Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

Ahab’s Hourly Whale Sight Demands

At the first dawn light, Ahab’s iron voice rings out “Man the mast-heads!” and every hour thereafter, at the striking of the helmsman’s bell, the same demand echoes: “What d’ye see?—sharp! sharp!” From sunrise through the day, after sunset and twilight, this relentless interrogation continues until the whale is finally spotted.

Ahab’s Self-Rigged Masthead Lookout

Determining to see the whale himself, Ahab rigs his own basket of bowlines at the main-mast head, sending a hand aloft with a block and receiving the rope ends himself. He positions the basket beside the pin and surveys his crew, fixing his firm eye upon Daggoo, Queequeg, and Tashtego, but shunning Fedallah. He entrusts the rope’s secured end to Starbuck—strangely selecting the very man whose look-out faithfulness he has doubted—to act as his watchman while he takes his position high above the deck, gazing abroad upon miles of sea in “the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.”

The Ominous Snatching of Ahab’s Hat

Within minutes of Ahab taking his perch, a red-billed sea-hawk begins wheeling and screaming round his head in swift circlings. Then it darts a thousand feet upward and spiralizes downward, eddying again around him—though Ahab, gaze fixed on the dim horizon, seems not to mark it. A Sicilian seaman posts at the mizen-mast-head cries out: “Your hat, your hat, sir!” But before Ahab can react, “the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long hooked bill at his head”—and with a scream, the black hawk bears away Ahab’s hat. The chapter closes with the parallel to Tarquin’s cap, where a wife’s declaration of kingship depended upon the cap’s replacement. Here, Ahab’s hat is “never restored”; the hawk flies on with it, far ahead of the prow, until a minute black spot dims into the sea below.