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.
Ahab had driven the white whale into an ocean-fold. The Rachel had spoken of Moby Dick the day before, and now the Pequod drifted over the exact coordinates where Ahab’s wound had been inflicted. Something in the old man’s eyes had become unbearable—fixed and relentless as the polar star that burns through the arctic night. His purpose gleamed down upon the crew, and all their fears retreated into silence.
Humor vanished from the deck. Stubb abandoned his jests; Starbuck stopped checking them. Every emotion seemed ground to powder in the mortar of Ahab’s iron will. The crew moved like machines, ever conscious of their captain’s despotic eye.
Yet even Ahab could not escape Fedallah’s glance. The Parsee invested the ship with gliding strangeness—ceaseless shudderings, eyes that never closed, a form the men could not determine as flesh or shadow. He never slept, never went below. His wan eyes seemed to say: we two watchmen never rest.
Ahab abandoned the cabin entirely. He stood motionless in his pivot-hole or paced between mast and mizen, hat slouched low. Dew gathered on his stone-carved coat at night; the sun dried it by day. His whole existence narrowed to a single watch.
At times captain and Parsee stood far apart in starlight, staring at each other—each seeming to find in the other his forethrown shadow or abandoned substance. They rarely spoke, yet moved as though yoked to the same unseen tyrant.
When days passed without a spout, Ahab’s distrust deepened. He would trust no eyes but his own. He rigged a basket to the mast-head and declared he would have first sight of the whale himself.
He surveyed his crew—lingering on the harpooneers, avoiding Fedallah—then fixed on Starbuck. “Take the rope, sir—I give it into thy hands.” The one man who had dared oppose him now held Ahab’s life in his grip.
Ten minutes aloft, a red-billed sea-hawk came screaming round his head. The Sicilian lookout shouted warning, but the black wing swept before Ahab’s eyes. The hawk seized his hat and vanished.
An eagle once stripped Tarquin’s cap and returned it—a good omen. Ahab’s hat was never restored. Far ahead of the prow, a black spot fell from the sky into the sea.
The Pequod sighted the Delight. Upon her shears lay the shattered ribs of a whale-boat. “Hast seen the White Whale?” The captain pointed to the wreck. “The harpoon is not yet forged that will do that.”
Ahab snatched Perth’s iron. “Here I hold his death!”
“I bury but one of five men lost yesterday. You sail upon their tomb.” He began the burial.
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