Chapter 6

The ship sails on: she meets other ships and the crews mingle in a conversation or “gam.” But Ahab restlessly drives on towards his ultimate goal: to each captain his first question is—“Hast seen the White Whale?”

Passing through the straits of Sunda, which divide Sumatra from Java, the Pequod spies great semi-circles of whale-jets sparkling on the horizon: she spreads sails after the Grand Armada; and presently, the boats are in the midst of it: among sires and cows and calves, the big and the little, spouting, playing, plunging, frantically mobbing the whale-boat, a tumult of power and virile energy on the outskirts of the Armada, but safe within the circle, calm and bliss, dalliance and delight, calves milking their mothers, and amorous bulls warm-bloodedly a-wenching. The boats, luckily, get out of this jam and tumult without damage; but while they set their pennoned poles on many, only one of the drugged whales is captured. This is but one of a score of scenes in Moby-Dick that remain in the memory like a personal experience: one exclaims with Ishmael: I was one of that crew, I pulled in that boat, I floundered around in those waters. A thousand things happen in life with less vividness and impact than they make in these printed pages: the Straits of Sunda are nearer than the neighbouring street.

Shortly after this encounter, the chase grows hotter: the Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby of London, and the Samuel Enderby has met Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab cannot contain himself: his gam with the English captain ends abruptly, and, with the blood pounding in his veins, he springs back to the ship—so precipitately that his ivory leg is shattered and the carpenter must fit him with a new one. The indignity increases Ahab’s impatient pride: “Here I am,” he exclaims, “proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-debtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.” Ahab causes a new harpoon head to be forged: he mans his own boat with the mysterious figures that had crept on the Pequod in the twilight of the morning they left Nantucket, Orientals, led by a Parsee, Fedallah. But at every move, Ahab stumbles on some new obstruction, or delay; and his words become more frenzied, while the effort of his will leaves a white scar of terror wherever his lightnings momentarily strike. When the Bachelor, homeward bound, full of oil, seeks to detain the Pequod for a friendly parley, Ahab leaves it behind with a curse.

Against the under-chorus of Stubb’s common sense and Starbuck’s prudent humanity, Ahab’s shrieks mount more wildly: he even throws the quadrant overboard, to steer by compass, fathom-line, and dead reckoning. In the last extremity of pursuit, in utter arrogance of purpose, he thrusts aside the quadrant as the foolish toy and baby’s plaything of haughty admirals and commodores and captains: in the final issue of life and death, science is impotent: it can but tell where the ship is on the planet, but not where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be tomorrow noon. Now the Pequod must ride out a typhoon; and in the midst of the electric storm, three corposants, tapers of white flame, appear on the three lightning-rods of the masts. For Ahab, his purpose is only beating nearer its goal: instead of bowing to the blind forces around him, the storm, the sea, the lightning, the whale, his resolution is more deeply fortified. Note his words: there are none more sudden and final with meaning in the whole book.

“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence will thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. O thou clear spirit, of the fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”

Everything conspires against Ahab’s deed: the compass needle goes wrong: the log and line, hitherto seldom used, snap off when they are heaved: a man is lost overboard and the life-buoy that was sent over after him springs a leak and goes down with him; finally, another whaler, the Rachel, that has lost a boat’s crew with the captain’s son aboard, seeks to stay Ahab, so that the Pequod may help in the search: Ahab refuses this call of humanity. One being alone almost defeats Ahab, not Starbuck, who, rifle in hand, is tempted to kill Ahab and end his crazy pursuit, but Pip, the little Negro idiot, whose devotion rises as the isolation of Ahab grows. Ahab flees from him: his love, faith, devotion move him from his purpose as no disasters or portents have hitherto moved him. “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him,” Ahab admonishes himself. The boy is black, and an outcast. The black is an idiot, and so doubly an outcast. From one as mad and isolated as himself, Ahab receives love, a love deep as his own sense of pride and power, and he is almost unmanned by it. “Spite of a million villains,” says Ahab, “this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man.” But love has come too late: the chase goes on.

As Ahab nears Moby-Dick his old humanity comes back to him. He sees his own wife and child in Starbuck’s eye, regrets her perpetual widowhood, and is lenient to Starbuck’s own desire to return to his hearth. No: more: Ahab sees his wasted years: the desolation of their solitude: the slavery of a lonely command: the dry nourishment this isolated soul has fed upon—forty years of waste and forty years of folly since, as a lad of eighteen, on a mild sweet day, he struck his first whale, a boy-harpooner of eighteen. How is it that in spite of all this he pursues his purpose? What keeps him pushing and crowding himself all the time, recklessly making himself ready to do what in his own nature he had no desire to accomplish?

The mild day and the steel-blue sky and the smell of the wind, as if the haymakers had been mowing grass on the slopes of the Andes—this day is scarcely over before Ahab detects a whale in the wind; and at next daybreak, Ahab himself raises the hump-like snow-head—Moby-Dick. In the smoother ocean, Moby-Dick seems as mild as the day, gliding with scarcely a ripple through the water, his wrenched, hideous jaw beneath the surface. Becoming aware of the chase, he sounds—only to return with open jaws beneath the bottom of Ahab’s boat, and, after playing with it as a cat with a mouse, he bites it in twain. The Pequod sails on the whale and drives him off. Ahab and his crew are rescued, Ahab with bloodshot blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles, manly wails arising from some far inland part of his being, as desolate as sounds from out ravines.

The second day comes, and the boats lower again. Moby-Dick takes the initiative and plunges immediately towards the boats with open jaws and lashing tail, warping and manoeuvring in such a fashion that the harpoons thrust into him become tangled and the lines shortened: again the whale dives, and again he rises, this time throwing Ahab’s boat topsy-turvy in the air. Ahab’s ivory leg is snapped off; but again he is rescued; and a third day opens. At noon, Ahab, keeping lookout himself, and doubling on his tracks, sights the whale, making towards him in the distance. Again the calm and beauty of the day wake some old humanity in Ahab; but he is churned onward by his purpose.

“Some men die at ebb-tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—I feel like a billow that’s all one crested comb. I am old;—shake hands with me, man,” says Ahab to his first mate.

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; but Starbuck’s manly tears cannot restrain Ahab’s order to lower away in pursuit, nor can the sharks that crowd around the boat and snap maliciously at the oars, nor can the hawk that tears at the red flag running on the main truck; nothing diverts him. The whale sounds; when he rises, tormented by a mass of harpoons and lines, it is as if a submerged iceberg rose suddenly to the surface, the waters flash like a heap of fountains, break in a shower of flakes, and leave the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale. Moby-Dick, churning his tail among the boats, dashes in the bows of the mate’s boat: Ahab, unscathed, orders them back to the ship, while he keeps to the hunt. The whale, fagged or malicious, permits Ahab to catch up with him: Ahab darts iron and curse into his flanks; but the line snaps loose, and the whale turns upon the Pequod herself, and bears down on her, his solid white buttress of a forehead meeting and shivering the planks. The ship settles. Ahab, cut off from the ship, makes one last thrust at the whale; the line spins out and runs foul, and Ahab, stooping to unsnarl it, is caught round the neck and shot out of the boat, fulfilling the prophecy of Fedallah, who has been drowned before him. The rest of the crew turns towards the Pequod; only its masts remain above the water; and as it goes down, they are carried in the suction. As its final spar settles in the water, a red arm and hammer hover back upliftedly in the air, in the act of nailing the flag faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk, pecking at the flag, intercepts the hammer with his wing; and in the death-grasp of Tashtego, the pinioned bird of heaven, with shrieks, his form folded in Ahab’s flag, is dragged into the water: the boat would not sink to hell until she had carried a living part of heaven with her, and helmeted herself with it.

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”