Moby Dick
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with therest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, andmore did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul.
A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchlessfeud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of thatmurderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken ouroaths of violence and revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostlyfrequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew ofhis existence; a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him;while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle tohim, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number ofwhale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entirewatery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their questalong solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a wholetwelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-tellingsail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; theirregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, withother circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spreadthrough the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the specialindividualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to bedoubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such orsuch a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale ofuncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing greatmischief to his assailants, has completely escaped them; to some mindsit was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in questionmust have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whalefishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances ofgreat ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; thereforeit was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to MobyDick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content toascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perilsof the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.
In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and thewhale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, bychance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they hadevery one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him,as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamitiesdid ensue in these assaults- not restricted to sprained wrists andankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations- but fatal to thelast degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, allaccumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things hadgone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom thestory of the White Whale had eventually come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still themore horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For notonly do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of allsurprising terrible events,- as the smitten tree gives birth to itsfungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma,wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them tocling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so thewhale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in thewonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimescirculate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt fromthat ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but ofall sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought intocontact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face toface they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, givebattle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you saileda thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not cometo any chiselled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that partof the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such acalling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences alltending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth. Nowonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit overthe wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whaledid in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, whicheventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed fromanything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panicdid he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, hadheard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing toencounter the perils of his jaw.
But there were still other and more vital practical influences atwork. Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of theSperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species ofthe leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body.
There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent andcourageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Rightwhale, would perhaps- either from professional inexperience, orincompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale;at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen, especially among thosewhaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have neverhostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of theleviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursuedin the North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with achildish fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales ofSouthern whaling. Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the greatSperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board ofthose prows which stem him.
