Moby Dick

trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in some one
or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently
to be mentioned.

Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of
his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the
neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels
at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years.
A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid.
Nor is there any reason it should be.  Of what precise species this
sea-monster was, is not mentioned.  But as he destroyed ships,
as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am
strongly inclined to think a sperm whale.  And I will tell you why.
For a long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always
unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it.
Even now I am certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be,
in the present constitution of things, a place for his habitual
gregarious resort.  But further investigations have recently proved to me,
that in modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence
of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean.  I am told, on good authority,
that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found
the skeleton of a sperm whale.  Now, as a vessel of war readily passes
through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route,
pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.

In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar
substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale.
But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale--
squid or cuttle-fish--lurks at the bottom of that sea,
because large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort,
have been found at its surface.  If, then, you properly
put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit,
you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning,
Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships
of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale.



CHAPTER 46

Surmises


Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his
thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;
though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that
one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature
and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways,
altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage.
Or at least if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other
motives much more influential with him.  It would be refining
too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to hint that his
vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended
itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters
he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances that each
subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he hunted.
But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were still
additional considerations which, though not so strictly according
with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means
incapable of swaying him.

To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used
in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.
He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some
respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover
the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority
involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual,
the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation.
Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab
kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; still he knew that for all this
the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain's quest, and could he,
would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it.
It might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale
was seen.  During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall
into open relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership,
unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought
to bear upon him.  Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab
respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his
superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present,
the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative
impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the
voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's
courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action);
that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must
have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick.  For however eagerly
and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of his quest;
yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable--
they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness--
and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit,
however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things
requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene
and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.

Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing.  In times of strong emotion
mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man,
thought Ahab, is sordidness.  Granting that the White Whale fully
incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round
their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism
in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick,