Moby Dick: The White Whale

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; I had shouted with the rest and sworn with the rest, and I shouted all the louder because of a strange dread in my soul.A wild feeling had taken hold of me that Ahab’s fierce quarrel was mine too, and I listened greedily to the history of the monster we had all sworn to hunt.For some time the white whale had wandered alone in the far seas where sperm whalers sail, but few had seen him and fewer had fought him, because the ships were scattered across the oceans and news travelled slowly.

Those who did meet him usually lowered their boats as boldly as for any other whale, but their attacks ended in such disasters, with smashed boats, lost limbs and drowned men, that many brave hunters lost their nerve.Rumours grew wilder with every retelling, for sailors alone on the empty ocean are always ready to believe in wonders, and soon Moby Dick was said to be in two oceans at the same moment.Some whalemen even swore that he was immortal, and that if he were ever made to spout blood, it would be only a trick, for his clear white jet would appear again hundreds of miles away.

But even without these tales, there was enough in the whale himself to frighten a man, for besides his great size he had a snow-white wrinkled forehead, a high white hump and a twisted lower jaw.The rest of his body was so streaked and marbled with the same ghostly white that he was known as the White Whale, and at noon, gliding through the dark blue sea, he left a creamy wake sparkling with gold.But more than his size or his colour, sailors feared his cunning, because he would pretend to flee, then suddenly turn and smash the boats of the men who chased him.

On one such day, with three boats splintered around him and men struggling in the water, one captain seized a short knife and rushed at the whale, and that captain was Ahab.Moby Dick swept his curved lower jaw beneath him and cut off Ahab’s leg as easily as a farmer cuts a stalk of grass, and from that day Ahab nursed a wild hatred of him.During the long voyage home, as he lay in pain in his hammock, his suffering body and his wounded mind seemed to grow into one, until he saw in the white whale everything that torments a man, as if all the evil of the world had taken one shape that he could strike.

At times on that voyage he raved so wildly that his mates had to tie him down, and when he came out on deck again, calm and giving orders, they thanked God that the fit had passed.But it had not passed; it had only narrowed into a single fixed obsession, and all of Ahab’s great intelligence now served that one purpose, so that he was more dangerous than ever.When he stepped ashore on his ivory leg, the people of Nantucket thought him merely a man who had suffered a terrible loss, and some even thought his dark moods made him the right captain for a whale hunt.

So Ahab had sailed on this voyage with one secret purpose, to hunt the White Whale, while his owners thought only of profit and his crew, drawn from every corner of the world, seemed picked to follow him.Why the whole ship’s company took up his hatred as their own I cannot fully explain, but for my part I gave myself up to the hour and the place, and in that whale I saw nothing but the deadliest enemy.