Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  As I lay there in the try pot, stewing, as it were, the scenes Bulkington inhabited began to come back to me as fits and flashes of memory, as though lightning lit, bursting in my brain to paint pictures I would fain forget; and yet, I would solve the mystery of Bulkington. So, with no small resolve, and some trepidation, I strove to piece together the meaning in these flashes; for as with a lighting flash, though you no longer see the bolt, yet some dim afterimage remains clearly before you even with closed eyes.

  Some few months after acquiring my axes, I had assumed command of my Militia band and we were prowling deep into the western edge of Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, south of Suffolk. There had been reports of zombies lurching out from that tangled jumble of steamy swamp in puzzling numbers. We went to investigate and to gather all the scalps we could.

  It was full summer, and in the heavy humid heat, sweat soaked our every article of clothing, and this the least of our troubles. Dense clouds of mosquitoes and biting gnats buzzed about us, seeking blood, and by all accounts, no small number of zombies lurched about in the dense concealing undergrowth.

  Of the zombies reported thereabouts, many appeared to have been former slaves. This was no surprise to us as The Dismal—so we called it—had long been a place of refuge for such poor wights as escaped their bondage. But among those zombies coming from the swamp were also many others, many of whom were white, and no small number of whom who had been well-to-do. This was puzzling for at least two reasons: there were many more zombies lurching from the swamp’s western edge than rationality warranted, for though there were undoubtedly many former slaves hunkered down in that wilderness in relative safety, there were not so many as then streamed forth from that soggy, squelching, itchy wilderness; but even more puzzling was that such august personages as were found coming out of the swamp—now zombies—had no business being in The Dismal at all, or so it seemed.

  As I recalled the faces of the eight members of my troupe, my heart leapt with gladness uknlooked for, because there, in my mind’s eye, were two of my dearest companions from that time: Quay Chang, a Chinaman whom we had chanced to meet some weeks earlier at the port in Chesapeake, newly arrived from China and seeking his brother in the West; and Dred, himself an escaped slave with a storied and troubled past who had spent much time in The Dismal, and who had been with this Militia band since its inception. From them I did learn more than from any schoolmaster’s stale lessons.

  Dred—a name he received from his mother—was not an unusual name among slaves of Mandingue descent, and is generally given to those of great physical force. He early acquired the power of reading, by an apparent instinctive faculty, and like other children of a deep and fervent nature, he developed great religious ardor, and often surprised his elders by his questions and replies on this subject. The impression seemed to prevail universally that this child was born for extraordinary things; and perhaps it was his yearning to acquire liberty that became his greatest strength. At the time of his father’s execution for rebellion, Dred was a lad of fourteen. He was a witness of the undaunted aspect with which his father and the other conspirators met their doom. The memory dropped into the depths of his soul, as a stone drops into the desolate depths of a dark mountain lake.

  Sold to a distant plantation, Dred became noted for his desperate, unsubduable disposition. He joined in none of the social recreations and amusements of the other slaves, labored with proud and silent assiduity, but, on the slightest rebuke or threat, flashed up with a savage fierceness, which, supported by his immense bodily strength, made him an object of dread among overseers. He was one of those of whom they gladly rid themselves; and, like a fractious horse, was sold from master to master. Finally, an overseer, hardier than the rest, determined on the task of subduing him. In the scuffle that ensued Dred struck him to the earth, a dead man, then made his escape to The Dismal, and was never afterwards heard of in civilized life.

  Dred said his life then passed in a kind of dream. Sometimes, traversing for weeks in these desolate regions, he would compare himself to Elijah traversing for forty days and nights the solitudes of Horeb; or to John the Baptist in the wilderness, girding himself with camel’s hair, and eating locusts and wild honey. Sometimes he would fast and pray for days; and then voices would seem to speak to him, and strange hieroglyphics would be written upon the leaves. In less elevated moods of mind, he would pursue, with great judgment and vigor, those enterprises necessary to preserve existence. From the restlessness of his nature, he had not confined himself to any particular region, but had traversed the whole swampy region.

  Dred had hidden in The Dismal for some eighteen months, outwaiting his former master’s agents after his harrowing escape; he it was who led us deeper into The Dismal then, for he intimately knew the ways of its soggy bogs. Some of the run-away slaves, Dred told us, had resided within these damp environs for twelve, twenty, or thirty years and upwards, subsisting themselves in the swamp upon corn, hogs, and fowls that they raised on some of the spots not perpetually under water, nor subject to be flooded, as forty-nine parts out of fifty of it are; yet these have always been perfectly impenetrable to any of the white inhabitants of the country around, even to those nearest to and best acquainted with the swamps. Dred would not take us to such places, he said, for he had sworn never to reveal the location of those who had granted him succour, and he would not break this oath. He said, “Them that live there would rather be shot than took; and they’d sooner shoot you than either of them former options. They ain’t afraid of plunder neither, so mind your eye.”

  Dred showed us plants we could use to stave off the worst of the onslaught from the murderous mosquitoes; but mosquitoes were not our most fearsome worry, of course, for this swamp—also known as the Great Alligator Dismal swamp—was home to poisonous snakes as well as those ravenous reptiles, and Vander spoke at great length of giant burrowing millipedes with a taste for flesh; and, lest it be forgotten, no small number of zombies also infested the area. It seemed a fearsome, foreboding place; no fit abode for civilized man. The swamp is scarcely passable in many parts, owing not only to the softness of the sponge, but to the obstruction caused by innumerable shrubs, vines, creepers, and briars, which often take entire possession of the surface, forming dense thickets.

  We were in the dreariest and wildest part of The Dismal; the darkness crowed out from dense thickets, the air damp, and the ghastly silence broken only by the hooting of owls and crying coughs of wild cats. For two hours after dusk we made our way through the Stygian darkness of the forest, lit fitfully from above by a near-full moon that threw ominous shadows. Dred had just led us to a rare patch of higher and drier ground on which to pitch our bivouac when a scream tore through the night. Instantly, all weapons were at the ready; all hooting and all chatter of insects ceased and an eerie calm suffused the muggy air, faintly pierced by the mosquito’s whine. The anguished scream came again. It was no shamble-man’s scream, that was certain, for there was much emotion in it, both rage and woe and no small hint of madness. Again it tore through the stillness, a short way north of us, from what looked to be a dense bower of brambles. We approached it warily, weapons at the ready.

  As we neared the bramble thicket, Dred called out, his query instantly throttled by the cry, now close enough to make our hackles rise and quiver. We came round the thicket and there sat a large man, naked and shivering, his hands torn and filthy with blood and dirt; he was covered in welts, here and there leeches hung suckingly from his skin, jet black bladders of blood, full to bursting. We stood speechless at such a sight. He was heard to mutter, over and anon, “They have her, they have her, they have her,” until, building forth like pressure in a steam boiler, he again let forth his horrible cry. Five of our members moved to form a wide perimeter, for such cries as these were likely to bring forth any zombies hereabouts, while Dred, Quay Chang and I approached the man cautiously, speaking soothingly, with hands empty and outstr
etched, for lunacy is a powerful opponent. The man seemed not to notice us at all, his eyes vacant and staring.

  He came with us docilely enough. After scraping the leeches from him, and clothing and feeding him, the big man fell to shaking and vomiting, showing all the signs of laudanum sickness, whereupon I proffered my own supply, and he sank into an exhausted, febrile slumber. Upon waking late the next day and another dose of laudanum, Bulkington then told us a tale that is yet difficult to believe. He and his lovely young wife, Pollyanna, had booked passage on a barge up the canal that ran along the eastern edge of The Dismal, up from Hintonsville in the south to Portsmouth in the north, that means of travel being both easy and pleasant. However, they had booked passage on the wrong barge, for no sooner were they deep in the swamp than Bulkington and his wife were subdued, hog-tied and blindfolded, and roughly delivered to their doom.

  Deep in the middle of The Dismal—near 2,000 square miles of it—lies Lake Drummond, residing there like a wetly beating heart, and up a feeder canal to this lake were Bulkington and his wife conveyed, finally reaching what Bulkington guessed was the far western side of that lake, to an overgrown cove, and on its shore lay a welter of spavined hovels. There, Bulkington told us, he and Pollyanna were drugged and subjected to unimaginable ignominies. But the worst was yet to come.

  This was a place of the most ill and evil repute. Therein—for a price—any man could come and slay a zomby, or worse. A brisk trade was made of selling the right to slaughter a zombie, once it was deemed no longer useful for other pecuniary means. Wealthy patrons who wished to violate or slaughter a zomby without the danger inherent in doing so in the wild, so to speak, laid their money down and got in line. And if any were subsequently infected, as it seemed often happened, this was no bother to such men as ran the place; those so affected simply moved from the ranks of the paying customer to the festering ranks of the chattel.

  The rogues running the establishment had immediately separated Bulkington from Pollyanna. Frantic with worried panic despite the regular doses of laudanum, Bulkington had clawed through the damp earth under his cell and thereby escaped to seek help. We set out that very afternoon for the zomby brothel, soon found it and secluded ourselves in a large thicket of brambles from which we could easily observe the horrid place.

  That which we beheld was more foul than any thing I ever could imagine, even had I lived as long as Fedallah. We watched, all of us sickened, until the drunken debauchery neared its height. Our plan had been to wait until the early morning when all parties—all of whom were festooned with pistols and other weapons—were asleep or dead drunk. But as we watched, a pair of hard-looking men moved a slight, stumbling burlap-hooded figure from one hovel to another, and upon this sight, Bulkington came entirely unhinged and could no longer be restrained.

  Flailing from our grasp, he bellowed, “Pollyanna!” and, with that inarticulate scream of rage and woe and madness we had earlier heard, Bulkington grabbed Vander’s boarding sword and launched himself from our place of concealment, charging the men who manhandled his wife. Quay Chang, Dred and I followed immediately behind him, and I warned the others to stand ready.

  The manic strength of an insane rage is terrible to behold. Before the drunken louts knew what transpired, Bulkington had slashed one across the face and deep into his neck, which spouted gouts of blood, black and shining in the torchlit night, and without an instant’s pause, Bulkington then buried the boarding sword to the hilt in the guts of the other man, who went down with a surprised choking grunt to grovel there in the mud, mewling pathetically. Dred quickly despatched the cur.

  Deranged with relief, Bulkington reached for his tightly bound wife, and as he frantically cut her bonds, she reached for him with desperate longing. Panting, Bulkington carefully cut the final rope from round her neck and slipped the burlap sack from off her head. Suspecting the worst, I was there at the ready, and when his wife—who had truly once been a beautiful young woman—I say, when this former beauty lunged, hissing, to rip out Bulkington’s throat, I was at the ready and grasped her by the hair and savagely yanked her back out of reach, yea, altogether out of Bulkington’s grasp. Quay Chang, also reading ahead, had immediately pulled Bulkington aside so he would not see what I needs must do. It was quickly if not gladly done.

  Bulkington however, was thereafter lost to us. He stood as a deaf mute, nor moved of his own volition, nor seemed even to breathe, his eyes two horrid pits of blankness. Seeing that ghastly stare, the loss of my own Lilith then came back to me in all its dreadful force and sent me on such a berserker rampage as to swallow all memory of particulars. We killed all zombies and all the so-called men therein, freed the few poor wights not yet infected by these fiends, and, leaving the small fortune of scalps where they lay, and using what large store of moonshine that remained after we had taken all we could carry, we burned the place to the sodden ground. It was a grim business.

  Some days later, we staggered out from the swamp’s western edge, into improbably bright morning sunshine—for how could the sun shine on such deeds as those we had witnessed? We made our way north, to Portland. Bulkington had recovered enough to speak, but only when spoken to, and that in monosyllables; he wept most nights. He made it known he would ship aboard a whaler, and never again set foot upon land if he could help it. We saw him safely signed aboard The Grampus.

  Just past Portland’s outskirts, Quay Chang asked for a private word with me. We had grown close in the months since meeting, and he knew much of my own sad story, and I of his, and in that short time he earned from me a deep, abiding respect. His hand firmly gripping my left shoulder, he touched my face lightly with his other hand and said, “You must go to them and deliver them from their suffering, and thereby deliver yourself from yours.” I nodded, knowing in my heart the truth of his words, however impossible they were to then enact. With no further words, Quay Chang turned from the rising sun, and with nary a backward glance, walked into the west.

  Ah, thou untrammeled sun! None can stay hid from thee; not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, nor fully developed. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” All.

  He who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

  But as for Bulkington? He was such a man. Through my patchy try pot remembrance, Bulkington became yet more unfathomable than Solomon himself in my estimation. Bulkington was now unfathomable in sooth, sinking in our wake, down and down and down into that final dark.

  Chapter

  The Afterhold

  [The Captain’s Cabin, Ahab moving to go on deck;

  Pip catches him by the hand to follow]

  “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be, loose though thou art.”

  “No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir
; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.”

  “Oh! spite of a million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.”

  “They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose zomby bones now show white through all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.”

  “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.”

  “Oh good Captain, Captain, Captain!

  “Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall.”

  [Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward]

  “Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me.

  “Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!