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.
In the pre-dawn dark, the watch was startled by a wild, unearthly cry. The Christian crew said mermaids and shuddered; the pagan harpooneers remained unmoved. The grey Manxman declared the sounds were voices of newly drowned men. At dawn, Ahab hollowly laughed: seals that had lost their dams or cubs. But the crew’s superstitious dread of seals—their human-looking faces, their peculiar tones—only deepened the omen.
At sunrise a sailor fell from his mast-head. Looking up, they saw a falling phantom; looking down, white bubbles in the blue. The life-buoy was dropped, but the sun-shrunken cask filled and sank. The first man to mount the mast on the White Whale’s own ground was swallowed up. The crew regarded it not as foreshadowing, but as fulfilment of an evil already presaged—now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks.
No cask could be found to replace the lost buoy. They were about to leave the stern unprovided when Queequeg hinted concerning his coffin.
“A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting. After a melancholy pause: “Bring it up. Rig it, carpenter.”
The carpenter mimed each motion—nailing the lid, caulking the seams, paying with pitch. Starbuck flinched. “Away! Make a life-buoy, and no more.” He went off in a huff.
The carpenter muttered that Starbuck could endure the whole but baulked at the parts. He grumbled at this cobbling work—undignified, not his place. He liked clean mathematical jobs, not work “at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end.” But he would do it. He would hang thirty Turk’s-headed life-lines all round—“thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin!”
The coffin lay on line-tubs while the Carpenter caulked its seams. Ahab approached, sent Pip away, and nearly stumbled at the hatchway. “Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.” He accused the worker of being an unprincipled jack-of-all-trades, a leg-maker and undertaker now crafting a life-buoy. The mallet rang on the lid, a sounding-board with naught beneath. When the Carpenter spoke of faith, Ahabbed seized the word. Left alone, the worker muttered that an Equator cut the old man, who was always fiery hot under the Line. Ahab watched, likening the sound to a woodpecker tapping a hollow tree. He saw the dreaded symbol of death transformed into a sign of hope, wondering if it were an immortality-preserver. Yet he rejected the thought, too gone in earth’s dark side to see the theoretic light. Driven mad by the sound, he ordered the Carpenter stop and went below to Pip, seeking wondrous philosophies from the boy’s unknown conduits.
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