Herman
Melville was the author of a story about what we'd now consider an illegal activity,
the commercial hunting of whales for oil and meat. Whaling is still
carried out by Japan, Iceland and Canada, among other nations, though
most nations voluntarily abstain in the interests of conserving these
magnificent animals - as per International
Whaling Commission guidelines.
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CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
For several days after leaving
Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of
Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by the ragged
Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle
energy I could not have before conceived of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness—to call it so—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.
Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a
Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being
Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension;
Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great
tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once
Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey
Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of
Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye, he was dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Indian once; "but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em."
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud;
Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the
Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish
air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
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BOOK
CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
CHAPTER
2. The Carpet-Bag.
CHAPTER
3. The Spouter-Inn.
CHAPTER
4. The Counterpane.
CHAPTER
5. Breakfast.
CHAPTER
6. The Street.
CHAPTER
7. The Chapel.
CHAPTER
8. The Pulpit.
CHAPTER
9. The Sermon.
CHAPTER
10. A Bosom Friend.
CHAPTER
11. Nightgown.
CHAPTER
12. Biographical.
CHAPTER
13. Wheelbarrow.
CHAPTER
14. Nantucket.
CHAPTER
15. Chowder.
CHAPTER
16. The Ship.
CHAPTER
17. The Ramadan.
CHAPTER
18. His Mark.
CHAPTER
19. The Prophet.
CHAPTER
20. All Astir.
CHAPTER
21. Going Aboard.
CHAPTER
22. Merry Christmas.
CHAPTER
23. The Lee Shore.
CHAPTER
24. The Advocate.
CHAPTER
25. Postscript.
CHAPTER
26. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER
27. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER
28. Ahab, Captain.
CHAPTER
29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
CHAPTER
30. The Pipe.
CHAPTER
31. Queen Mab.
CHAPTER
32. Cetology.
CHAPTER
33. The Specksnyder.
CHAPTER
34. The Cabin-Table.
CHAPTER
35. The Mast-Head.
CHAPTER
36. The Quarter-Deck.
CHAPTER
37. Sunset.
CHAPTER
38. Dusk.
CHAPTER
39. First Night Watch.
CHAPTER
40. Midnight, Forecastle.
CHAPTER
41. Moby Dick.
CHAPTER
42. The Whiteness of The Whale.
CHAPTER
43. Hark!
CHAPTER
44. The Chart.
CHAPTER
45. The Affidavit.
CHAPTER
46. Surmises.
CHAPTER
47. The Mat-Maker.
CHAPTER
48. The First Lowering.
CHAPTER
49. The Hyena.
CHAPTER
50. Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
CHAPTER
51. The Spirit-Spout.
CHAPTER
52. The Albatross.
CHAPTER
53. The Gam.
CHAPTER
54. The Town-Ho's Story.
CHAPTER
55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
CHAPTER
56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True
CHAPTER
57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in
CHAPTER
58. Brit.
CHAPTER
59. Squid.
CHAPTER
60. The Line.
CHAPTER
61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
CHAPTER
62. The Dart.
CHAPTER
63. The Crotch.
CHAPTER
64. Stubb's Supper.
CHAPTER
65. The Whale as a Dish.
CHAPTER
66. The Shark Massacre.
CHAPTER
67. Cutting In
CHAPTER
69. The Funeral.
CHAPTER
70. The Sphynx.
CHAPTER
71. The Jeroboam's Story.
CHAPTER
72. The Monkey-Rope.
CHAPTER
73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk
CHAPTER
74. The Sperm Whale's Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER
75. The Right Whale's Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER
76. The Battering-Ram.
CHAPTER
77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
CHAPTER
78. Cistern and Buckets.
CHAPTER
79. The Prairie.
CHAPTER
80. The Nut.
CHAPTER
81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
CHAPTER
82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling.
CHAPTER
83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
CHAPTER
84. Pitchpoling.
CHAPTER
85. The Fountain.
CHAPTER
86. The Tail.
CHAPTER
87. The Grand Armada.
CHAPTER
88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
CHAPTER
89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
CHAPTER
90. Heads or Tails.
CHAPTER
91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
CHAPTER
92. Ambergris.
CHAPTER
93. The Castaway.
CHAPTER
94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
CHAPTER
95. The Cassock.
CHAPTER
96. The Try-Works.
CHAPTER
97. The Lamp.
CHAPTER
98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
CHAPTER
99. The Doubloon.
CHAPTER
100. Leg and Arm.
CHAPTER
101. The Decanter.
CHAPTER
102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
CHAPTER
103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton.
CHAPTER
104. The Fossil Whale.
CHAPTER
105. Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
CHAPTER
106. Ahab's Leg.
CHAPTER
107. The Carpenter.
CHAPTER
108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
CHAPTER
109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
CHAPTER
110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
CHAPTER
111. The Pacific.
CHAPTER
112. The Blacksmith.
CHAPTER
113. The Forge.
CHAPTER
114. The Gilder.
CHAPTER
115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
CHAPTER
116. The Dying Whale.
CHAPTER
117. The Whale Watch.
CHAPTER
118. The Quadrant.
CHAPTER
119. The Candles.
CHAPTER
120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
CHAPTER
121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
CHAPTER
122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
CHAPTER
123. The Musket.
CHAPTER
124. The Needle.
CHAPTER
125. The Log and Line.
CHAPTER
126. The Life-Buoy.
CHAPTER
127. The Deck.
CHAPTER
128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
CHAPTER
129. The Cabin.
CHAPTER
130. The Hat.
CHAPTER
131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
CHAPTER
132. The Symphony.
CHAPTER
133. The Chase—First Day.
CHAPTER
134. The Chase—Second Day.
CHAPTER
135. The Chase.—Third Day.
Epilogue
Moby
Dick is the antogonist in this story of a great white 'bull' sperm whale that fought back at
whalers who tried to harpoon him.
The idea came to
Herman Melville after
he spent time on a commercial whaler, where stories abounded of the
sinking of the Essex in 1821 and Mocha
Dick, a giant sperm whale that sank around 20 ships, before being
harpooned in 1838.
Herman
realised how fixated the sailors became, and he also became with the
thought that there was a whale that nobody could catch, that represented
a real risk to the whalers hunting whales, in that it was more sport
than commercial operations.
Without
any doubt this is one of the greatest novels coming out of America at
this time and way off the beaten track, making it so interesting,
reflecting the state of whaling and the economic importance in the
developing the nation - giving the general public a taste of something
adventurous that most people never think about.
Many
films and graphic novel adaptations have been inspired by the writings
of Herman Melville, from Marvel
and Disney
comics with good cause.
One
such production in 2020 is a graphic novel about a giant humpback whale
called Kulo
Luna, that sinks a modern whaling boat, much as depicted in Herman
Melville's Moby
Dick, except that is this day and age whales have explosive harpoons
to contend with, and sonar, from which there is no escape.
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