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Table of Contents
Chapter 44
THE CHART
Had you followed Captain
Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took place on the night
succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have
seen him go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll
of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table.
Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the
various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady
pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At
intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were
set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various
ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. While thus employed, the heavy
pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the
motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines
upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was
marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil
was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his
forehead. But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of ..
2 his cabin, Ahab thus
pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost
every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For
with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of
currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that
monomaniac thought of his soul. Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the
ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek
out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so
did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby
calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food; and, also, calling to
mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes;
could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties,
concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his
prey. So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the
sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could
he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for one
voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of
the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the
herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been
made to construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale. Besides, when
making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales, guided
by some infallible instinct -- say, rather, secret intelligence from the Deity
--mostly swim in ..
3 veins, as they are
called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating
exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe
of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the direction taken by
any one whale be straight as a surveyor's parallel, and though the line of
advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the
arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to swim, generally embraces
some few miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or
contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's
mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that
at particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating
whales may with great confidence be looked for. And hence not only at
substantiated times, upon well known separate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope
to encounter his prey; but in crossing the widest expanses of water between
those grounds he could, by his art, so place and time himself on his way, as
even then not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting. There was a
circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his delirious but still
methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the gregarious
sperm whales have their regular seasons for particular grounds, yet in general
you cannot conclude that the herds which hunted such and such a latitude or
longitude this year, say, will turn out to be identically the same with those
that were found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and
unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In
general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the
solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though
Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the
Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast;
yet it did not follow, that were the pequod to visit either of those spots at
any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly encounter him there.
So, too, with some other feeding grounds, where he had at times revealed
himself. But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns,
so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab's chances of
accomplishing ..
4 his object have
hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever way-side,
antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set time or place were
attained, when all possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab
fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty. That
particular set time and place were conjoined in the one technical phrase --the
Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby
Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as
the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign
of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the
white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds;
there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the
awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and
unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this
unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the
one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those
hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his
unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest. Now, the Pequod had sailed
from Nantucket at the very beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible
endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards,
double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in
the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for
the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had,
perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion
of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and
nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring
ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale,
spending his vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds,
should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay,
or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons,
Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoom,
might blow Moby Dick into ..
4 the devious zig-zag
world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake. But granting all this;
yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a mad idea, this; that
in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered, should
be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter, even as a
white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For
the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not
but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to
himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would
throw himself back in reveries --tallied him, and shall he escape? His broad
fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear! And here, his mad
mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of
pondering came over him; and in the open air of the deck he would seek to
recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure
who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched
hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. often, when forced
from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night,
which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid
a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing
brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish;
and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his
being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked
flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down
among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be
heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state
room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps,
instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or
fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For,
at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the
white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so
caused ..
5 him to burst from it
in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him;
and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind,
which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it
spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic
thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind
does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that,
in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme
purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself
against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its
own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it
was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth.
Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what
seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a
formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without
an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old
man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense
thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for
ever; that vulture the very creature he creates. ..
6 Since the above was
written, the statement is happily borne out by an official circular, issued by
Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, . By
that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in course of
completion; and portions of it are presented in the circular. This chart
divides the ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees
of longitude; perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of which
districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that have been spent
in each month in every district, and the two others to show the number of days
in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen. ..
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