Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  All the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, did sit brooding on Ahab’s brow; who among ye would not sit brooding the same had ye lost your very life and yet remained alive? Far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable febrile notion; such a one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack.

  But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man!; had any known his pivotal role in unleashing the zomby plague upon the land, they would have clapped him in irons or strung him high from a yardarm, the closest thing to a tree in all Nantucket, or burned him to ashes! But no, Ahab retained his secret heart, and whilst they, the shipowners, were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint, he was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge-cum-redemption.

  Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly, godlike old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs though they knew not its true source; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,—all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael could then go.

  The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a 74-gun warship can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill. Had I but known how the ill that Moby Dick truly was would surpass the ill imagined, I might have taken that final plunge from the t’gallant cross-trees. Aye, and gladly.

  Chapter

  Hark!

  “Hist, Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?!”

  It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel.

  It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor the words above.

  “Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”

  Cabaco looked to his own neighbor, his bosom friend, Bulkington; took the bucket from him and held it out to Archy, who was now crouched with his ear pointed downward to the deck, listening.

  “Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”

  “There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a cough—it sounded like queer cough; maybe a groan.”

  “Groan be damned! Fill that bucket and return it.”

  “There again—there it is!—a thump and a moan; it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over, now!”

  “Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked biscuits ye et for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the bucket!”

  “Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”

  “Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re the chap.”

  “Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody or some thing down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind.”

  “Tish! the bucket!”

  Chapter

  Whale Charts

  Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him descend to his cabin and, after glancing askance toward the afterhold, go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. When poring over these charts, not five minutes would pass before Ahab would grab for a quill, jab it into the inkpot and scratch away with feverish intensity at his sharkskin-bound logbook.

  While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.

  But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted; and on no night did Ahab fail to make some entry in his log. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul; ever and anon would he stop and wet his nib in fresh ink to scribble in the log at his elbow; some nights found him foregoing the consultation of charts in order to write long and frantically, stopping only to wring the cramps from his hand.

  Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.

  Where Ahab’s chances of accomplishing his objec
t—and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty; that particular set time and place were conjoined in the one technical phrase—the Season-on-the-Line.[1] For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile. There it was, too, that the recentest deadly encounters with the White Whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds. But that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance was further north, off the Japan grounds, and the Pequod would cruise there first before descending to cruise the Season on the Line.

  [1]The Line is the equator, the season thereupon lasting from December to June.

  Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.

  But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved redemptive desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. Not quite so was it for Ahab, for though his nails did indeed gouge his palm, yet no blood was there to be found, and those four small crescentic wounds in each palm did not heal.

  Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire.

  Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the White Whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of livid light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, for a creature has been created in thee; and thy thoughts have created yet another; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

  Ahab's Log: Chapter

  Dismasted

  Ahab’s log: February 23, 1851

  Sleep is but a stage on which the past plays out, strutting and fretting its nightly hour on thy brainy stage, and again, and again, and again dost thou feel thy dismasting off locked Japan when, unknowing of what ye risked, didst thou jump, knife in hand, to do battle, nay! hand-to-tooth combat with the curséd White Whale. And ye lost that fight and lost thy very life though ye knew it not then; and aye, lost all future dreamless sleep besides!

  And when by chance ye can catch at the skirts of sleep enough to dream, thy dismasting rears afresh. There again, and again, and again do ye go down midst the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that ye scarce heed the moment when ye drop, seething into the yawning, yeasty jaws awaiting thee; and again Moby Dick shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white knives upon thy leg. Sinful as thou art, thou darest not weep and wail for direct deliverance. Yet ye know thy dreadful punishment is unjust, do ye not? Aye, there’s the screw that turns in ye; there’s the dark seed that blooms in thy raging, fevered brain!

  Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. Yon lovely light on deck above, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—what folly such courtesy now meanest to thee, for never again will ye have such a thing. Some nights are filled with dreaming, and all dreaming filled with that dismasting and worse, oh, aye, worse beyond endurance! Just now, started from sweating sleep, did ye struggle to refrain from clambering up in fearful palsied stupor to the deck, there to be gawked at, aghast, by the crew.

  Not two minutes past, behind sleep-lidded eyes didst thou see the infected crimson life that redly jetted from that ragged stump in rhythm with thy pumping heart; again ye see Caspar take his own belt from round his trowsers and he stoops to cinch down that tourniquet to its utmost, thus stemming the bloody freshet, then did he bathe Ahab’s sweating delirious brow with his cool cloth, his tender touch.

  It was that blasted blood that did infect Caspar—thy own tainted, blasted blood, acrawl with some nameless yeasty thing as thou didst later learn. And then—oh, folly!—fool that I then was and yet may be, I, Ahab, did unknowingly release Caspar in Santa Cruz; for the gore he had witnessed—not only that which had so redly jetted from Ahab’s stump, but such gore as is present in all the normal butchery of any whaling voyage,—it unmanned and sickened Caspar; all this and more he didst relate to Ahab in heartfelt apology before taking his leave of the Pequod.

  Cruel irony! That such a gentle soul should become that which would have made the then-living man quake in revulsion! Pray then, Ahab, most fervently! that no spirit is left in the zomby; that none of the past is left in its black heart; for only then will ye sleep; only then will ye have any hope to retain what wits are left ye. Were it such that one’s memory lived on within a rotten,
slavering corpse, detached somehow from the slaughter witnessed through the soul’s windows, the eyes, then wouldst Caspar be in a torment beyond all imaginings. Oh, thou Abomination! Let it not be so!

  Again and again dost Ahab relive that bone-crunching pressure and the froth of phrensied water, the unspeakable wriggling about the gums of Moby Dick’s crooked jaw, and the sound!: that sharp Crack ! that was more heard than felt, for it was ponderous loud. No pain, no pain, and that’s queer. The pain pounded down the alley of thy brain later when Caspar wrenched his belted tourniquet tighter and the carpenter produced his bone saw and set to work.

  And yet, that dismasting dream is as a dream of summer dalliance in comparison to those others; aye, a dream to coax nocturnal emissions compared to those no less frequent nightmares in which demons cavort, dancing mad jigs and goading Ahab on to gorge himself on yet-living flesh that weeps with blood; and in these dreams he does, Ahab does, I do with wild abandon give in to that dire hunger and fall to at the trough of some poor soul’s trunk: its gray looping entrails, the bright crimson slick and delicious on Ahab’s chin. And the horror, the starting horror that sends thee reeling to screaming wakefulness, clawing thy way to the deck and damn the staring eyes; no, it is not the horror of the deed—though that be terrible enough—but it is horror at the unmitigated pleasure Ahab dost feel in sinking his teeth deep into those succulent sweetmeats; the savage thrill of drinking hot blood! Even now, Ahab, in full possession of thy faculties, dost that pleasure haunt thee, and make thee jump at any thumping noise from yon afterhold. For there resides thy greatest fear: fear that ‘tis thy doom and thy destiny to feed thus that knocks there! Can it be so?