Moby Dick

The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when
a cannonball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up
the level field.

"By salt and hemp!" cried Stubb, "but this swift motion of the deck
creeps up one's legs and tingles at the heart.  This ship and I
are two brave fellows!--Ha, ha!  Some one take me up, and launch me,
spine-wise, on the sea,--for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel.
Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!"

"There she blows--she blows!--she blows!--right ahead!"
was now the mast-head cry.

"Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't escape--blow on and split
your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump--
blister your lungs!--Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts
his watergate upon the stream!"

And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew.
The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them
bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew.  Whatever pale
fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before;
these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing
awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,
as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison.
The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring
perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense;
the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild
craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things,
their hearts were bowled along.  The wind that made great bellies
of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible
as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency
which so enslaved them to the race.

They were one man, not thirty.  For as the one ship that held them all;
though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple,
and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran
into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way,
both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so,
all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear;
guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness,
and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord
and keel did point to.

The rigging lived.  The mast-heads, like the tops of
tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs.
Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other
with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the
vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars
in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate.
Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek
out the thing that might destroy them!

"Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?" cried Ahab, when, after the
lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.
"Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd
jet that way, and then disappears."

It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken
some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved;
for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed
to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra,
that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharge of rifles.
The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as--
much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet,
less than a mile ahead--Moby Dick bodily burst into view!
For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush
of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal
his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching.
Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,
the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure
element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam,
shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more.
In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane;
in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.

"There she breaches! there she breaches!" was the cry, as in his
immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like
to Heaven.  So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved
against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised,
for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier;
and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first
sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower
in a vale.

"Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and
thy harpoon are at hand!--Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore.
The boats!--stand by!"

Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men,
like shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays
and halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly
was dropped from his perch.

"Lower away," he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat--a spare one,
rigged the afternoon previous.  "Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine--
keep away from the boats, but keep near them.  Lower, all!"

As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being