Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad.

  “Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at the main-mast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive ’em aft.”

  “Strike the tent there!”—was the next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.

  “Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!”—was the next command, and the crew sprang for the handspikes.

  Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots of the port—he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft—Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts’s hymnal in each seaman’s berth.

  Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first kick.

  “Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” he roared. “Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don’t ye spring, I say, all of ye—spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!” And so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.

  At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.

  Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard,—

  Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,

  Stand dressed in living green.

  So to the Jews old Canaan stood,

  While Jordan rolled between.

  Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant zomby-free haven in store on the coming voyage; and meads and glades so eternally vernal and free of disease, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer. Ah, what sweetness does sometimes lie in error.

  At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging alongside.

  It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave for good a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage—beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,—poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”

  As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck—now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.

  But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him,—“Captain Bildad—come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now! Careful, careful!—come, Bildad, boy—say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck—luck to ye, Mr. Stubb—luck to ye, Mr. Flask—good-bye and good luck to ye all—and this day three years I’ll have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!”

  “God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,” murmured old Bildad, almost incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye—a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye’ll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three percent within the year. Don’t forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind that cooper don’t waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in the green locker! Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, men; but don’t miss a fair chance either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don’t keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it’ll spoil. Be careful with the butter—twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye, if—“

  “Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,—away!” and with that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.

  Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

  Chapter

  Bulkington

  Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn where he eyed me with trepidation—or so it seemed to me—and him both a stranger and yet a queer sort of familiar. When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington!

  I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter, just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs, at least not for the stoneless gr
ave of Bulkington.

  Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

  Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

  But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

  Ahab’s Log: Chapter

  Dervish Dance

  In such manner as will become clear ere this tale’s ending, I, Ishmael, came into possession of the ship’s log of the Pequod, penned by the scripturient hand of Ahab himself. Even I who saw—nay, lived through!—what transpired; upon reading the truth of Ahab’s tale, even my own assumed intimate understanding transformed beyond all reckoning; I am not shamed to say I wept to learn of it, once the rage had passed.

  On the whole, Ahab’s log was filled to overflowing with the most mundane material, that stuff deemed routine on a whaling voyage: headings, weather, casks stowed, wonders seen, and boats stove, but oh! to be sure, therein were also page upon page of frantically scratched ravings; frenetic letters packed back to back tighter than the hold of the Pequod; all part and parcel of Ahab’s one-pointed purpose. It beggars the imagination to attempt a reading, and many long months did I spend pondering the tomes in puzzled amazement.

  The majority of Ahab’s log will be useless and arcane to all others but a ship’s captain, or an inmate of Bethlem; these entries I do not include for they bewilder rather than clarify. But ah! in those rare entries wherein Ahab bares his very soul, those entries wherein Ahab’s mad quest and its lofty loathsome purpose fairly leaps from the page to seize your windpipe; from these entries you will shudder to learn the truth of Ahab’s madness, and more besides.

  Ahab’s Log: December 25, 1850

  Jove blast thee, winter! These hands become claws and this brain is but a sluggard thing and yet thy fever rages, Ahab, aye, rages afresh on every waking day, fed by portents and omens read in every scudding cloud and phrensied wave. Damn this winter and damn this Christmas Day; damn this icy clime; how these withered thews do creak with the cold!

  Stoke thy inner fire, Ahab, for with it thou must do battle gainst that paralyzing cold seeping into thy backbones from without, and that other cold that even now slithers its tendrils up that same backbone here within this sack of skin, thy body. Thy body? ‘Tis thine no longer, old man. A purpose works within thee, for did it not, thou wouldst even now be fronting a raging fire with thy son and loving wife, thy feet on the hearth to ease this thickened ache that slithers up thy centermost keel. To move at all is an agony of shrieking tendon. Would that unblinking Ahab could lie insensate as the whaleboat crew, all save unsleeping, indispensable Fedallah, there brewing his bitter beverage; its heat seeming its sole redeeming quality. But hard down on thy weakness, Ahab! Thou needest not sleep, thou needest thy due, no more! The fever burns in thee and the bitter potion dost unlimber thy bones somewhat, so thou canst pace and better plot the demise of Moby Dick!

  Damnable whale; I shall find thee and rend thee and feast on thy flesh and bathe in thy blood and dance a whirling dervish dance in thy blackened entrails! I swear! I swear! I swear! that naught will keep Ahab from thee, demon whale! Neither the freezing fires of hell nor the burning cold overtaking this flesh; not one whit shall aught under sun or stars or the blasted shadow of the moon hinder Ahab in this one purpose, nigh-equal parts foul and noble!

  Nigh-equal? Hast not that balance shifted; shifted to show more of darkness than light? Dost not hear that shifty ballast close to hand there, whimpering in the afterhold, rolling about in drugged stupor? It needs must be so! says Fedallah. So be it, and damn the consequence. Ye fightest a greater battle, old man; and thy cause and quest is more than equal to that one wasted life; aye, thy purpose is more than worthy of that sacrifice and much else besides if needs be. Such a price will be willingly paid by thee if not by others.

  Aye, those two more tick-marks ‘gainst Ahab’s curséd soul now lie there just below, in the cleverly concealed Captain’s hold Fedallah hast crafted to hide his men, and that thing—bedamned ingredient—and that other, future ingredient, bound and gagged and sleeping his laudanum sleep. The Quaker’s own John White Webster, only more vile, for his sin is yet more unspeakable.

  Hist! Hear the struggles and turgid moans, a faint and feeble sound that yet knocks so loud in Ahab’s ears and pounds on his thrice-damned mind with the concussion of a million lunatic timpanists pounding out of time. Hist! How do ye but hear it, Ahab, and not give in to raving? Ye do not. Ye can not. Ye will not. Aye, for will’s the thing. Iron will. Steely will. It shall be thy boon and thy brawn ere the bitter end of him I hate.

  Fedallah, his demon-like crew, and mine own crippled corpus slunk aboard the Pequod under cover of morning fog like the damned slinking from Eden; but belay that!—for never was such a paradise part of Ahab’s ken, nor wast his to lose; more apt is it that thou hast moved within the centermost ring of Dante’s devising, Ahab—aye, slinking not from a garden paradise, but from one stinking pit to another yet more vile and deeper and damning.

  The whale. Ever yon blasted, shitting whale. Prepare thyself, thou foul beast, for the Pequod hast weighed anchor and even now pitches its prow toward thy deep abode at last. Ahab comes for thee, Moby Dick!

  Chapter

  Knights

  and Squires

  The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil, like the hop-heavy bottled ale bound for old Bombay. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight; he was no leptosome. It was merely the condensation of the man.

  He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds.

  Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh
to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward. Though perhaps overly punctilious, he would have made a fine Militia man.

  “Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck is as careful a man as you’ll find anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall ere long see what that word “careful” precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.