destroyed quadrant and his oath. “Heave the log!”
The Manxman warned the line was far gone. Ahab deflected with wordplay—learning the old man was born in the Isle of Man, he made dark sport: “a man from Man, now unmanned of Man.”
The log was heaved. Snap! The line sagged; the log was gone. “I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all.”
Before he could assert mastery, Pip appeared in his madness. The Manxman tried to drive him off. Ahab advanced: “Hands off from that holiness!” He looked into Pip’s vacant pupils and saw no reflection.
Then Ahab made his declaration: “Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth. Thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings.” Pip felt Ahab’s hand—“velvet shark-skin”—and begged to have their hands riveted together.
Ahab led him away: “I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”
The Manxman watched them go. “There go two daft ones now. One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness.”
The Pequod sailed south-eastward toward the Equator, her course fixed by Ahab’s levelled steel. Through unfrequented waters, driven by trade winds over mild waves, all seemed strangely calm—as if preluding some desperate scene.
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