Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

The Crooked Lamp of Conscience

In his state-room, Jonah encounters a swinging lamp that, though itself permanently straight, hangs at a crooked obliquity because the ship heels toward the wharf. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah, revealing the false, lying levels of his surroundings. He groans that his conscience hangs in him straight upwards like the lamp, while the chambers of his soul are all in crookedness. Like a man reeling from drunken revelry whose conscience still pricks him, Jonah turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit passes. At last, a deep stupor steals over him—conscience is the wound with naught to staunch it—and Jonah’s ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.

The Storm and Jonah’s Sleep

The time of tide arrives; the ship casts off her cables and glides to sea from the deserted wharf, careening toward Tarshish. This ship, Father Mapple remarks, was the first of recorded smugglers, with Jonah as the contraband. But the sea rebels and will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm arises, the ship is like to break, and the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her. Boxes, bales, and jars clatter overboard; the wind shrieks, the men yell, and every plank thunders with trampling feet. Yet amid this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep in his berth in the cabin, oblivious to the black sky, the reeling timbers, and the far rush of the mighty whale that even now cleaves the seas after him with open mouth.

The Casting of Lots

The frightened master comes to Jonah and cries out, “What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!” Startled from his lethargy, Jonah staggers to the deck, grasps a shroud, and looks out upon the sea, only to be struck by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave crashes into the ship, and the mariners come nigh to drowning. The white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies overhead, and Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, then beating down toward the tormented deep. The terrors of the God-fugitive become plain to the sailors, whose suspicions grow certain. To test the truth by referring the matter to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots to see for whose cause the tempest is upon them.