🎤031 Moby Full Text Chs50-51

Capstan: weighing anchor Furling Sails storm, ‘tgallant sail furled

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CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah. CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout. FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.

“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”

“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. “If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you know.”

“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”

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Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers¹ often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight.

But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.

Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco’s -←Archy’s→- published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins² with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of sheathing³ in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat,⁴ as it is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew being assigned to that boat.

Workshop on the Water blogspot

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes⁵ of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks,⁶ and what not; that Beelzebub⁷ himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.

But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis,⁸ the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins,⁹ indulged in mundane amours.

CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.¹⁰

Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes;¹¹ on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground,¹² an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena.¹³

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she blows!” Had the trump¹⁴ of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t’gallant sails and royals¹⁵ to be set, and every stunsail¹⁶ spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft¹⁷ rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze¹⁸ filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly¹⁹ to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.

This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.

Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us²⁰ at last in the remotest and most savage seas.

These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like²¹ prow.

But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds²² began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.

Cormorant - sea-raven

Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens.²³ And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.

Cape of Good Hope,²⁴ do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoso, as called of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together.²⁵ Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline²⁶ secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that swung from a beam in the ceiling.* ²⁷

Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.

Images from the Charles W. Morgan, Mystic Seaport

Images from John Putnam’s article, “Whaling and Whalecraft: A Pictorial Account.” c. 1850

from shipwreck library

Whale underneath whaleboat, pushing it off water (1922). Photo courtesy: New Bedford Whaling Museum & NPS

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Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes: Tamerlane is the English name of the Great Khan Timur-i-Leng (Timur the Lame, 1336–1405), Mongol conqueror and subject of “Tamburlaine the Great” by Christopher Marlowe. (In Ch. 30, lame Ahab was a “Khan of the plank.”) Melville purchased Marlowe’s The Dramatic Works just before writing Moby-Dick; however, the reference to tearful soldiers, which may be folk legend, does not appear in “Tamburlaine” nor in Poe’s poem “Tamerlane” (1827, 1845). ↩

2. thole-pins: sets of two pegs in the gunwales that keep the oars in place while rowing ↩

3. sheathing: planking ↩

4. clumsy cleat: a board in the whaleboat’s bow against which one can lean a thigh or knee for balance. ↩

5. a dump where rubbish is burned ↩

6. blown-off Japanese junks: Melville apparently knew at least some of the stories about Japanese castaways saved by American whalers, perhaps including the 14-year-old Manjirō (1827-1898), rescued in 1841, who was educated in Massachusetts and returned to Japan in 1851. ↩

7. Beelzebub: Hebrew for “Lord of the Flies” and a traditional name of the devil. Originally the pagan god of the Philistine city Ekron in 2 Kings 1.2, he is also called prince or chief of the devils in Matthew, Mark, and Luke and is Satan’s lieutenant in Milton’s Paradise Lost. ↩

8. when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours: In Genesis 6.4, “the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” The Rabbins (an obsolete form of rabbi, or Jewish scholar) are, in this case, uncanonical because their writings are not included in the canon of accepted scripture in either the Bible or Apocrypha. In two such books, the “sons of God” who “came in unto” women are lustful, fallen angels, that is, devils. The references to unconventional scripture reveal the breadth of Melville’s reading in esoteric texts. ↩

9. Uncanonical Rabbins: the authors of scdriptures excluded from the Bible and Apocrypha, ncluding the books of Enoch and Jubilees. “Rabbins” is a plural form of “rabbi” which was apparently common into the 19th C b/c they (incorrectly) thought the plural was “rabbin”. ↩

10. The Spirit Spout: In his January 8, 1852, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, Melville responds to her earlier letter praising Moby-Dick and offering, among other insights, her interpretation of the spirit spout. The interpretation is not known because Sophia’s letter is lost, but Melville acknowledges her finding “a subtile significance” in the spirit spout, although he “did not, in that case, mean it.” For Melville’s further ruminations on the “allegoricalness of the whole” of Moby-Dick, see NN Correspondence 219. ↩

11. Cape de Verdes: Now a nation, but at the time Portuguese, the Cabo Verde islands (Cape Verde in English), are located off the west coast of present-day Senegal. ↩

12. Carrol Ground: Also spelled “Carroll Ground,” this feeding area for whales is not south but east and north of St. Helena, off the coast of Angola. ↩

13. St. Helena: The British island colony famous for Napoleon Bonapart’s final exile, situated in the middle of the South Atlantic. One commenter said this: This seems an odd route: the Plate is very far south of St. Helena and very far west as well. The first three areas would make sense on their own if Ahab were going to enter the Pacific through the Straits of Magellan around Cape Horn, so maybe that was his initial plan which he then revised for some reason and headed back to Africa to round the Cape of Good Hope instead. (The prevailing winds make sailing from North America to the coasts of Europe and Africa, then doubling back to South America the easiest and fastest path, as well as providing the opportunity to pick up additional crew and supplies in the Azores and Cape Verde.) ↩

14. trump: trumpet ↩

15. t’gallant sails and royals: third and fourth level of sails up from the deck; thus, the highest sails aboard the Pequod ↩

16. stunsail: short for studdingsail and pronounced STUN suhl. Light sail set out and rigged to extend the ends of the yards in fair weather to increase speed. ↩

17. Piled-up: having all its sails set ↩

18. taffrail breeze: breeze coming from the taffrail, the handrail around the open deck area toward the stern of a ship. ↩

19. yawingly: veering from one side to the other ↩

20. turn round upon us, and rend us: According to Parker, Ishmael’s language echoes in part Matthew 7.6: “neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” ↩

21. urn-like: rounded, but also HELLOOOOoooo foreshadowing! ↩

22. the Cape winds: Having turned eastward from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean, the Pequod is buffeted by the winds off Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. From this point on, the ship sails waters that Melville never witnessed. ↩

23. sea-ravens: Cormorants (from medieval Latin corvus marinus, ravens of the sea).HOWEVER, another note says: Sea-ravens are bottom-dwelling fish, a variety of sculpin. They are “flying” in the water, an image suggested by their name, and are not (as most readers might guess) birds following them in the air. But I’m looking at Sculpins and I think I’ll stick with Cormorants—who would likely follow the ship expecting breakfast. ↩

24. The Cape of Good Hope (34°22’S 18°28’E) is not, as is commonly thought, the southern tip of Africa, but is the point at which ships traveling around Africa are heading more to the east than to the south, and is about ninety miles west of the tip. “Cape Tormentoto” (actually “Cabo das Tormentas”, or “Cape of Storms”) was the name given it by Bartholomew Dias in 1488, referring to the tempestuous nature of the seas there. It was renamed “Cape of Good Hope” by John II of Portugal.* ↩

25. So they’ve been out for awhile if they’re hitting winter weather in the Southern Hemisphere. ↩

26. sort of bowline: loop of rope with a non-slipping knot thrown over their shoulders like a car seat-belt. ↩

27. MELVILLE’S NOTE: *The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the course of the ship. ↩