Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/BOOKS/Novels/H.Melville/moby.44

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.. < chapter xliv 12  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
.. <p 196 >
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
.. <p 197 >

     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
.. <p 198 >
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
.. <p 199 >
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
.. <p 200 >
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.
.. <p 196n. >
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.
.. <p 200 >