Moby-Dick

On the little packet boat to Nantucket, a young lout mocks Queequeg behind his back; Queequeg sends him somersaulting through the air and lands him on his feet. Minutes later the boom swings loose, knocks the same lout overboard, and Queequeg is the one who dives into the freezing water to save him, then shrugs it off: we cannibals, he says in effect, must help these Christians. On Nantucket, Yojo, consulted, rules that Ishmael alone must choose their ship.

He chooses the Pequod: an old, weather-stained whaler named after a Native American tribe that colonists had all but wiped out, and decorated with whale teeth and bones like a trophy-hung warrior. Her two chief owners, retired captains Peleg and Bildad, are Quakers of very different kinds. Peleg is gruff and salty; Bildad reads his Bible while haggling and tries to sign Ishmael on for the 777th lay—that is, a 777th share of the profits, practically nothing. Peleg bullies him up to the 300th. Queequeg, asked whether he has ever struck a fish, leaps into a whaleboat and darts his harpoon clean across the deck, over Bildad’s hat, to hit a drop of tar floating on the water. He is promptly offered the 90th lay, a record for a harpooneer.

The captain is not aboard. His name is Ahab, Peleg explains—like the wicked king in the Bible, though not his fault—and he lost a leg to a whale on his last voyage. He is “a grand, ungodly, god-like man,” moody but good. On the wharf a ragged prophet named Elijah drops dark hints about Ahab and the voyage, and before dawn on sailing day Ishmael glimpses shadowy figures slipping aboard. On a cold Christmas Day the Pequod puts to sea.

Ishmael pauses to defend whaling as heroic work, with a line that may be Melville’s autobiography: “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”

For days after sailing, nobody sees Ahab. Then one grey morning there he is: a tall, broad, iron-grey man who looks as if he had been burned at the stake and cut down before the fire finished him, with a pale scar running from his hair down into his collar. In place of his lost leg he stands on one made from polished sperm-whale jawbone, braced in holes bored into the deck.

Starbuck, the chief mate, is a brave, thoughtful Nantucket Quaker with a wife and son at home, who wants no man in his boat who is not afraid of a whale. Stubb, the second mate, is a cheerful Cape Cod man who meets every danger with his pipe in his mouth. Flask, the third mate, is short, ruddy and pugnacious, and seems to take whales as a personal insult. Their harpooneers are Queequeg, the Wampanoag Tashtego and the towering African Daggoo.

Then comes the turning point. Ahab gathers the whole crew on the quarter-deck and nails a gold coin—a Spanish doubloon worth sixteen dollars—to the mainmast. It will go to whoever first spots a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow, a crooked jaw and three holes in his right fluke. The harpooneers know him at once: Moby Dick. It was Moby Dick that took his leg, Ahab roars, and he will chase him round the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn and through the flames of hell before he gives him up.

Starbuck alone objects. Revenge on a dumb animal that struck from instinct is madness, even blasphemy, and how many barrels will it fetch in the Nantucket market? Ahab answers with the book’s most famous speech: everything visible is a “pasteboard mask,” and behind it hides some intelligence he must strike through. The white whale is the wall in front of him. “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” The crew drink to the hunt from the hollow sockets of the harpoons. Starbuck gives way.

The next few chapters are written like a play, with stage directions and soliloquies: Ahab knows he is mad and does not care, Starbuck despairs, Stubb decides to meet whatever comes laughing, and sailors from a dozen nations sing, dance and nearly brawl in the forecastle. The ship is a floating world, and it has just been hijacked.

Ishmael now tells us the legends about Moby Dick: that he appears in different oceans at once, cannot be killed, and turns on his hunters with something like cunning. On their last meeting Ahab, his boats smashed, lunged at the whale with a knife and lost his leg to the sweep of its scythe-like jaw. Lashed into his hammock on the long voyage home, raving, he came to fuse his pain with every evil in the universe and aim all of it at one animal. At night he pores over charts to calculate where the whale will feed, then bursts from his cabin in nightmares: his own thoughts, Ishmael says, have made him a Prometheus with a vulture feeding on his heart.

Then Ishmael confesses what frightens him: not the whale’s size or strength but its colour. In one of the strangest essays in fiction, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” he notes that white means purity, royalty and holiness, yet also the polar bear, the shark, the shroud and the ghost. Perhaps whiteness terrifies because it is a blank: the absence of all colour that is also all colours at once, an empty space onto which we project whatever we fear.

This is where many readers stall, so here is the honest truth. Melville stops the story again and again, for whole chapters, to tell you about whales. In “Cetology” he classifies them like books in a library—Folio, Octavo and Duodecimo whales—insists, against the science of his day, that the whale is a fish, and leaves the whole scheme deliberately unfinished: “God keep me from ever completing anything.” Later chapters dissect the whale’s head, tail, skin and skeleton, review whale pictures and whale law, and ask whether whales can be hunted to extinction. Some of these chapters are dazzling and funny; others are slow going. If you are dipping in, read chapters 1–23 for Ishmael and Queequeg ashore; 28, 36 and 41–42 for Ahab and the whale; 87, 93, 94 and 96 for the best scenes at sea; and 132–135 plus the Epilogue for the end. Skim the anatomy chapters unless they grab you.

At the first lowering for whales, the shadowy figures from sailing day burst out of hiding: Ahab has smuggled aboard his own boat crew, led by Fedallah, a turbaned Parsee who seems less a man than Ahab’s shadow. Starbuck’s boat is swamped in a squall, and Queequeg holds up a lantern in the mist all night until the ship finds them; Ishmael, soaked, goes below and calmly writes his will.

Melville does not spare us the work. Stubb kills a whale in a scene of shocking violence, then eats a whale steak by lantern light at midnight and makes Fleece, the ship’s old Black cook, preach a sermon to the sharks thrashing at the carcass. Ishmael, tied by a “monkey-rope” to Queequeg as his friend stands on the slippery whale among the sharks, realizes that every person is roped to others in the same way: if Queequeg falls, he falls too. When Tashtego tumbles into a severed whale head as it sinks, Queequeg dives after him with a knife and delivers him from it, Ishmael says, like a midwife.

Near the Strait of Sunda the Pequod meets a vast herd of whales, and Ishmael’s boat is drawn into its calm centre, where mothers nurse their calves and young whales nose at the boat like puppies. In the middle of slaughter, a nursery.

And there is the book’s saddest small story. Pip, a little Black boy from Connecticut who plays the tambourine, panics in Stubb’s boat and jumps overboard, fouling the line and costing them a whale. Stubb warns him that in Alabama a whale would sell for thirty times what he would. The next time Pip jumps, they leave him. He floats alone for hours before the ship picks him up by chance, and his mind does not come back. The sea, Ishmael says, kept his body up but drowned his soul; or rather, carried it down to see the hidden wisdom of the deep.

Then, in one of the most joyful chapters ever written, Ishmael and his shipmates squeeze lumps of cooled spermaceti back into liquid, and he finds himself squeezing his fellows’ hands in a delirium of brotherly love—“Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long.” That same night the try-works, the brick furnaces that boil blubber into oil, turn the ship into a floating hell of fire and smoke. Ishmael dozes at the tiller, wakes facing backwards, and nearly capsizes the ship. His lesson: do not stare too long into the fire. “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

One by one the crew study the doubloon on the mast: Ahab sees himself, Starbuck the Trinity, Flask 960 cigars. Pip simply conjugates: “I look, you look, he looks.” Everyone sees what he brings.

When two whalers meet at sea they “gam”: they visit, swap news and mail. The Pequod has nine such meetings, and each one is a mirror. Ahab always asks the same question: “Hast seen the White Whale?”

The Town-Ho carries a secret tale of a bullying mate snatched by Moby Dick just before the sailor he had abused could take revenge. The Jeroboam is in the grip of Gabriel, a mad Shaker prophet who claims the white whale is God; their mate was killed when he tried to hunt it. The German Jungfrau has no oil at all and begs some for her lamps. Stubb cons the captain of the French Rose-Bud out of a rotting whale and finds inside it a lump of ambergris, worth a fortune to perfume-makers.

The English Samuel Enderby offers the sharpest contrast. Her jolly captain also lost a limb to Moby Dick—an arm—and now wears one of whalebone. He has no wish to see the whale again: once bitten is enough. Ahab leaps back to his own ship so violently that he splinters his ivory leg. The Bachelor sails by, bursting with oil, her captain cheerfully sure the white whale is a myth.

Meanwhile Queequeg catches a fever working in the damp hold and, sure he is dying, orders the carpenter to build him a canoe-shaped coffin. He tries it for size, then decides he has unfinished business and simply gets better. The coffin becomes his sea-chest. The ship’s carpenter makes Ahab a new leg, and Perth, the blacksmith who drank away his family, forges Ahab a special harpoon from the stubs of racing horseshoe nails. Ahab tempers its barbs not in water but in the blood of his three pagan harpooneers, howling a backwards baptism in Latin: not in the name of the Father, but in the name of the devil.

The Pequod enters the Pacific, and the signs grow darker. One night Fedallah tells Ahab a prophecy: before Ahab can die he must see two hearses on the sea, the first not made by mortal hands, the second of wood grown in America; Fedallah himself will go before him as his pilot; and only hemp can kill him. Ahab laughs: hemp means the gallows, so he is immortal at sea. Soon afterwards he smashes the ship’s quadrant.

In a typhoon off Japan, the masts burn with corposants, the ghostly glow of St Elmo’s fire. Ahab grips the lightning chain, plants his foot on Fedallah, and defies the flames as a god he once worshipped and now must fight. His harpoon blazes like a torch. That night Starbuck, going below to report a change in the wind, takes a loaded musket from the rack and stands outside the sleeping captain’s door, knowing that one shot could save “thirty men and more.” He cannot pull the trigger. When lightning reverses the compasses, Ahab makes a new needle from a steel lance.

Ahab has one tenderness left. He takes the mad boy Pip into his cabin, holds his hand, and seems almost healed by him; and for that reason he leaves him behind when the hunt begins. A sailor falls from the masthead and drowns, the ship’s wooden life-buoy sinking after him, and the carpenter caulks Queequeg’s coffin to serve as a new one.

Then they meet the Rachel. Her captain, a Nantucketer Ahab knows, has just lost a whaleboat to Moby Dick, and on it was his own twelve-year-old son. He begs Ahab to help search for two days and offers to pay. Ahab refuses. The next ship, grimly named the Delight, is burying a man the whale killed the day before.

On a mild, lovely morning before the final chase, Ahab drops a tear into the sea. He tells Starbuck about forty years of whaling, about the young wife he left the day after their wedding—“I widowed that poor girl when I married her”—and the boy he hardly knows. For a moment, as Starbuck begs him to turn for home, he wavers. Then he asks what force inside him drives him on against his own heart, and Starbuck steals away in despair.

Ahab himself raises the whale: “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” The doubloon is his.

The hunt lasts three days. On the first, Moby Dick rises beneath Ahab’s boat and bites it in half, with Ahab almost in his jaws. On the second, he smashes all three boats, snaps Ahab’s ivory leg, and drags Fedallah to his death in the tangled lines. Starbuck pleads with Ahab to stop. “Ahab is for ever Ahab, man,” comes the reply; he is “the Fates’ lieutenant,” and the whole thing was rehearsed a billion years before the ocean rolled.

On the third day the whale surfaces with Fedallah’s body lashed to his back by the lines, dead eyes turned toward Ahab: the first hearse, not made by mortal hands. The whale begins to swim away. “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not,” Starbuck cries. “It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” Ahab chases anyway. Moby Dick turns and rams the Pequod, and as the ship begins to sink Ahab understands that she is the second hearse, built of American wood.

He throws his harpoon with a final curse—“from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee”—and the line, running foul, catches him round the neck and whips him silently out of the boat. The whirlpool of the sinking ship pulls down every boat and every man. At the last moment Tashtego, still nailing Ahab’s flag to the masthead, pins a sea-hawk’s wing with his hammer and takes the bird down with him. Then the sea closes over everything, and “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

The Epilogue begins with a line from the Book of Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Ishmael, it turns out, had been moved into Ahab’s own boat after Fedallah vanished, and was thrown clear of it before the end. He floated at the edge of the whirlpool as it slowed, and out of its centre burst Queequeg’s coffin, the life-buoy, shooting up beside him. His friend’s coffin kept him alive for a day and a night on a calm sea where even the sharks swam by as if their mouths were padlocked.

On the second day a ship found him. It was the Rachel, still searching for her lost children, and all she found was another orphan. The ending was missing from the first British edition, so London reviewers in 1851 read a novel narrated by a man who seemed to have drowned.

When Ahab finally appears, standing on a leg carved from whale jawbone, a scar running down his face, he gathers the crew and nails a gold doubloon to the mast for the first man to sight a white whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw: Moby Dick, the whale that maimed him. This voyage, he reveals, is about revenge. The level-headed first mate, Starbuck, protests that it is madness to hate a dumb animal and bad business besides. Ahab replies that everything visible is a mask, and he will strike through it. The crew, carried away, drink to the hunt. Only Starbuck stays uneasy, while the jolly second mate Stubb resolves simply to laugh at whatever comes.

Much of the book is the voyage itself, and Ishmael breaks off often for chapters about whales: their kinds, anatomy, history and the law of whaling. Some of these digressions are brilliant, some are slow; if you are dipping in, read chapters 1–23, 28, 36, 41–42, 93–96 and 132 to the end.

Between the essays come unforgettable scenes. Ahab’s secret boat crew, led by the mysterious Parsee Fedallah, bursts out of hiding at the first chase. Ishmael and Queequeg are roped together as Queequeg works on a slippery whale carcass among sharks. Pip, the little ship’s boy, is left alone in the open sea and goes mad. Ishmael squeezes lumps of whale oil with his shipmates in a burst of brotherly love, and nearly wrecks the ship staring into the oil furnaces at night. Meeting other ships, Ahab asks each one the same question: have you seen the White Whale? An English captain who lost an arm to Moby Dick has no wish to meet him again. Ahab cannot understand him.

The omens pile up. Fedallah prophesies that Ahab will see two hearses on the sea and that only hemp can kill him. Queequeg, ill with fever, has a coffin built, then recovers. In a typhoon the masts burn with eerie fire and Ahab defies it. Starbuck stands at Ahab’s door with a loaded musket, and cannot shoot. Then Ahab refuses to help the captain of the Rachel search for his lost son.

Ahab sights Moby Dick himself. The chase lasts three days. The whale smashes the boats, breaks Ahab’s ivory leg and drowns Fedallah, whose body reappears lashed to the whale’s side. Starbuck begs Ahab to stop: the whale is not seeking him; he is seeking the whale. Ahab will not. Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod, and Ahab, hurling his last harpoon with a curse, is caught round the neck by his own line and dragged under. The whole crew goes down with the ship.

Only Ishmael survives, floating for a day and a night on Queequeg’s coffin, which had been made into a life-buoy. He is picked up by the Rachel, still searching for her missing children, which finds instead another orphan.