Chapter 54.00: CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.

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CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
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South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising
ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by
name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head,
I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean
fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.

As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her
spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over
with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see
her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in
the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived
nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast,
they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship
slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to
each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one
ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly
eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while
the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.

“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”

But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the
act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand
into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make
himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the
distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod
were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere
mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for a moment
paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board
the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage
of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her
aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home,
he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the
world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! And
this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them
to ——”

At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in
accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that
for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away
with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with
the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings
Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any
monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.

“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep
helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But
turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the
wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,—“Up
helm! Keep her off round the world!”

Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings;
but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through
numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we
left behind secure, were all the time before us.

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for
ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than
any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the
voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented
chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all
human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead
us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.