Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particularto interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a littleand see the watery part of the world. It is a way I haveof driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever Ifind myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses,and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet;and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me,that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me fromdeliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knockingpeople's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to seaas soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword;I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this.If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some timeor other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towardsthe ocean with me.

  There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharvesas Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf.Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtownis the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooledby breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

  Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go fromCorlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward.What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town,stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads;some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some highaloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep.But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

  But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water,and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will contentthem but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shadylee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must getjust as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all,they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite.Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compassesof all those ships attract them thither?

  Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes.Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries youdown in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men beplunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs,set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water,if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirstin the great American desert, try this experiment, if yourcaravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor.Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

  But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest,shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in allthe valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs?There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermitand a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and theresleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlappingspurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But thoughthe picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes downits sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain,unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles youwade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm wanting?--Water there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but acataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfulsof silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed,or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why isalmost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him,at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyageas a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration,when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeksgive it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all thisis not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that storyof Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting,mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the keyto it all.

  Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I beginto grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs,I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger.For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is buta rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do not enjoy themselves much,as a general thing;--no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I amsomething of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain,or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such officesto those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorablerespectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without takingcare of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as forgoing as cook,--though I confess there is considerable glory in that,a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board--yet, somehow, I neverfancied broiling fowls;--though once broiled, judiciously buttered,and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak morerespectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiledibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creaturesin their huge bakehouses the pyramids.

  No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royalmast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make mejump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow.And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough.It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you comeof an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers,or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if justprevious to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have beenlording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boysstand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you,from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoctionof Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.But even this wears off in time.

  What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to geta broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to,weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you thinkthe archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptlyand respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance?Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the oldsea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punchme about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right;that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is;and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rubeach other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

  Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they makea point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they neverpay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of.On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there isall the difference in the world between paying and being paid.The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable inflictionthat the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which aman receives mone
y is really marvellous, considering that weso earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills,and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

  Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of thewholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck.For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than windsfrom astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim),so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets hisatmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle.He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the sameway do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things,at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smeltthe sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into myhead to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible policeofficer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me,and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless,my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grandprogramme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago.It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between moreextensive performances. I take it that this part of the billmust have run something like this:

  "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. "WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL." "BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

  Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers,the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage,when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies,and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recallall the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs andmotives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises,induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling meinto the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiasedfreewill and discriminating judgment.

  Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the greatwhale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monsterroused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas wherehe rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perilsof the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousandPatagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish.With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements;but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror,and could still be social with it--would they let me--since it isbut well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the placeone lodges in.

  By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome;the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wildconceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into myinmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all,one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.