After that morning, Ahab was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck with that disturbing lurching motion to which—O wise intuition!—I never entirely grew accustomed. As the sky became less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the deathly cold, wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And by and by, he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. The Pequod was only making a passage, not regularly cruising; there was little or nothing to employ or excite Ahab now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
Chapter
Fiery Fey
During the more pleasant weather, in due rotation with the other seamen, my first mast-head came round. In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her—say, an empty vial even—then her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant at the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor, for so high above the deck are you perched that no zomby could reach you even if he would. For these reasons and more, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplace slaughters never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic plagues; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable; and above all these pleasantries is the comfortingly absolute knowledge that you will not be dinner.
In one of those southern whaleships, on a long three or four years’ voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the
t’gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t’gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull’s horns.
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problems of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”
And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head.[1] Beware of such a one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth and its disease, and seeking sentiment and security of a sort in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:—“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
[1]Phaedon (1776): a book by the Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786); a defense of immortality.
The New American Practical Navigator (1802): written by mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1868), considered foundational for maritime navigation, and carried on board every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel.
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.
“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such a laudanum-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wycliffe’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
And so it was that there, aloft and swaying, far enough removed by time and tide for my addled mind to begin to unswallow itself from the blackness that had overtaken me; I say, there in the t’gallant cross-trees did my past come to engulf me. And, as many stories do, mine came back to me with a song.
Far below my perch atop the mast head, those not on duty lounged about on the forward deck, singing popular songs of minstrelsy. One particular song came floating up to carry me where I would not go of my own accord. Instead of the rough voices of my shipmates, though it was my own voice I heard, my own made-up lyrics inserted, happily singing to my sweet Lilith, not two days before she was lost from me for ever; my h
eart bursts; tears fall from off my cheek, and drift to windward to melt into the sea, salt to salt, silent as snow falling on a mountain lake, unheeded by the singers on the deck nearby. Ah, Lilith, my fiery Fey![1]
[1]This tale of my time prior to shipping aboard The Pequod is but a sketch by a fingerless man, for many of those terrible events had left only a vast blasted nothing in their wake; in that place where memories should reside there is only blankness, as on the edges of a map where bold letters decry, “Here be Dragons!” Such memories as did return appear herein, yet are they presented higgledy piggledy, for this is how they came back to me. There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
Oh___I went down South for to see my Lilly
Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day
My Lilly, she be a spunky filly
Singing Polly wolly doodle all the day
Fare thee well, fare thee well,
Fare thee well my fiery Fey
For I’m off to Old Virginny for to see my darling Lilly
Singing Polly wolly doodle all the day
Oh, my Lil, she be a maiden fair
Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day
With the curly eyes and the laughing hair
Singing Polly wolly doodle all the day
Behind the barn, down on her knees
Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day
I gave her such a mighty....
“Stop, stop, stop, silly man. You sing a tune fit to kill the cow,” Lilith laughed, then in a fierce whisper. “Hush I say! Are ye daft, sweet bully-trap? You’ll wake Gennie, and if already awake I’d not have the child hear your delightfully filthy ditty. On my knees indeed! What’s a girl to think?” She dragged me into the next room, shutting the door gently behind her. “I ought to give you my bunch of fives; don’t think I won’t” she said, balling her pretty fists and striking an impressive pugilistic stance. “Aye, a proper anointing I’ll give ye; I’ll nobble ye. And you got the words all arsey-versey besides! Tis not ‘fiery Fey,’ tis ‘Fairy Fey. Ye take as many liberties with your ditty as you do with your lady.”
What one must know of Lil, first and foremost, is that she belies description, for being fair and slight and with curly reddish-golden hair, she is an obvious product of the Isle of Saints. She is beauty personified in flesh, and one would think that would she but open her pale lips, the sweetest honey might pour forth, but such is not the case, for she was sired by a seaman, whelped by a harlot—a bit of a bunter as Lilly calls her, which is to say half-whore and half-beggar—and raised near entire by motherly Awashonks, the Indian crone who taught her what she needed to know of the world and its workings.
Lil’s mother’s plans were for Lilly to be a high-dollar toffer, but Lil would have none of it and, at the tender age of eight, she ran off to the home of Awashonks, a long-time friend of her absent father. From then forward, she hung about the docks and learned to fend for herself, to fish, and to fight, and to curse like a sailor. On the docks Lilith learned to speak as a sailor does; such slang you never have heard, and a fouler mouth on a fairer face you never will experience; and yet for all that, her heart was pure enough. I will translate her puckering where I may.
“Lady? Lady?” said I, laughingly. “Cease thy obloquy, I beg of you, dearest. ‘Fairy Fey’ is but ignorant redundancy, for any who know aught of the Fair Folk knows they are also called Fey; to twice name them as the original tune does seems foolish. And besides, my tart, thou art fiery in both spirit and appearance, and so I changed my tune.” I reached out to draw her close but she batted my hand away coquettishly and not without some small and loving violence.
“Avast there! Stow thy manhandling attempts. I am sore worried about news I heard today. I took Gennie to town with me, to visit the apothecary, and I heard the town crier sing out dreadful news: zombies have been sighted not ten miles west! Ten miles, Ishmael! West!” This last because our cozy cottage lay in a forest clearing some two miles west of town.
“Hush love,” I said ignorantly, “Our doors are stout enough, and the axe is just outside the door there, and the kindling hatchet is within easy reach,” I said, nodding toward the woodpile by the fireplace. “From all I have heard, the zomby is slow and easily killed, nor can he easily enter through a door as stout as this; not even a horde could breach these stout timbers.” I slapped the round trunks of pale gold that made up our cabin walls; felled and fit together by my own hand. “No need to worry.”
She clearly did not share my sentiment. “At any rate,” she continued, “Before the town crier’s dire news I had been inquiring after Harriet’s health, for she looked a bit pale. I was soon distracted by Gennie’s wailing. She had been playing with the little Walker boy; you know him, little Johnny; Jacob and Harriet’s boy, a few months younger than Gennie, and usually such a sweet boy.
I nodded.
“Well, that little so-and-so up and bit our Gennie. He was mad! His mother,—she did look a little feverish herself, come to think on it—she pulled him off straightaway and made her apologies, but I near to kicked the little lad, he was that ferocious.”
“Now, now,” I said, in a tone meant to placate, “boys can be a tad rough, I know...”
“Do not attempt thy sly patronizings, Ishmael. I am well acquainted with the roughness of boys. I tell you, the boy was rabid! I had just pulled him off when...”
But before she could continue, we heard a rustling shuffle; my little girl, my Genevieve, my Gennie, not but two and a half summers old, stumbled from her small sleeping place in the corner of our room and pushed open the door to where Lil and I stood close by each other; one wee hand clutching her blanket to her chest and the other rubbing the sleep from green eyes like her mother’s, cheeks flushed from sleep and a slight fever. Such beauty and innocence a child holds! If not already broken, my heart would shatter upon this memory. It now seems no distance of time nor tide can fully take the ache from this heart. It was the last time ever I saw her who was the dearest daughter of my heart. I flee pell-mell from this memory.
It is too much to continue, for Gennie’s tiny trusting face unmans me and makes my breath catch and one violently stifled sob brings me back to myself, high atop the t’gallant cross-trees, swaying there, nigh-upon reeling. It is not possible for you, mortal Ishmael, to think on that time and grasp the joy without reaping the sorrow afresh, for those twain emotions have become unsunderable in thee; aye, they are now and forevermore one and the same in thy heart. Would that I could live only in that honeyed homey moment for ever and for aye, and never go on to those darker days of blood and gore and folly. Better to tell all I can of whales instead, and by that distraction avoid these lunacy-inducing reveries.
But ah!, that such a time when she and I and little she were so full of life and love and hope should fade thus! Slowly, so slowly does it go; and choiceless, I both grieve and rejoice for the fading of that Fey-like life.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. While this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Whether such a fatal plunge be blessing or curse in the case of one Ishmael, none can yet say. Heed that fearsome drop well, ye Pantheists!
Chapter
Down, Dog!
Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days were as crystal goblets
of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, ‘twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.
Nor was Ahab alone in feeling the weather’s witchery, for it cast its indolent spell on my own heart. With the warmth and the riskless work, I did find some small solace aboard ship that I had all but forgotten in previous years. Youth returned, or so it seemed, and I slept deeply dreamless and felt some tiny inkling of slow recovery, as the first tingle of a sleep-numbed arm returning to life.
Old age however, is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels like going down into one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to himself—“for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth.”
Zomby Dick, or the Undead Whale Page 13
