Chapter 30.00: CHAPTER 28. Ahab.

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CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
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For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen
of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches,
and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the
only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin
with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they but
commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there,
though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now
sacred retreat of the cabin.

Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed
aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea,
became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by
the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me,
with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of. But poorly
could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready to smile
at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the wharves.
But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness—to call it so—which
I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed
against all warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though the
harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric,
heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies
which my previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I
ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the fierce uniqueness
of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so
abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the three chief
officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to
allay these colourless misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness
in every presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely sea-officers
and men, each in his own different way, could not readily be found, and
they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape
man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a
space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from
it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we
sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable
weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and
gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship
was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and
melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the
forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail,
foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab
stood upon his quarter-deck.

There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the
fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or
taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole
high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from
among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny
scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a
slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular
seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the
upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single
twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off
into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether
that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some
desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent,
throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by
the mates. But once Tashtego’s senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the
crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old
did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the
fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild
hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an
old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had
never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old
sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old
Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor
seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should
be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to pass, so he
muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the dead,
would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid
brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted
that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric
white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that
this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the
sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said the old
Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.”

I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there
was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His
bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud;
Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s
ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a
determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,
forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his
officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and
expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness
of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody
stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the
nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.

Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But
after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing
in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily
walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a
little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the
ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the
sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that
he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said,
or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary
there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not
regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision
the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing,
out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for
that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his
brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves
upon.

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant,
holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood.
For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to
the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most
thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to
welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little
respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did
he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would
have soon flowered out in a smile.