Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

Introduction to Captain Bildad

Introduction to Captain Bildad In the cabin, Ishmael finds Captain Bildad seated on the transom—a most uncommon and surprising figure. Along with Captain Peleg, Bildad is one of the largest owners of the Pequod; the remaining shares are held by a crowd of old annuitants, widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards, each owning only the value of a timber head, a foot of plank, or a couple of nails. Nantucketers commonly invest their money in whaling vessels as others invest in approved state stocks. Like Peleg, Bildad is a Quaker, the island of Nantucket having been originally settled by that sect, and its inhabitants still retain many Quaker peculiarities, though sometimes modified by alien and heterogeneous influences—some of these Quakers being the most sanguinary of sailors and whale-hunters, the so-called “fighting Quakers.” From a childhood steeped in the stately thee-and-thou Quaker idiom, combined with the audacious adventure of their whaling lives, these men develop bold and complex characters worthy of a Scandinavian sea-king or a poetical Pagan Roman, and when united with great natural force and a ponderous heart, shaped by long night-watches in remote waters, they produce a singular and tragically great type—a “mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.” Although such men may have a “half wilful overruling morbidness,” truly great men are made great through a certain morbidness, and all mortal greatness is but disease. Unlike Peleg, who cared nothing for serious things and deemed them trifles, Bildad was raised in the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, and even after an ocean life and voyages round the Horn, not one jot of his Quakerism was altered. Yet despite his conscientious refusal to bear arms against land invaders, he himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, he had in his straight-bodied coat spilled tuns of leviathan gore. How he reconciled these contradictions in his contemplative old age is unknown, but he seems to have concluded that a man’s religion is one thing and the practical world quite another. The world pays dividends. Bildad’s career was one of relentless progress: from cabin-boy in the drabbest clothes, to harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat, to boat-header, chief-mate, captain, and finally ship owner. At the age of sixty, he wholly retired from active life to spend his remaining days quietly receiving his well-earned income. He carries a reputation, however, as an incorrigible old hunks and a hard task-master in his sea-going days. He never swore at his men, but worked them cruelly hard. As a chief-mate, his drab-colored eye staring at a sailor would make him nervous until he could clutch a hammer or marling-spike and go to work like mad. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own person, gaunt and beardless with only a soft economical nap on his chin, was the embodiment of his utilitarian character.