Moby Dick
by Hermann Melville
Photo by Harald MM
Chapter 41
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with
the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I
shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath,
because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical,
sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud
seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that
murderous monster against whom I and all the others had
taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen
him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whalecruisers;
the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along
solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the
inordinate length of each separate voyage;
the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and
indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick.
It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm
Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, has completely escaped them; to
some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the
Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were
content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.
In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
The White Whale
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one
of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in
these assaults— not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations—but fatal to the last degree of fatality;
those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude
of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in
maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the
sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of
the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness
hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing
in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them.
Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a
thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would
not come to any chiselled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable
beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes,
pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is
wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant
with many a mighty birth.
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale
did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which
eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he
finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils
of his jaw.
The Leviathan
But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm
Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this
day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would perhaps—either
from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of
whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm
Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their
hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the
preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem
him.