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.
“Brace forward!” Ahab fled. But the corpse’s splash sprinkled the Pequod’s hull. As the life-buoy-coffin swung at her stern, a voice cried: “Ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!”
A clear steel-blue day. Sky and sea merged in azure, distinguished only by sex—the pensive air feminine and soft, the robust sea heaving with masculine strength. The sun joined them at the horizon like bride and groom.
Ahab stood forth in the morning light, his splintered helmet of a brow lifted toward heaven, his eyes glowing like coals in the ashes of ruin. He leaned over the rail, watching his shadow descend into the depths. The gentle air seemed to soften the bitterness in his soul. The world, long cruel, now embraced him. A tear fell from beneath his hat into the Pacific.
Starbuck approached, hearing in his heart the measureless sobbing within the serenity. Ahab turned and confessed: forty years of whaling, forty years of privation and peril. Scarcely three years ashore. He had wedded a young woman past fifty, then sailed away the next morning—leaving her a widow while her husband lived. He called himself an old fool, grey-haired, bent beneath the weight of centuries like Adam himself.
He asked Starbuck to stand close. In the mate’s eye he saw his wife and child reflected. Stay aboard, he urged—let me chase the whale alone.
Starbuck begged him to turn homeward. Wife and child were Starbuck’s too—the wife and child of his youth, just as Ahab’s were of his old age. How cheerily they would bowl along to see old Nantucket again! For a moment Ahab wavered, speaking of his boy waking from naps, his mother promising that father would return. Starbuck pressed: the child’s face at the window, his hand raised on the hill.
Then Ahab looked away. He trembled like a blighted tree dropping its last withered fruit. Some nameless power drove him onward against all natural love. Did he command his own arm, or did God—or Fate?
He spoke of mowers sleeping in hayfields. But Starbuck had already fled, blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair.
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over the other side—and started at two fixed eyes reflected in the water. Fedallah stood motionless at the rail, waiting.
In the mid-watch, Ahab emerged from the scuttle and thrust his face into the darkness, drawing in the sea air with the instinct of a hound. A whale was near. Soon the peculiar odor of the living sperm whale became palpable to all, and Ahab ordered the ship’s course altered, the sail shortened. His instinct proved true. At daybreak, a long sleek stretched across the water ahead, smooth as oil, marking the passage of something vast beneath the surface.
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