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1It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record
2years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the
3barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been
4declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference,
5it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the
6whale. So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland
7Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the
8surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have
9come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities
10of the whalemen. Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid
11assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still
12further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity
13in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed
14he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined
15billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen. But even stripped of these supernatural
16surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination
17with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales,
18but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These
19were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a
20long distance, to those who knew him. The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same
21shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally
22justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of
23creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings. Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
24deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity
25which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his
26treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers,
27with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon
28them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship. Already several
29fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual
30in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every
31dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent. Judge,
32then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the
33chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful
34wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. His three boats stove around
35him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed
36at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of
37the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby
38Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay,
39could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal
40encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic
41morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual
42exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some
43deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity
44which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which
45the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but
46deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that
47most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews
48and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified,
49and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and
50hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell
51upon it. It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily
52dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal
53animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but
54nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and
55anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was,
56that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on
57the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that,
58at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet
59lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast,
60even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And,
61when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics,
62and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from
63his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and
64issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his
65hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have
66but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like
67the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in
68his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not
69one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such
70a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred
71cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a
72thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.
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