Moby Dick: The Quarter-Deck

All day long Captain Ahab paced the deck on his ivory leg, so lost in one dark thought that the boards under his feet were dented with his steps.Near the end of the day he suddenly halted, set his ivory leg into a hole in the rail, gripped a rope with one hand, and ordered his first mate, Starbuck, to send every man aft.Starbuck was astonished, because such an order is given on a ship only when something extraordinary is about to happen, but soon the whole crew stood gathered around their captain.

Ahab asked them what they did when they sighted a whale, and the crew roared back, “We sing out! We lower the boats and go after him!”Then he held up a gold coin worth sixteen dollars, nailed it to the mainmast with a hammer, and promised it to the first man who sighted a white whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw.The sailors cheered, but the three harpooners, Tashtego, Daggoo and Queequeg, gave a start at those words, as if each of them remembered something.

“That white whale must be the one some men call Moby Dick,” said Tashtego, and Daggoo and Queequeg described his bushy spout and the old harpoons twisted in his hide like corkscrews.When Starbuck asked whether it was Moby Dick that had taken his leg, Ahab answered with a wild sob that it was, and that the whale had left him standing on a dead stump.He swore that he would chase the white whale round the Cape of Good Hope, round Cape Horn, and even round the flames of hell before he gave him up, and he asked the men to join hands on it.

The sailors shouted, “A sharp eye for the white whale, and a sharp lance for Moby Dick!” — but the honest first mate Starbuck stood silent, with a long face.“I came here to hunt whales, not my captain’s vengeance,” he said, “and it is madness to hate a dumb brute that only struck you out of blind instinct.”Ahab answered that everything we see is only a mask, and that behind the white whale he sensed a hidden, reasoning malice: “If a man will strike, let him strike through the mask!”

He said he would strike even the sun if it insulted him, and he pointed to the crew, who were all on his side, until Starbuck, unable to stand alone against the whole ship, fell silent.Starbuck murmured, “God keep me — keep us all!” but Ahab, glad of his silence, did not hear him, nor the low laugh from the hold, nor the sails that flapped hollowly against the masts as if in warning.First the whole crew passed a pewter flagon of strong drink round the circle; then Ahab told his three harpooners to take the iron heads off their harpoons and hold them up like goblets, and he filled each one to the brim.

“Drink, and swear!” he cried. “Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!”The harpooners drank with a hiss and the crew cried out curses against the white whale, Starbuck turned pale and shivered, and Ahab waved them all away and went into his cabin.