Ivory Leg Broken
When Ahab is helped to the deck, all eyes fix upon him as he half-hangs upon Starbuck’s shoulder, for his ivory leg has been snapped off, leaving only one short, sharp splinter. The carpenter approaches, explaining that he had done good work on that leg, while Stubb hopefully asks if no bones are broken. Ahab declares that the leg is splintered to pieces but that his living bones are no more his than this lost dead one, asserting that neither white whale, nor man, nor fiend can graze him in his proper, inaccessible being. Despite the injury causing him visible pain—“how this splinter gores me now”—Ahab refuses to lean for long, commanding attention to the ship’s course and the continuing pursuit.
Parsee Missing
When Ahab demands to know the ship’s heading and orders preparations to continue, he suddenly realizes the Parsee is missing. Upon mustering the company, the dark sailor is nowhere to be found. Stubb suggests he must have been caught in the tangles of Ahab’s own line, remembering seeing him dragging under. Ahab is stunned at the word “gone,” asking what death-knell rings in that little word that makes him shake like a belfry. The harpoon too is missing—darted by Ahab’s own hand and now embedded in the whale—and Ahab rages at this loss, ordering all hands to rigging, collecting oars, and demanding the royals be hoisted higher as he declares he will yet slay the whale despite everything.
Ahab’s Rage
Ahab explodes with fury upon discovering the Parsee’s disappearance and the loss of his harpoon in the whale. He denounces the “black vomit” and orders everyone to search the ship from crow’s nest to cabin for the missing man, but the search proves futile. The revelation that his line—the line he specifically declared as “my line”—has caused the Parsee’s fate strikes him with particular force, as does the knowledge that his own hand-darted harpoon remains in the fish. He roars commands for the boat rigging, oars, and harpoons, insisting that he’ll girdle the globe and dive through it rather than give up the chase, his rage bordering on madness as he pursues the whale with renewed, terrible intensity.
Starbuck’s Plea
Starbuck cries out to God, begging that He show himself for even a single instant, then pleads with the old man never to capture the whale. He catalogues the horrors of the two-day chase: twice stove to splinters, Ahab’s very leg again snatched from under him, evil shadows gone, and good angels mobbing him with warnings. He asks desperately what more Ahab would have, questioning whether they should keep chasing the murderous fish until it swamps the last man, whether they should be dragged to the bottom of the sea or towed by the whale to the infernal world. He denounces the pursuit as impiety and blasphemy.
Ahab Defiant
Ahab admits to feeling strangely moved toward Starbuck since an hour when they both saw something in each other’s eyes, but declares that in the matter of the whale, Starbuck’s face must be to him as a blank lipless wall. He insists Ahab is forever Ahab, that this whole act is immutably decreed, rehearsed a billion years before the ocean rolled. He calls Starbuck an underling and commands his obedience. Standing cut down to a stump, leaning on a shivered lance, propped on a lonely foot, Ahab declares that though his body is diminished, his soul is a centipede moving on a hundred legs. He likens himself to ropes towing a dismasted frigate in a gale, warning that though he may look strained, they will hear him crack before he breaks. He invokes the omen that drowning things rise twice before sinking forever, predicting the whale will rise once more on the third day, only to spout his last.
Preparations for Tomorrow
When dusk falls, the whale remains visible to leeward. The sail is shortened again, and preparations continue nearly as on the previous night. The sound of hammers and the hum of the grindstone continues until nearly daylight as the men labor by lanterns, carefully rigging the spare boats and sharpening fresh weapons for tomorrow’s confrontation. Meanwhile, the carpenter constructs a new leg from the broken keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft. Throughout the night, Ahab stands fixed within his scuttle, his heliotrope glance anticipatingly turned backward on its dial, as he sits facing eastward, waiting for the earliest sun and the resumption of the chase.
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