Moby Dick

had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had
actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed.
For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly
way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference,
many of them adventurously pushing their quest along
solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth
or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail
of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage;
the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these,
with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed
the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special
individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick.  It was hardly
to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered,
at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian,
a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale,
after doing great mischief to his assailants, has completely
escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption,
I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than
Moby Dick.  Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been
marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity,
cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was,
that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick;
such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe
the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils
of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.
In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab
and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale,
by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing
they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly
lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species.
But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults--
not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs,
or devouring amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality;
those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling
their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to
shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story
of the White Whale had eventually come.

Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still
the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters.
For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body
of all surprising terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birth
to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma,
wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them
to cling to.  And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter,
so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life,
in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes
circulate there.  For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt
from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors;
but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought
into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea;
face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw,
give battle to them.  Alone, in such remotest waters, that though
you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would
not come to any chiselled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath
that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too
such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences
all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit
over the wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale
did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,
and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies,
which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from
anything that visibly appears.  So that in many cases such a panic
did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least,
had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing
to encounter the perils of his jaw.

But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.
Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of the
Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species
of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body.
There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and
courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale,
would perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency,
or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate,
there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations
not sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely
encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan
is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;
seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside
interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling.
Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale
anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows
which stem him.

And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary
times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists--
Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be
a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be
so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.
Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost
similar impressions effaced.  For in his Natural History,
the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish
(sharks included) are "struck with the most lively terrors,"
and "often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against
the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death."
And however the general experiences in the fishery may amend