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CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.

Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin¹ there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.

But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.

Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of many a Pactolus² flows. And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris³ of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the White Whale’s talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to spend it.

Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.

It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO⁴. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.

Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing.

“There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, ‘t is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here’s stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”

“No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must have left their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. “The old man seems to read Belshazzar’s awful writing⁵. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.”

“There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, “he’s been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer’s Hook⁶, I’d not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes⁷. What then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda⁸! let me read it once. Halloa! here’s signs and wonders⁹ truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome¹⁰ calls the zodiac, and what my almanack below calls ditto. I’ll get the almanack and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll’s arithmetic¹¹, I’ll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here’s the book. Let’s see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he’s always among ‘em. Hem, hem, hem; here they are—here they go—all alive:—Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here’s Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among ‘em. Aye, here on the coin he’s just crossing the threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That’s my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch’s navigator, and Daboll’s arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders! There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By Jove, I have it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins—that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that’s our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside; here’s the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There’s a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly’s the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let’s hear what he’ll have to say. There; he’s before it; he’ll out with something presently. So, so; he’s beginning.”

“I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I wont smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here’s nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy ‘em out.”

“Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman¹²—the old hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of the mast; why, there’s a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he’s back again; what does that mean? Hark! he’s muttering—voice like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!”

“If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs, and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what’s the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign—the roaring and devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.”

“There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the back country. And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicinity of his thigh—I guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don’t know what to make of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king’s trowsers. But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah¹³; tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin—fire worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip—poor boy! would he had died, or I; he’s half horrible to me¹⁴. He too has been watching all of these interpreters—myself included—and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!”

“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look¹⁵.”

“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”

“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”

“Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”

“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”

“Well, that’s funny.”

“And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a crow, especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s the scare-crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.”

“Wonder if he means me?—complimentary!—poor lad!—I could go hang myself. Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.”

“Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s nailed to the mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White Whale; he’ll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey’s wedding ring¹⁶. How did it get there? And so they’ll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious gold!—the green miser’ll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes ‘mong the worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done¹⁷!”

FOOTNOTES

the doubloon — a Spanish (and, by extension, Spanish-American) gold coin. The one nailed to the Pequod’s mainmast (established back in Ch. 36, “The Quarter-Deck”) is Ahab’s promised reward to whichever man first raises Moby Dick. This chapter is one of the most celebrated in the novel: seven characters in turn look at the exact same coin and see seven completely different things — a demonstration, almost 80 years before literary theory had language for it, that meaning isn’t sitting inside the object; it’s projected onto it by the observer. Worth framing this directly for listeners as the chapter’s whole point, since every reading offered below is really a self-portrait. ↩
Pactolus — a river in ancient Lydia (modern-day Turkey), legendary in Greek myth as the river where King Midas washed off his golden touch, after which its sands supposedly ran with gold. A stock poetic shorthand for fabulous, almost mythic wealth. ↩
verdigris (pronounced “VUR-di-grees”) — the blue-green patina that forms on copper, bronze, or brass when exposed to air over time (think of the Statue of Liberty’s color). ↩
REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO — Ecuador, “the country planted in the middle of the world,” takes its name from the equator itself; Quito is its capital, high in the Andes. The three peaks, flame, tower, and crowing cock Melville describes are drawn from the real iconography of 19th-century Ecuadorian coinage, which is part of what makes this chapter’s Rorschach-test structure work: it’s a real, specific, verifiable object that seven different minds project seven different meanings onto. ↩
Belshazzar’s awful writing — a reference to the biblical story of Belshazzar’s Feast, in which a disembodied hand writes a message of doom on the wall of the Babylonian king’s banquet hall, which only the prophet Daniel can interpret. (Daniel 5) Starbuck reaches for this image instinctively — he reads the coin the way you’d read a warning from God, in contrast to Ahab, who reads it as a mirror of himself. ↩
Negro Hill or… Corlaer’s Hook — two real 19th-century red-light districts frequented by sailors: Negro Hill in Boston, and Corlear’s Hook (misspelled here) on the Lower East Side of Manhattan — the latter already referenced back in Ch. 1, “Loomings.” Stubb’s point is purely practical: in a place like that, a gold coin’s meaning is obvious — you spend it. A note for on-air acknowledgment: the place name “Negro Hill” reflects the casual racial vocabulary of both the historical setting and Melville’s own era, and is worth a brief, matter-of-fact flag rather than a pass-over. ↩
moidores, pistoles, joes — a run of period coin names: the moidore was a Portuguese gold coin; the pistole, a Spanish/French gold coin; “joes” (and “half joes,” “quarter joes”) were slang for the Portuguese johannes, another gold coin, named for King João. Stubb is establishing his own worldliness — he’s seen plenty of foreign gold — right before the chapter demonstrates that worldliness doesn’t actually help him read the coin any better than anyone else. ↩
Golconda — a ruined fortress city near Hyderabad, India, historically a major center of the diamond trade. By Melville’s time, the name had already become a byword for fabulous wealth — much the way we might say “a gold mine” today. ↩
signs and wonders — a recurring phrase from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament describing miraculous divine action (e.g. Exodus 7:3, Acts 2:22). Stubb reaches for scripture-flavored language half-jokingly, which is itself part of the chapter’s running joke: everyone brings their own vocabulary to the coin, sacred or commercial, and it tells you more about them than about the coin. ↩
Bowditch’s Epitome — Nathaniel Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator (1802), the standard navigational reference manual on American ships throughout the 19th century — practically a Bible of its own aboard a whaler. (Wikipedia) ↩
Daboll’s arithmetic — Nathan Daboll’s Schoolmaster’s Assistant, an enormously popular 19th-century American arithmetic textbook that generations of schoolchildren (including, per family record, Melville’s own father) learned from. Stubb’s joke — that “devils can be raised with Daboll’s arithmetic” — plays on the double sense of “raising,” as in solving a sum and as in summoning a spirit, right before he tries to “raise” a meaning out of the coin using it. ↩
our old Manxman — a sailor from the Isle of Man, a small island in the Irish Sea long associated in British folklore with second sight, witchcraft, and doom-laden superstition. The Manxman’s claim to have learned astrology “two score years ago” from “the old witch in Copenhagen” fits this folk reputation, and his reading of the coin — grim, fatalistic, focused on the ship’s coming destruction — is entirely in character for how Melville’s contemporaries would have expected a Manxman to talk. ↩
Fedallah… fire worshipper — Fedallah, the Pequod’s mysterious Parsee harpooneer (first introduced in Ch. 50), is here read by Stubb through the lens of Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion historically associated (somewhat inaccurately, in Western popular imagination) with fire worship. A note worth flagging on air: Fedallah is one of the novel’s most heavily “orientalized” characters — exoticized, silent, treated as an omen rather than a person by the other characters (and, at times, by the narration itself). It’s worth naming that pattern directly for listeners rather than letting it pass as simple local color. A small MEL editorial variant, and a good B-block detail: in the American first edition, Stubb calls Fedallah simply a “ghost-devil”; in the British Bentley edition, Melville revised this to “old ghost-devil” — probably to reinforce the sense, established back in Ch. 73, that Fedallah is ageless, outside ordinary time. ↩
Half-horrible because Stubb was the one who threatened to leave him to drown if he popped out of the boat again (which he did). ↩
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look” — Pip is reciting a verb conjugation drill straight out of Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, the dominant grammar textbook in American schools well into the 19th century. It’s simultaneously the novel’s funniest and most devastating moment in this chapter: the “crazy” cabin boy, driven mad by being left alone in the ocean in Ch. 93, is reciting rote grammar-school drill — and in doing so, accidentally names the chapter’s entire theme. Every person on this ship looks at the same object and sees something different; conjugating the verb “to look” is, structurally, exactly what this whole chapter has been doing. This is worth connecting on air to the ongoing thread of Pip as the novel’s moral center from Ch. 93 onward — his madness keeps producing the truest reading in the room, even though (or because) no one can take him seriously. ↩
some old darkey’s wedding ring — Pip’s closing monologue contains a racial term that was common, casual usage in Melville’s era but reads as a slur today. Flag this plainly for listeners rather than softening or skipping it — Pip is himself a young Black cabin boy, and the fact that his own fragmented, grief-stricken speech reaches for this kind of language is part of what makes this monologue so uncomfortable and so frequently discussed by scholars: Melville is putting period minstrel-inflected diction into the mouth of the character the novel is quietly building toward as its most spiritually perceptive figure. It’s worth sitting with that tension rather than resolving it. ↩
“Jenny… get your hoe-cake done” — scholars have long noted that Pip’s closing exclamations echo the rhythms and stock phrases of minstrel-show and plantation song (a “hoe-cake” is a simple cornmeal cake associated with the antebellum South). This is one of the more genuinely difficult passages in the novel to read aloud: Pip’s madness is voiced, in part, through the era’s blackface entertainment conventions, even as the chapter is simultaneously positioning him as the one character capable of a truthful reading. Suggested on-air framing: name both things — that the passage draws on racist minstrel convention, and that literary critics have long argued Melville is using Pip’s “broken” voice, painfully, as the novel’s clearest mirror. Presenting this as an open critical question (rather than settling it) is honest to how unresolved this passage remains in Melville scholarship. ↩

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🎤056 Moby Full Text Ch99

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CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.

FOOTNOTES

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Quartz 4

Explorer

🎤056 Moby Full Text Ch99

Contents

CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.

FOOTNOTES

Footnotes

Graph View

Table of Contents

Backlinks