Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  What Lies Within

  Loomings

  Rucksack

  Sober Cannibal

  The Counterpane

  Breakfast

  The Street

  A Bosom Friend

  Queequeg

  Backspatter

  Nantucket

  The Ship

  Queequeg's Mark

  The Prophet

  Going Aboard

  Merry Christmas

  Bulkington

  Dervish Dance

  Knights and Squires

  Ahab

  Fiery Fey

  Down, Dog!

  All That Glitters

  The Little Lower Layer

  Soliloquies

  Moby Dick

  Hark!

  Whale Charts

  Dismasted

  In the Shadow of the Moon

  The Weavers

  First Lowering

  The Hyena

  Subordinate Phantoms

  The Spirit Spout

  Slouching from Santa Cruz

  The Albatross

  The Gam

  Aloft & Alone

  The Kraken

  The Line

  Stubb Kills a Whale

  The Dart & the Crotch

  Stubb's Supper

  Eating Whale Brains

  Zombology[1]

  The Shark Massacre

  From Whale to Oil

  Infandous Deeds

  Monkey Rope

  Beheadings

  The Jeroboam

  On the Heads of Whales

  Tashtego's Spermy Shroud

  Ishmael Dreams

  Pitchpoling

  Whale Tails

  The Grand Armada

  Fast & Loose

  The Rosebud

  Ambergris

  Added Ballast

  The Castaway

  An Affair of Oil

  Asleep at the Tiller

  Young Life’s Old Routine

  The Doubloon

  Cross Bones

  Unhealing Wounds

  Ahab and the Carpenter

  Queequeg in his Coffin

  Blood-Forged Steel

  Fedallah's Prophecy

  Smashing the Quadrant

  The Cruellest Fangs

  A Musket to the Head

  The Needle

  The Log & Line

  Thus Falls Bulkington

  Zomby Brothel

  The Afterhold

  A Coffin for a Life-Buoy

  The Starboard Hand of Woe

  So Man’s Seconds Tick

  The Pequod Meets Rachel

  From that Vast Height

  The Delight

  One Wee Drop

  The Chase: First Day

  The Chase: Second Day

  The Chase:Third Day

  Amniotic Sea

  Zomby Dick

  or

  The Undead Whale

  Herman Melville

  &

  JD Livingstone

  Memento Mori Press

  Chicago, USA

  Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

  Memento Mori Press edition 1.1, eBook

  October, 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Memento Mori Press. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, portions thereof, and all images in any form whatsoever. For information, please contact us at MementoMoriPress.com

  Cover and interior designed by Bookem Danno Design, LLC

  cover art: The Chase: Third Day, by Sinisa Banovic.

  Interior heading and folio font is Cristoforo (Victorian Cthulu), by Thomas Phinney; its development funded in small part by Memento Mori Press through Kickstarter.

  Dedication font is “Zombified,” by Chad Savage: SinisterVisions.com

  All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

  Get fine art prints, clothes & other zombie swag at ZombyDick.com

  ISBN 10: 1477604197

  ISBN 13: 978-1477604199

  ISBN (ebook): 978-0-9707512-0-1

  A portion of the proceeds from this novel are donated annually to the Pacific Whale Foundation’s No Child Left Indoors program and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

  Learn more at “PacificWhale.org,” and “SeaShepherd.org.”

  for my chelle

  Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote; the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of any who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide does the all-receptive ocean spread forth its whole plane of unimaginable terrors and wonderful new life adventures. From the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them:

  Come hither broken hearted;

  here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death;

  here are wonders supernatural without dying for them.

  Come hither! put up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!

  Chapter

  Loomings

  Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having grown weary in mind and spirit from endless bones-jarring slaughter of the undead, and having little or no money in my purse, and nothing whatsoever to interest me on shore—in point of fact, it was the opposite, for I needed away from the plaguey landed world—and so I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. Some may call me purser rigged and parish damned for boarding ship while so many shamble-men yet threatened the Union, but then they likely do not know my part in the last two years of fighting that undead host; judge me not too harshly, pray, ‘til you hear the whole of it. Go to sea I must.

  Going to sea is a way I have of 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 I find myself involuntarily pausing before bankrupt coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every furnace-bound, headless-corpse funeral I meet;[1] and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically lopping people’s heads off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for battle-axe and hatchet, 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 souls in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

  [1]As final resting place, the undertaker’s pine box has been replaced by the wind-scattered ash cloud, attested by the stoked and smoking crematoria smelt all across the land.

  Here now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, girded and guarded round by vigilantly manned, high new stone walls, their bulk broken only by wharves, as the breaks in reefs round Feegee isles—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves and cooled by breezes which a few h
ours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

  Circumambulate this high-walled city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all round the town stand thousands upon thousands of mortals fixed in ocean reveries. Some high atop the walls, leaning out between the gaps in the crenelated stone parapets; some seated upon the pier-heads on the docks below those high walls; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landlubbers; of weekdays pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? What do they here?

  But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, almost like zombies themselves, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just 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 compasses of all those ships attract them thither, or do they, like me, seek escape from the horror that shuffles behind them? There is a desperate longing in these seaward looking faces.

  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 you down 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 be plunged 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.

  Any who hunts for zomby scalps knows that mindless ambulatory things also tend to wend their way downward, and a shuffling zomby will also start from the plaguey headwater of its spawning, and stumble towards the delta where freshwater meets the salt. Woe betide that philosopher in his reverie also traipsing seaward in his idyll, for if such a wayward daydreamer does not look to aught surrounding him, he shall indeed soon see that coast, but all unknowing, staring out from corpsey white eyes as he stumbles, rotting, to the sea.

  But avast, there, Ishmael; back to happier stuff; there will be enough of that to come. We talk of water. Here then, is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? Up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke; deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hillside blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine tree shakes down its 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.

  Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust soul, with a healthy robust spirit in them, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as 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 Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of 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 key to it all.

  Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs and seen too often the rent lungs of others, 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 but a rag unless you have something in it. Mine own was now but a rag, for blood money such as I earned from zomby scalps brought in for bounty is quickly spent, the better to be quit of its residual guilt; and so, to board ship as passenger was not a course then open to me.

  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 am something 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 offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.

  And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.

  No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump 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 honour.

  What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it’s all right; everybody else is one way or other served 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 rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content. And aye, it must be said that it is no small thing to be safely afloat and relatively secure against any zomby menace; or such was my mistaken assumption at that time.

  Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied person enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

  Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim[1]), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.

  [1] The Pythagorean maxim is an injunction to avoid eating beans.

  After having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor as a younger man; then a year of wedded bliss followed by two of utter hell; I now take it into my head and aching heart to go on a whaling voyage, a purposeful choice promising distraction and escape. And,
doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances.

  I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

  Grand Contested Election For The

  Presidency Of The United States.

  Bloody Battle In Afghanistan.

  Whaling Voyage By One Ishmael.

  Massive Face-Eating Zomby

  Infestation in Florida

  I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage. Others were set down for heroic and 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 recall all the circumstances, I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did.

  Even had I not required succour from my blighted past, the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself would have pulled me to sea. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity and no little fear; but not the dreadful fear roused by the stinking shamble-men; no, the fear of the whale is a clean fear, and a cleansing one, or so I then dreamt in my naiveté.

  Ah, the whale! In wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless wholesome perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds—far from any zomby—helped to sway me to my wish. With others, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, the torments of these two years past, and my long-felt itch for places remote; I say both these things rise and goad me to sea.

  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 is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in, unless of course, said inmate carries a disease that drives him from his yeasty grave to feast on the living. None may be on intimate terms with such horrors—if you take my meaning—and remain in all ways hale and whole, and this a truth learned from long experience. It is said the sea is a healing presence, and so I hoped it would prove for one Ishmael.