.. < 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 >

