Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,continued through day into night,and through night into day,is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery.For such is the wonderful skill,prescience of experience,and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port?Inferable from these statements,are many collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales.
The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball,missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field.
“By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck creeps up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave fellows!—Ha, ha!Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise,on the sea,—for by live-oaks!my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha!we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!”
“There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was now the mast-head cry.
“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on and split your spout, O whale!the mad fiend himself is after ye!blow your trump—blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood,as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!”
And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew.The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up,like old wine worked anew.Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before;these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab,but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison.The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls;and by the stirring perils of the previous day;the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed,unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
They were one man, not thirty.For as the one ship that held them all;though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak,and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch,and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull,which shot on its way,both balanced and directed by the long central keel;even so, all the individualities of the crew,this man’s valor, that man’s fear;guilt and guiltiness,all varieties were welded into oneness,and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
The rigging lived. The mast-heads,like the tops of tall palms,were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs.Clinging to a spar with one hand,some reached forth the other with impatient wavings;others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight,sat far out on the rocking yards;all the spars in full bearing of mortals,ready and ripe for their fate. Ah!how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!
“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some minutes since the first cry,no more had been heard. “Sway me up, men;ye have been deceived;not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that way,and then disappears.”
It was even so; in their headlong eagerness,the men had mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout,as the event itself soon proved;for hardly had Ahab reached his perch;hardly was the rope belayed to its pin on deck,when he struck the key-note to an orchestra,that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles.The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard,as—much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet,less than a mile ahead—Moby Dick bodily burst into view!For not by any calm and indolent spoutings;not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head,did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity;but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching.Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air,and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam,shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more.In those moments, the torn,enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane;in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.
“There she breaches!there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!—Down!down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The boats!—stand by!”
Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds,the men, like shooting stars, slid to the deck,by the isolated backstays and halyards; while Ahab,less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch.