and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained
his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally
justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a
dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with
golden gleamings.
Nor was it his unwonted
magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so
much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled,
intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over
and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous
retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming
before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had
several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon
them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in
consternation to their ship.
[pgallery]
[/pgallery] Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though
similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual
in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's
infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that
he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an
unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what pitches
of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were
impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of
torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful
wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a
birth or a bridal.
imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em;
margin-right: 1em;" title="Weddings from The Knot and The Nest">
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifWshe7spZwzDFVdcRWqZqZTPULwtuF6AS7CjiYFgs4EqnHBkr-bDS9HdLjTuzHbmDAEOoTTsrNHywq-QAMkTz8SwSotGPZFv1DMkPkagjIRxC5wLmCjgnPyxpjlS0VIllFOtyD4vNZPE/s320/nature_6.jpg"
title="Weddings from The Knot and The Nest" width="248" />His
three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the
eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had
dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking
with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That
captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his
sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg,
as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired
Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small
reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal
encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all
the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to
identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual
and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the
monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men
feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and
half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning;
to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the
worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue
devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously
transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all
mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs
up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the
sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought;
all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically
assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of
all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and
then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell
upon it.
It is not probable that this monomania in
him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment.
Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to
a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke
that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but
nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and
for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together
in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian
Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one
another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the
homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him,
seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage,
he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital
strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by
his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as
he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad
rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes,
the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil
tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left
behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den
into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm,
collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and
his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab,
in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and
most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become
transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided
not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble
Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But,
as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness
had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great
natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the
living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy
stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred
cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength,
Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than
ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable
object.