Chapter XLIV: THE CHART
Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall
that took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his
purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the
transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea
charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then
seating himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the
various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but
steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were
blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside
him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various
former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or
seen. While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains
over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for
ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled
brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out
lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was
also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his
forehead. But it was not this night in particular that, in the
solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost
every night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil
marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For with the charts
of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents
and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that
monomaniac thought of his soul. Now, to any one not fully acquainted
with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless
task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of
this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all
tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm
whale's food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained
seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at
reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the
timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey. So
assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the
sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe
that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;
were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully
collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to
correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the
flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to
construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale. Besides,
when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm
whales, guided by some infallible instinct -- say, rather, secret
intelligence from the Deity --mostly swim in veins, as they are
called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such
undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any
chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these
cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a
surveyor's parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly
confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein
in which at these times he is said to swim, generally embraces some
few miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or
contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's
mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum
is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that
path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for. And
hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in
crossing the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could,
by his art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to
be wholly without prospect of a meeting. There was a circumstance
which at first sight seemed to entangle his delirious but still
methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the
gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for particular
grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which
hunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn
out to be identically the same with those that were found there the
preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable
instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the
same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries
and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby
Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called
the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the
Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the pequod to visit
either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she
would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other
feeding grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all
these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to
speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab's chances of
accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has
only been made to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were
his, ere a particular set time or place were attained, when all
possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought,
every possibility the next thing to a certainty. That particular set
time and place were conjoined in the one technical phrase --the
Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several consecutive
years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those
waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a
predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too,
that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken
place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was
that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful
motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and
unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into
this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his
hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering
it might be to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could
he so tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening
quest. Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very
beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could
enable her commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape
Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the
equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait
for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's
sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to
this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred
and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which,
instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a
miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his
vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds,
should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the
Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his
race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any
wind but the Levanter and Simoom, might blow Moby Dick into the
devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.
But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it
not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one
solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of
individual recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti
in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the
peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could
not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would
mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after
midnight he would throw himself back in reveries --tallied him, and
shall he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a
lost sheep's ear! And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless
race; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and
in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah,
God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed
with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands;
and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. often, when forced
from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the
night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day,
carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round
and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his
life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the
case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base,
and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and
lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down
among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry
would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would
burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on
fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable
symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were
but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy
Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale;
this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so
caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the
eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the
time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times
employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought
escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which,
for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not
exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that,
in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one
supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will,
forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed,
independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while
the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken
from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented
spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed
from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless
somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without
an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help
thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he
whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds
upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he
creates. Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne
out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the
National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, . By that circular, it
appears that precisely such a chart is in course of completion; and
portions of it are presented in the circular. This chart divides the
ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of
longitude; perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of which
districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that have
been spent in each month in every district, and the two others to show
the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.