Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of the splash the corpse made as it struck the sea; not so quick to miss the flying bubbles that sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.

  As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.

  “Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake. “In vain do ye strangers fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!”

  Chapter

  One Wee Drop

  It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.

  Hither and thither on high glided the white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

  But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.

  Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen here at the Equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

  Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his unblinlking eyes glowing like coals that still glow hot and red in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his seared helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.

  Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

  Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the fungiform canker in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one that, however willful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.

  Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around him. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.

  Ahab turned.

  “Starbuck!”

  “Sir.”

  “Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore.

  When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-in town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow.

  And then, oh and then the others, the awful plaguey whalebite and ensuing madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow with which old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—and now more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, hast old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. He is not.

  Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me and with it my very life and mayhap my soul besides? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so white did never grow but from out of some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of white hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye for the mirror shows it not; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!”

  “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”

  “They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”

  “ Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! Eben’s face from in the window there! the boy’s hand waving on the hill!”

  But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. “Wither dost Ahab end and the world begin? Tell me that. Thou sayest, ‘Ahab beware of Ahab,’ but I knowest not the doer; is’t that creeping thing within? I say again, is Ahab Ahab? I knowest not the answer.” Starting, he turned.

  “—Starbuck! If ye but knew what Ahab dost know, then would thy heart be as one with mine, for what Ahab does must be done—for salvation’s sake— aye, not for mine alone: for the continued hale lifeblood of all humanity!”

  But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away and heard him not.

  Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.

  Chapter />
  The Chase:

  First Day

  That night in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at intervals—stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor—sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale—was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the weather-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.

  The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at daybreak by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.

  “Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”

  Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear with their clothes in their hands.

  “What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.

  “Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.

  “T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”

  All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air. “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”

  Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast so that the Indian’s head was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had six months before beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

  “And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him.

  “I saw him almost that same instant, sir, and I cried out,” said Tashtego.

  “Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first. There she blows!—there she blows!—there she blows! There again!—there again!” he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember: stay on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,—quick, quicker!” and he slid through the air to the deck.

  “He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away from us; cannot have seen the ship yet.”

  “Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up! Shiver her!—shiver her!—So. Boats, boats!”

  Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails set—all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.

  Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling mottled hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest yeasty foam.

  They saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening corpse-white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a dirgelike musical rippling accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and capered by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of screaming fowl feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of an ancient lance projected from the white whale’s back, bloodless; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.

  A savage joyousness—a festering mildness of repose in swiftness invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his devilish horns; his leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not vengeful Jove himself did surpass the terrible White Whale as he swam.

  On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed off a stench as from the very bowels of the earth, or the vilest chthonic sludge dredged from the deepest sea. No wonder so many among the hunters who, namelessly transported and sickened by this vast festering whale, had failed to assail it; but had fatally found in his prodigious bulk the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! as of Death himself, thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.

  And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand zomby god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls screamingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.

  With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.

  “An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he gazed beyond the whale’s place towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now freshened; the sea began to swell.

  “The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.

  In long skein, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, they wheeled round and round with joyous, expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea. But as he peered down and down into its depths, he saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying profoundly as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undi
scoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and seizing Perth’s harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and stand by to stern.

  Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while yet under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, transplanted himself in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.

  Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s head, and reached higher than that; it seethingly writhed with thin filaments that grasped at Ahab. In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s heads to gain the uttermost stern.

  And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its grip.