Chapter 46.00: CHAPTER 44. The Chart.

**
CHAPTER 44. 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. *

*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, 1851. 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.”

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 haunted 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
Simoon, 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 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 colour, 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.