Moby-Dick - Full Audiobook (Herman Melville) | Part 3 of 3 - Moby-Dick [Deluxe Edition]

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
What a horrushal off there? I would even take it
for sublime? Did I not know that the colic is
a noisy malady? Yet? You want oh take medicine, Take medicine?
Chapter one, twenty one midnight the forecastle bulwarks, Stubb and
Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the

(00:22):
anchors they're hanging. No stub. You may pound it not
there as much as you please, but you will never
pound into me what you were just now saying. And
how long ago is it since you said the very contrary?
Didn't you once say that whatever ship they have sails in,
that ship should pay something extra on its insurance policy,

(00:42):
just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft
in boxes of lucifers forward? Stop now, didn't you say so? Well,
suppose I did? What then I've part changed my flesh
since that time? Why not my mind? Besides supposing we
are loaded with powder barrels aft and lucifer's forward, how

(01:04):
the devil could the lucifers get a fire in this
drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have pretty
red hair, but you couldn't get a fire. Now shake yourself.
You're aquarius or the water bearer flask might fill pitchers
at your coat collar. Don't you see then, that for
these extra risks, the marine insurance companies have extra guarantees.

(01:28):
Here are hygrants flask. But hark again, and I'll answer
you the other thing. First, take your leg off from
the crown of the anchor here though, so I can
pass the rope. Now listen, what's the mighty difference between
holding a mast's lightning rod in the storm and standing
close by a mast that hasn't got any lightning rod

(01:48):
at all in a storm? Don't you see, you timberhead,
that no harm can come to the holder of the
rod unless the mast is first struck. What are you
talking about? Then? Not one ship and one hundred carries rods,
and ahab I man and all of us were in
no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all
the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas.

(02:12):
Why you king post you, I suppose you would have
every man in the world go about with a small
lightning rod running up the corner of his hat like
a militia officer's steward feather, and trailing behind like his sash.
Why don't ye be sensible, Flask. It's easy to be sensible.
Why don't ye? Then any man with half an eye

(02:33):
can be sensible. I don't know that stub. You sometimes
find it rather hard. Yes, when a fellow soap through,
it's hard to be sensible, that's a fact. And I
am about drenched with this spray. Never mind, catch the
turn there and pass. It seems to me we are

(02:55):
lashing down these anchors now, as if they were never
going to be used again. Tying these two anchors here, Flask,
seems like tying a man's hands behind him. And what
big generous hands they are. To be sure these are
your iron fists. Hey, what a hole they have too?

(03:15):
I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere. If
she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable though
there hammer that not down, and we've done so. Next
to touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory.
I say, just wring out my jacket skirts, will ye?

(03:36):
Thank ye? They laugh at long togs, so Flask, But
seems to me a long tailed coat out always to
be worn in all storms afloat the tails tapering down
that way serve to carry off the water dc. Same
with cocked hats. The cocks form gable and eve tross flask.
No more monkey, jackets and tarpaulins For me, I must

(03:58):
modest swallowtail and drive down a beaver. So hello, few,
there goes my tarpaulin overboard. Lord, Lord, that the winds
that come from heaven should be so unmannerly, This is
a nasty night, lad Chapter one twenty two, midnight aloft,

(04:20):
thunder and lightning, the main topsail yard dot tash tago,
passing new lashings around it. M m m stop that
thunder plenty too much thunder up here? What's the use
of thunder? M Um. We don't want thunder, we want rum.

(04:43):
Give us a glass of rum, m um. Chapter one
twenty three The Musket. During the most violent shocks of
the typhoon, the man at the Pequad's jawbone tiller had
several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its
spasmodic motions, even though prevent tackles had been attached to it,

(05:05):
for they were slacked because some plate of the tiller
was indispensable in a severe gale like this. While the
ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast. It
is by no means uncommon to see the needles in
the compasses at intervals go round and round. It was
thus with the pequads at almost every shock. The helmsman
had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which

(05:27):
they revolved upon the cards. It is a sight that
hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.
Some hours after midnight, the typhoon embedded so much that,
through the strenuous exertions of Starbuck and stub, one engaged
forward and the other raft. The shivered remnants of the
jib and foreign maintop sails were cut adrift from the spars,

(05:47):
and when eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of
an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when
that storm tossed bird is on the wing. The three
corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a
storm trussel was set further aft, so that the ship
soon went through the water with some precision again, and
the course for the present east southeast, which he was

(06:08):
to steer, if practicable, was once more given to the helmsman,
for during the violence of the gale, he had only
steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now
bringing the ship as near her course as possible, watching
the compass, meanwhile lo a good sign. The wind seemed
coming round astern Aye. The foul breeze became fair. Instantly

(06:33):
the yards were squared to the lively song of ho
the fair wind. Oh HEO. Surely men the crew singing
for joy, that so promising an event should so soon
have falsified the evil portense preceding it. In compliance with
the standing order of his commander to report immediately and
at any one of the twenty four hours, any decided

(06:55):
change in the affairs of the deck, Starbuck had no
sooner trimmed the yards to the breeze, however reluctantly and gloomily.
Then he mechanically went below to a prize. Captain ahab
of the circumstance ere knocking at his stateroom, He involuntarily
paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp taking long
swings this way and that, was burning fitfully and casting

(07:17):
fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted door, a thin
one with fixed blinds inserted in place of upper panels.
The isolated, subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming
silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by
all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in
the rack were shiningly revealed as they stood upright against

(07:40):
the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest, upright man. But
out of Starbuck's heart at that instant when he saw
the muskets there strangely evolved an evil thought, but so
blent with its neutral or good accompaniments, that for the
instant he hardly knew it for itself he would have
shot me. Once he murmured, Yes, there's the very musket

(08:00):
that he pointed at me, that one with the studded stock.
Let me touch it. Lift it strange that I, who
have handled so many deadly lances. Strange that I should
shake so now loaded. I must see, I aye, and
powder in the pan. That's not good. Best spill it. Wait,

(08:23):
I'll cure myself of this. I'll hold the musket boldly
while I think I come to report a fair wind
to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom?
That's fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind. That's
only fair, for that accursed fished the very tube he
pointed at me, the very one, this one I hold

(08:43):
it here. He would have killed me with the very
thing I handle now I, and he would fain kill
all his crew. Does he not say he will not
strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed
his heavenly quadrant? And in these same perilous seas gropes
he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the
error abounding log? And in this very typhoon? Did he

(09:06):
not swear that he would have no lightning rods? But
shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag
a whole ship's company down to doom with him? Yes?
It would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men
and more if this ship come to any deadly harm,
And come to deadly harm, my soul swears the ship
will if they have his way. If then he were

(09:26):
this instant put aside, that crime would not be his
ha Is he muttering in his sleep? Yes? Just there
in there he's sleeping, sleeping iy, but still alive and
soon awake again. I can't withstand thee then, old man

(09:47):
not reasoning not remonstrance, not entreaty. Wilt thou hearken to
all this? Thou scornest flat obedience to thy own flat commands.
This is all thou breathest. Aye, and say st two
men have vowed by vow sast all of us are ahabs,
Great God forbid. But is there no other way, no

(10:08):
lawful way, make him a prisoner to be taken home?
What hope to wrest this old man's living power from
his own living hands? Only a fool would try it.
Say he were pinioned, even knotted all over with ropes
and hawsers chained down to ring bolts on this cabin floor,
he would be more hideous than a caged tiger. Then

(10:31):
I could not endure the sight, could not possibly fly
his howlings, all comfort, sleep itself inestimable reason, would leave
me on the long intolerable voyage. What then remains the
land is hundreds of leagues away and locked Japan. The
nearest I stand alone here upon an open sea, with

(10:51):
two oceans, and a whole continent between me and law
I tis soda. Is heaven a murderer when its lightning
strikes it would be murderer in his bed, hindering, sheets
and skin together, and would I be a murderer then
if and slowly, stealthily and half sideways looking, he placed
the loaded muskets end against the door on this level.

(11:12):
Ahab's hammock swings within his head. This way a touch,
and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.
Dot O Mary, Mary, boy, boy boy, But if I
wake thee not to death, old man, who can tell
to what unsound deep starbucks body this day week may
sink with all the crew, Great God, where art thou

(11:36):
shall I shall I? The wind has gone down and shifted, Sir,
the foreign main topsails are reefed and set. She heads
her course stern all, Oh moby dick, I clutch thy heart.
At last, Such were the sounds that now came hurtling
from out the old man's tormented sleep, as if Starbucks's

(11:58):
voice had caused the law dumb dream to speak. The
yet leveled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel.
Starbucks seemed wrestling with an angel. But turning from the door,
he placed the death tube in its rack and left
the place. He's too sound asleep, mister Stubb, go thou
down and wake him and tell him I must see

(12:20):
to the deck here thou know'st what to say Chapter one,
twenty four The Needle. Next morning, the not yet subsided
sea rolled in long, slow billows of mighty bulk, and
striving in the pequad's gurgling track pushed her on like giants,
palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded, so that sky

(12:43):
and air seemed vast outbellying sails. The whole world boomed
before the wind muffled in the full morning light. The
invisible Sun was only known by the spread intensity of
his place, where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks
emblazonings as of crowned babel, and kings and queens reigned
over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten

(13:05):
gold that bubblingly leaps with light and heat. Long maintaining
an enchanted silence, ahab stood apart, and every time the
teetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit he turned to
why the bright Sun's rays produced ahead, And when she
profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind and saw
the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays

(13:26):
were blending with his undeviating wake ha ha, my ship,
thou mightest well be taken now for the sea chariot
of the Sun. Ho ho, all ye nations before my prow,
I bring the sun to ye yoke on the further
billows Hollo a tandem, I drive the sea. But suddenly

(13:51):
reined back by some counter thought. He hurried towards the helm,
huskily demanding how the ship was heading east? So east, Sir,
said the frightened steersman, thou least smiting him with his
clenched fist, heading east at this hour in the morning,
and the sun astern. Upon this, every soul was confounded,

(14:13):
for the phenomenon just then observed by Ahab had unaccountably
escaped everyone else. But it's very blinding palpableness must have
been the cause. Thrusting his head halfway into the binnacle,
Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses. His uplifted arms
slowly fell. For a moment he almost seemed to stagger.
Standing behind him, Starbuck looked and lo the two compasses

(14:37):
pointed east, and the pequot was as infallibly going west.
But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad
among the crew. The old man, with a rigid laugh, exclaimed,
I have it. It has happened before, mister Starbuck. Last
night's thunder turned our compasses. That's all thou hast before

(14:58):
now heard of such a thing. I take I, But
never before has it happened to me, sir, said the
pailmate gloomily. Here it must needs be said that accidents
like this have, in more than one case occurred to
ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy as developed in
the mariner's needle is as all noll essentially one with

(15:20):
the electricity beheld in heaven. Hence it is not to
be much marveled at that such things should be. In
instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel so
as to smite down some of the spars and rigging,
the effect upon the needle has at times been still
more fatal, all its lodestone virtue being annihilated, so that
the before magnetic steel was of no more use than

(15:41):
an old wife's knitting needle. But in either case the
needle never again of itself recovers, the original virtue thus
marred or lost. And if the binical compasses be effected,
the same fate reaches all the others that may be
in the ship, even were the lower most one inserted
into the kelson. Deliberately standing before the binnacle and eyeing

(16:02):
the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of
his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and,
satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his
orders for the ship's course to be changed. Accordingly, the
yards were braced hard up, and once more the pequad
thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the

(16:22):
supposed fair one had only been juggling her. Meanwhile, whatever
were his own secret thoughts, Starbucks said nothing, but quietly
he issued all requisite orders, while stubborn Flask, who in
some small degree seemed them to be sharing his feelings,
likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of
them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than

(16:44):
their fear of fate. But as ever before the pagan
harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed, or if impressed, it was
only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts
from inflexible a habs for a space. The old old
man walked the deck in rolling reveries, but chancing to
slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper

(17:06):
site tubes of the quadrant he had the day before
dashed to the deck al poor proud heaven gazer and
son's pilot. Yesterday I wrecked thee, and today the compasses
would fain have wrecked me. So so, but Ahab is
lord over the level loadstone. Yet, mister Starbuck, a lance

(17:27):
without the pole, a top mall, and the smallest of
the sail maker's needles, quick accessory perhaps to the impulse
dictating the thing he was now about to do, were
certain prudential motives whose object might have been to revive
the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his
subtle skill in a matter so wondrous as that of

(17:48):
the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man well knew that
to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not
a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors without
some shudder rings and evil portents. Men, said he, steadily
turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the
things he had demanded my men. The thunder turned old

(18:09):
Ahab's needles. But out of this bit of steel, Ahab
can make one of his own that will point as
true as any. Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged
by the sailors as this was said, and with fascinated
eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow, But Starbuck looked away.
With a blow from the top, mall Ahab knocked off

(18:31):
the steel head of the lance, and then handing to
the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold
it upright without its touching the deck, then with them
all after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod,
he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it,
and less strongly hammered that several times. The mate, still
holding the rod as before, then going through some small

(18:54):
strange motions with it. Whether indispensable to the magnetizing of
the steel or merely intended to augment the awe of
the crew, is uncertain. He called for linen thread, and
moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there,
and horizontally suspended the sail needle by its middle over
one of the compass cards. At first the steel went

(19:14):
round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end, but
at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who
had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back
from the binnacle, and, pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,
look ye for yourselves, if they have be not lord
of the level loadstone. The sun is east, and that
compass swears it. One after another they peered in, for

(19:38):
nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs,
and one after another they slunk away. In his fiery
eyes of scorn and triumph. You then saw Ahab in
all his fatal pride. Chapter one, twenty five. The log
in line. While now the faded pequat had been so

(19:59):
long afloat this voyage, the log and linee one had
but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident
reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's place, some
merchantmen and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to
heave the log, though at the same time and frequently
more for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting down

(20:19):
upon the customary slate, the course steered by the ship,
as well as the presumed average rate of progression every hour.
It had been. Thus with the pequad the wooden reel
and angular log attached hung long, untouched, just beneath the
railing of the After bulwarks, rains and spray had damped it,
sun and wind had warped it. All the elements had

(20:40):
combined to rot a thing that hung so idly, but
heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab as he
happened to glance upon the reel not many hours after
the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was
no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level
log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly stern. The
billows rolled in riots forward. There heave the log. Two

(21:08):
seamen came, the golden hued Tahitian and the grizzly manksmen
take the reel one of ye, I'll heave. They went
towards the extreme stern on the ship's lee side, where
the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was
now almost dipping into the creamy sidelong rushing sea. The

(21:29):
manksmen took the reel and holding it high up by
the projecting handle ends of the spindle, round which the
spool of line revolved. So stood with the angular log
hanging downwards till Ayhab advanced to him. Ahab stood before him,
and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to
form a preliminary hand coil to toss overboard, when the
old Manksman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line,

(21:52):
made bold to speak, Sir, I mistrusted this line looks
far gone. Long heat and wet have spoiled it. Twill hold,
old gentleman, Long heat and wet have they spoiled thee?
Thou seem'st to hold? Or truer, perhaps life holds thee,
not thou it I hold the spool, sir. But just

(22:17):
as my captain says, with these gray hairs of mind,
tis not worth while disputing, specially with a superior wholl
ne'er confess what's that? There? Now's a patched professor in
Queen Nature's granite founded college, But methinks he's too subservient.
Where wert thou born in the little rocky isle of man? Sir,

(22:42):
excellent thou'st hit the world by that I know not, sir,
But I was born there in the isle of Man. Hey.
Well the other way it's good. Here's a man from Man,
a man born and once independent man, and now unmanned
of man, which is sucked in by what up with

(23:04):
the reel? The dead blind wall butts all inquiring heads
at last up with it. So the log was heaved,
the loose coils rapidly straightened out, and a long dragging
line of stern and then instantly the reel began to
whirl in turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows.

(23:27):
The towing resistance of the log caused the old reel
man to stagger strangely, hold hard, snap. The over strained
line sagged down in one long festoon. The tugging log
was gone. I crushed the quadrant. The thunder turns the needles,
and now the mad sea parts the log line. But

(23:49):
ahab can mend all haul in here Tahitian reel up manksman,
and look ye, let the carpenter make another log and
mend thou the line. See to it there he goes.
Now to him, nothing's happened but to me the skewer
seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in,

(24:10):
haul in, Tahitian. These lines run whole and whirling out
come in broken and dragging slow. Ha, Pip come to
help at Pip? Pip? Whom call ye? Pip? Pip jumped
from the whaleboat. Pip's missing. Let's see now if ye

(24:33):
haven't fished him up here, fisherman, it drags hard. I
guess he's holding on. Jerk him Tahiti, jerk him off.
We haul in no cowards here. Ho, there's his arm
just breaking water. A hatch it a hotch it cut

(24:54):
it off. We haul in no cowards here, Captain Ahab, Sir, Sir,
here's Pip trying to get on board again. Peace thou
crazy loon, cried the manksman, seizing him by the arm,
away from the quarter deck. The greater idiot ever scolds,

(25:15):
the lesser muttered a hab advancing hands off from that holiness,
Where sayest thou Pip was? Boy? Astern there, sir, astern
lo lo, And who art thou boy? I see not
my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God,

(25:39):
that man should be a thing for immortal souls to
sift through. Who art thou boy, bell boy, Sir, shipsquier
ding dong Ding, Pip, Pip, Pip reward for Pip one
hundred pounds of clay five feet high, looks cowardly, quickest

(26:01):
known by that ding down Ding? Who's seen Pip the coward?
There can be no hearts above the snow line. Oh, ye,
frozen heavens, look down here. Ye did beget this luckless
child and have abandoned him? Ye? Creative libertines here boy,

(26:23):
Ahab's cabin shall be pips home henceforth while Ahab lives.
Thou to shayest my inmost setter, boy, thou art tied
to me by cords woven of my heart strings. Come,
let's down. What's this? Here's velvet sharkskin, intently gazing at
Ahab's hand and feeling it. Ah now had poor Pip,

(26:46):
but felt so kind a thing as this. Perhaps he
had never been lost. This seems to me, Sir, as
a man rope, something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir,
let old perth now come and rive at these two
hands together, the black one with the white, For I
will not let this go, Oh boy, nor will I
thee unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors

(27:08):
than are here. Come then to my cabin. Lo ye,
believers in God's all goodness and in man all ill
Low you see the omniscient God's oblivious of suffering man,
and man the w idiotic, and knowing not what he does,
yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come.

(27:30):
I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand than
though I grasped an emperor's. There go two daft ones
now muttered the old Manksman, one daft with strength, the
other daft with weakness. But here's the end of the
rotten line, all dripping two mend it, ah, I think

(27:50):
we had best have a new line altogether. I'll see
mister stub about it. Chapter one, twenty six. The life
buoy steering now southeastward by Ahab's leveled steel, and her
progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and line. The
pequot held on her path towards the equator, making so

(28:13):
long a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships
and ere long sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds over
waves monotonously mild. All these seemed the strange calm things,
preluding some riotous and desperate scene. At last, when the
ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of
the equatorial fishing ground, and in the deep darkness that

(28:34):
goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of
rocky islets, the watch, then headed by Flask, was startled
by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly, like half
articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered innocence,
that one and all they started from their reveries, and
for the space of some moments stood or sat or leaned,
all transfixedly listening like the carved Roman slave. While that

(28:58):
wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part
of the crew said it was mermaids and shuddered, but
the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled. Yet the gray Manksmen, the
oldest mariner of all, declared that the wild thrilling sounds
that were heard were the voices of newly drowned men
in the sea below. In his hammock Ahab did not

(29:20):
hear of this till gray dawn. When he came to
the deck. It was then recounted to him by flask,
not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and
thus explained the wonder Those rocky islands the ship had
passed were the resort of great numbers of seals, and
some young seals that had lost their dams, or some
dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen neither

(29:42):
ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with
their human sort of wail. But this only the more
affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very
superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar
tones when in distress, but also from the human look
of their round heads and semi intelligent faces seen peeringly
uprising from the water alongside in the sea. Under certain circumstances,

(30:08):
seals have more than once been mistaken for men. But
the boatings of the crew were destined to receive a
most plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number.
That morning, at sunrise, this man went from his hammock
to his mast head at the fore, and whether it
was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep,
For sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state. Whether

(30:29):
it was thus with the man, there is now no telling,
but be that as it may. He had not been
long at his perch when a cry was heard, a cry,
and a rushing, and looking up they saw a falling
phantom in the air, and looking down, a little tossed
heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea,
the life buoy. A long, slender cask was dropped from
the stern where it always hum, obedient to a cunning spring,

(30:52):
but no hand rose to seize it. And the sun,
having long beat upon this casket, had shrunken so that
it slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled its end,
and the studded iron bomb cask followed the sailor to
the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though
in sooth, but a hard one. And thus the first
man of the pequad that mounted the mast to look
out for the white whale on the white whale's own

(31:13):
peculiar ground, that man was swallowed up in the deep.
But few perhaps thought of that at the time. Indeed,
in some sort they were not grieved at this event
at least as a portent, for they regarded it not
as a foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as
the fulfillment of an evil already presaged. They declared that

(31:34):
now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they
had heard the night before. But again the old Manksman
said nay. The lost life buoy was now to be replaced.
Starbuck was directed to see to it. But as no
cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in
the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of
the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil, but

(31:56):
what was directly connected with its final end, whatever the
proved to be. Therefore, they were going to leave the
ship's stern, unprovided with a buoy, when, by certain strange
signs in innuendows, Quickwit hinted a hint concerning his coffin.
A life buoy of a coffin, cried Starbuck, starting rather

(32:17):
queer that I should say, said Stubb. It will make
a good enough one, said Flask. The carpenter here can
arrange it easily. Bring it up. There's nothing else for it,
said Starbuck, after a melancholy pause, rig it, carpenter, do
not look at me so the coffin, I mean, dost

(32:38):
thou hear me? Rig it? And shall I nail down
the lid, sir, moving his hand as with a hammer? I?
And shall I cock the seams, Sir, moving his hand
as with a cocking iron. I? And shall I then
pay over the same with pitch, Sir, moving his hands

(33:00):
as with a pitch? Pot away? What possesses thee to
this make a life buoy of the coffin? And no
more does mister Stubb, mister Flask come forward with me.
He goes off in a huff. The hole he can
endure at the parts, he balks. Now, I don't like this.

(33:22):
I make a leg for Captain Ahab and he wears
it like a gentleman. But I make a bandbox for
Queekwake and he won't put his head into it. Are
all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin?
And now I'm ordered to make a life booy of it.
It's like turning an old coat going to bring the
flesh on the other side. Now, I don't like this

(33:44):
cobbling sort of business. I don't like it at all.
It's undignified. It's not my place. Let tinker's brats do tinkerings.
We are their betters. I like to take in hand
none but clean, virgin, fair and square mathematical jobs. Something
that regularly begins at the beginning and is at the
middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion.

(34:05):
Not a cobbler's job that's at an end in the
middle and at the beginning at the end. It's the
old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord, what
an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know
an old woman of sixty five who ran away with
a bald headed young tinker once. And that's the reason

(34:26):
I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore
when I kept my job shop in the vineyard. They
might have taken it into their lonely old heads to
run off with me. But high ho, there are no
caps at sea but snow caps. Let me see, nail
down the lid cock the seams, pay over the same
with pitch, batten them down tight, and hang it with

(34:49):
the snapspring over the ship's stern wherever such things done
before with a coffin, some superstitious old carpenters now would
be tied up in the ere. They would do the job.
But I'm made of nty eurustic hemlock. I don't budge
cruppered with a coffin, sailing about with a graveyard tray.

(35:12):
But never mind. We workers in woods make bridal bedsteads
and card tables as well as coffins and hearses. We
work by the month, or by the job, or by
the prophet. Not for us to ask the why and
wherefore of our work unless it be too confounded cobbling,
and then we stash it if we can ham. I'll

(35:33):
do the job now tenderly. I'll have me. Let's see
how many in the ship's company all told, but I've
forgotten anyway, I'll have me thirty separate turkis headed, one lifelines,
each three feet long, hanging all round to the coffin.
Then if the hull go down, there'll be thirty lively fellows,

(35:54):
all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very
often beneath the sun. Come gammer, cocking, iron, pitch pot,
and marling spike. Let's to it. Chapter one, twenty seven.
The deck the coffin laid upon two line tubs between
the vice bench and the open hatchway. The carpenter cocking,

(36:16):
it seems the string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from
a large roll of it placed in the bosom of
his frock. Dot ahab comes slowly from the cabin gangway,
and here's Pip following him back. Lad, I will be
with you again presently, he goes. Not this hand complies
with my humor more genially than that boyd at middle

(36:38):
aisle of a church. What's here? Life buoy suah mista
Stabuck's orders. Oh look, suh, beware the hatchway, thank'ee man,
Thy coffin lies handy to the vault. Sir, the hack

(37:01):
Oh so it does, sir, So it does, Art not
thou the leg maker? Look? Did not this stump come
from thy shop? I believe it did, sir? Does the
feral stand? Sir well enough? But art thou not also
the undertaker? I sir, I patched up this thing here

(37:25):
as a coffin for quick wake, but they've set me
out of turning it into something else. Then tell me,
art thou not an errant, all grasping, intermeddling, monopolizing, heathenish
old scamp to be one day making legs, and the
next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again
life buoys out of those same coffins. Thou art as
unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack

(37:48):
of all trades. But I do not mean anything, sir.
I do as I do the gods. Again, harkey, dost
thou not ever sing working about a coffin. The Titans
they say hum snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes,
and the grave digger in the play sings spade in hand.

(38:11):
Dost thou never sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh? I'm
indifferent enough sir for that. But the reason why the
grave digger made music must have been because there was
none in his spade, sir. But the cocking malleyed one
is full of it, hark to it, ay, And that's

(38:33):
because the lid there's a sounding board, And what in
all things makes the sounding board is this? There's not beneath,
and yet a coffin with a body in it rings
pretty much the same carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry
a beer and heard the coffin knock against the churchyard
gate going in faith, sir, I've faith. What's that? Why faith? Sir?

(38:58):
It's only a sort of exclamation like that's all sir,
um um go on. I was about to say, sir,
that art thou a silkworm. Dost thou spin thy own
shroud out of thyself, look at thy bosom, dispatch and

(39:19):
get these traps out of sight. He goes aft. That
was sudden now, but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes.
I've heard that the isle of Albemarle, one of the Galipagos,
is cut by the equator right in the middle. Seems
to me some sort of equator cuts yon old man too,

(39:39):
right in his middle. He's always under the line. Fiery hot,
I tell ye, he's looking this way. Come oakum quick,
here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork,
and I'm the professor of musical glasses. Tap tap ahab
to himself. There's a sight. There's a sound. The gray

(40:05):
headed woodpecker tapping the hollow tree blind and deaf might
well be envied. Now see that thing rests on two
line tubs full of tollines. A most malicious wag. That
fellow rat tat so Man's seconds tick, Oh, how immaterial

(40:28):
are all materials? What things real? Are there? But imponderable thoughts? Here?
Now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death by a
mere hap made the expressive sign of the help and
hope of most endangered life, a life buoy of a coffin.
Does it go further? Can it be that, in some

(40:48):
spiritual sense the coffin is, after all but an immortality preserver?
I'll think of that. But no, so far gone am
I in the dark side Earth? That its other side,
the theoretic bright one seems but uncertain twilight to me?
Will ye never have done? Carpenter with that accursed sound?

(41:10):
I go below. Let me not see that thing here
when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over.
I do suck most wondrous philosophies from THEE. Some unknown
conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into THEE. Chapter one,
twenty eight, the Pequad meets the Rachel. Next day, a

(41:33):
large ship, the Rachel was descried bearing directly down upon
the Pequad, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At
the time, the Pequod was making good speed through the water,
but as the broad winged windward, Stranger shot nigh to her.
The boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that
are burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull.

(41:55):
Bad news she brings, bad news, muttered the old Manksman.
But ere her commander, who with trumpet to mouth, stood
up in his boat. Ere he could hopefully hail. Ahab's
voice was heard, hast seen the white whale? I yesterday
have ye seen a whale boat adrift? Throttling his joy?

(42:18):
Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question, and would then have
fain boarded the stranger. When the stranger captain himself, having
stopped his vessel's way, was seen descending her side. A
few keen pulls and his boat hook soon clinched the
pequad's main chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately.
He was recognized by Ahab for a nantucketer he knew,

(42:41):
but no formal salutation was exchanged. Where was he not killed?
Not killed? Cried Ahab, closely advancing how was it? It
seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous,
while three of the Stranger's boats were engaged with a
shoal of whales which had led them some four or
five miles from the ship, and while they were yet

(43:03):
in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head
of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the
blue water, not very far to leeward, whereupon the fourth
rigged boat, a reserved one, had been instantly lowered in
chase after a keen sail before the wind. This fourth boat,
the swiftest keeled of all, seemed to have succeeded in fastening,
at least as well as the man at the masthead

(43:24):
could tell anything about it. In the distance he saw
the diminished dotted boat, and then a swift gleam of
bubbling white water, and after that nothing more. Whence it
was concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run
away with his pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension,
but no positive alarm. As yet the recall signals were

(43:46):
placed in the rigging Darkness came on and forced to
pick up her three far to windward boats, ere going
in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction.
The ship had not only been necessitated to leave the
boat to its fate, till near midnight, but for the
time to increase her distance from it, but the rest
of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded

(44:06):
all sail stunsail on stun sail after the missing boat,
kindling a fire in her tripods for a beacon, and
every other man aloft on the lookout. But though when
she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the
presumed place of the absent ones when last seen, though,
she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull
all around her, and not finding anything, had again dashed on,

(44:27):
again paused and lowered her boats, And though she had
thus continued doing till day light, yet not the least
glimpse of the missing keel had been seen, the story told.
The stranger captain immediately went on to reveal his object
in boarding the Pequad. He desired the ship to unite
with his own in the search by sailing over the
season four or five miles apart on parallel lines, and

(44:50):
so sweeping a double horizon, as it were. I will
wager something, now, whispered Stubb to Flask, that someone in
that missing boat wore off at Captain's bead coat. Mayhap
his watch he's so cursed anxious to get it back.
Whoever heard of two pious whale ships cruising after one
missing whale boat in the height of the whaling season.

(45:11):
See flask only see how pale he looks, pale in
the very buttons of his eyes. Look, it wasn't the coat.
It must have been the My boy, my own boy
is among them. For God's sake, I beg I conjure here,
exclaimed the stranger captain to Ahab, who thus farhead but
icily received his petition. For eight and forty hours, let

(45:32):
me charter your ship. I will gladly pay for it,
and roundly pay for it. If there be no other
way for eight and forty hours, only only that you must, Oh,
you must, and you shall do this thing. His son
cried Stubb. Oh, it's his son. He's lost. I take
back the coat, and watch what says Ahab. We must

(45:52):
save that boy. He's drowned with the rest on m
last night, said the old Manx sailor standing behind them,
I heard all of ye, heard their spirits. Now, as
it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the
Rachels the more melancholy was the circumstance that not only
was one of the captain's sons among the number of

(46:13):
the missing boat's crew, but among the number of the
other boats crews at the same time, but on the
other hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes
of the chase, there had been still another son, as that,
for a time the wretched father was plunged to the
bottom of the cruelest perplexity, which was only solved for
him by his chief mates, instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure

(46:35):
of a whale ship in such emergencies, that is, when
placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up
the majority first. But the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason,
had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced
to it by Ahab's iciness, did he allude to his
one yet missing boy, a little lad but twelve years old,

(46:56):
whose father, with the earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a
nantucketer's eternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him
in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially
the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently
occur that nantucket captains will send a son of such
tender rage away from them for a protracted three or
four years voyage and some other ship than their own,

(47:18):
so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall
be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural
but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern. Meantime, now
the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab,
and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock,
but without the least quivering of his own. I will

(47:41):
not go, said the stranger, till you say I to me,
do to me as you would have me do to
you in the like case. For you too have a boy,
Captain Ahab, though but a child and nestling safely at
home now, but child of your old age. Two yus,
yes you relent, I see it. Run run men now
and stand by the square in the a vast crideyhab touched,

(48:03):
not a rope yarn. Then, in a voice that prolongingly
molded every word, Captain Gardiner, I will not do it
even now I lose time. Goodbye, goodbye, God, bless ye man,
and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mister Starbuck,
look at the binnacle, watch and in three minutes from

(48:24):
this present instant worn off all strangers. Then brace forward
again and let the ship sail as before. Hurriedly, turning
with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the
strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of
his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner

(48:44):
silently hurried to the side, more fell than stepped into
his boat, and returned to his ship. Soon the two
ships diverged their wakes, and long as the strange vessel
was in view, she was seen to ya hither and
thither at every dark spot, however small on the sea
this way, and that her yards were swung round starboard
and larboard. She continued to attack. Now she beat against

(49:06):
a head sea, and again had pushed her before it,
while all the while her masts and yards were thickly
clustered with men as three tall cherry trees when the
boys are cherrying among the boughs. But by her still
halting course and winding woeful way, you plainly saw that
this ship that so wept with spray still remained without comfort.

(49:27):
She was Rachel, weeping for her children because they were
not Chapter one twenty nine. The cabin, Ahab moving to
go on deck. Pip catches him by the hand to follow, Lad, Lad,
I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab. Now the
hour is coming when Ahab would not scare THEE from him,

(49:49):
yet would not have THEE by him. There is that
in the poor Lad, which I feel too curing to
my malady like cures like, And for this hunt, my
malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below
here where they shall serve thee as if thou wert
the captain, Ay, Lad, thou shalt sit here in my

(50:10):
own screwed chair another screwed to it. Thou must be no, no, no,
Ye have not a whole body, sir, do ye, but
use poor me for your one lost leg. Only tread
upon me, Sir, I ask no more. So I remain
a part of ye, oh, spite of million villains. This
makes me a bigot in the fadless fidelity of man,

(50:33):
and a black and crazy. But me things like cures
like applies to him too. He grows so sane again.
They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor
little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white for all
the blackness of his living skin. But I will never
desert ye, sir, as stubbed at him, Sir, I must

(50:54):
go with ye. If thou speakest thus to me much more,
Ahab's purpose keels up in him. I tell THEE, no,
it cannot be. Oh, good, Master, master, Master weep so
and I will murder THEE have a care for Ahab
two is mad. Listen, and now I'll often hear my

(51:17):
ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I
am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand met
true art, Thou lad as the circumference to its center.
So God forever bless thee. And if it come to that,
God forever save thee. Let what will befall? Ahab goes,

(51:38):
Pip steps one step forward. Here he this instant stood.
I stand in his air. But I'm alone. Now we're
even poor Pip here. I could endure it, but he's
missing Pip. Pip Ding, don Ding, Who's seen Pip? He

(51:58):
must be up here. Let's try the door. What neither
lock nor bolt nor bar? And yet there's no opening it.
It must be the spell He told me to stay here, aye,
and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here. Then
I'll seat me against the transom in the ship's full middle,
all her keel and her three masts before me. Here,

(52:22):
our old sailors say in their black seventy four's great
admirals sometimes sit at table and lord it over rows
of captains and lieutenants. Ha, what's this? Applets, applets, The
apaulets all come crowding, pass round the decanters, glad to

(52:42):
see ye. Fill up, monsieurs, What are not feeling now
when a black boy's host to white men with gold
lace upon their coats? Messieurs, have you seen one pip,
a little negro lad five feet high hang dog look
and cowardly jumped from a whaleboat once seen him? No, Well,
then fill up again, captains, and let string Shame upon

(53:06):
all cowards. I name no names, Shame upon them. Put
one foot upon the table, Shame upon all cowards. Dot
hissed above there I hear ivory, oh master master, I
am indeed downhearted when you walk over me. But here

(53:28):
I'll stay though the stern strikes rocks and they bulge
through and oysters come to join me Chapter one thirty
the Hat. And now that at the proper time and place,
after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab all
other whaling waters swept, seemed to have chased his foe
into an ocean fold to slay him the more securely there.

(53:51):
Now that he found himself hard by the very latitude
and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted. Now
that a vessel had been spoken, which on the very
day precedes had actually encountered Moby Dick. And now that
all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to
show the demoniac in difference with which the white whale
tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against. Now it

(54:13):
was that there lurked to something in the old man's
eyes which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see,
as the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong Arctic
six months night sustains its piercing, steady central gaze. So
Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight
of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them, so that

(54:35):
all their boatings, doubts, misgivings, fears were fain to hide
beneath their souls, and not sprought forth a single spear
or relief In this foreshadowing interval, too, all humor, forced
or natural vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a
smile starbuck, no more strove to check one alike. Joy

(54:55):
and sorrow, hope and fear seemed ground to finest, dust
and powdered for the time in the clamped mortar of
Ahab's iron soul like machines. They dumbly moved about the deck,
ever conscious that the old man's despot eye was on them.
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret,
confidential hours, when he thought no glance but one was

(55:16):
on him, then you would have seen that even his
Ahab's eyes saw on the crews the inscrutable parsis glance
on his, or somehow, at least in some wild way,
at times affected it. Such an added gliding strangeness began
to invest the thin Fedalla. Now such ceaseless shudderings shook him.
That the men looked dubious at him, half uncertain, as
it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or

(55:38):
else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some
unseen being's body, And that shadow was always hovering there.
For not by night, even had Federlla ever certainly been
known to slumber or go below, he would stand still
for hours, but never sat or leaned his Wand but
wondrous size did plainly say, we two watchmen never read,

(56:01):
Nor at any time, by night or day, could the
mariners now step upon the deck, unless they have was
before them, either standing in his pivot hole or exactly
pacing the planks between two undeviating limits, the main mast
and the mizzen, or else they saw him standing in
the cabin scuttle, his living foot advanced upon the deck
as if to step, his hat slotched heavily over his eyes,

(56:22):
so that however motionless he stood. However, the days and
nights were added on that he had not swung in
his hammock, yet hidden beneath the slouching hat, they could
never tell unerringly weather. For all this his eyes were
really closed at times, or whether he was still intently
scanning them, no matter though he stood so in the
scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the

(56:43):
unheeded night damp gathered in beads of dew upon that
stone carved coat and hat, the clothes that the night
had wet. The next day's sunshine dried upon him. And
so day after day and night after night, he went
no more beneath the planks. Whatever he wanted from the
cabin that they n he sent for, he ate in
the same open air. That is his two only meals

(57:05):
breakfast in dinner supper. He never touched nor reaped his beard,
which darkly grew, all narled as unearth roots of trees
blown over, which still grow idly on a naked base,
though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole
life was now become one watch on deck, and though
the Parsi's mystic watch was without intermission as his own,
yet these two never seemed to speak, one man to

(57:26):
the other, unless at long intervals some passing, unmomentous matter
made it necessary. Though such a potent spell seemed secretly
to join the twain openly, and to the Ostra crew
they seemed poll like asunder. If by day they chanced
to speak one word by night, dumb men were both
so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange, at times,

(57:48):
for longest hours without a single hail, they stood far
parted in the starlight, Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsi
by the mainmast, but still fixedly gazing upon each other,
as if in the Parsi Ahab saw his forethrone shadow
in Ahab the Parsi, his abandoned substance. And yet somehow
did Ahab in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,

(58:09):
and every instant commandingly revealed to his subordinates. Ahab seemed
an independent lord the Parsi, but his slave. Still again,
both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them
the lean shade, sighting the solid rib. For be this
Parsei what he may all rib and keel was solid
Ahab at the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his

(58:32):
iron voice was heard from aft man the mast heads,
and all through the day till after sunset and after twilight,
the same voice every hour, at the striking of the
helmsman's bell was heard what d C sharp sharp. But
when three or four days had slighted by, after meeting
the children, seeking Rachel and no spout had yet been seen.

(58:54):
The monomaniac old Man seemed distrustful of his cruise fidelity,
at least of nearly all except the pagan harpooneers. He
seemed to doubt even whether Stubb and Flask might not
willingly overlook the sight he sowd. But if these suspicions
were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them,
however his actions might seem to hint them. I will

(59:16):
have the first sight of the whale myself, he said,
I Ahab must have the doubloon. And with his own
hands he rigged a nest of basket bowlins, and, sending
a hand aloft with a single sheaved block to secure
to the mainmast head, he received the two ends of
the downward reeved rope, and, attaching one to his basket,
prepared a pin for the other end in order to

(59:38):
fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end
yet in his hand, and standing beside the pin, he
looked round upon his crew sweeping from one to the other,
pausing his glance long upon the god Quekwig tash Tago,
but shunning fed Allah, and then settling his firm relying
eye upon the chief mate said take the rope, sir,
I give it into thy hands. Starbuck then arranged his

(01:00:00):
person in the basket. He gave the word for them
to hoist into his perch. Starbuck being the one who
secured the rope at last, and afterwards stood near it,
And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast,
ay have gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and
miles ahead astern this side, and that within the wide
expanded circle, commanded at so great a height. When in

(01:00:23):
working with his hands at some lofty, almost isolated place
in the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the
sailor at sea is hoisted up to that spot and
sustained there by the rope. Under these circumstances, its fastened
end on deck is always given in strict charge to
some one man who has the special watch of it.
Because in such a wilderness of running rigging whose various

(01:00:44):
different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what
is seen of them at the deck. And when the
deck ends of these ropes are being every few minutes
cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a
natural fatality if unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted
sailors should buy some carelessness of the crew be cast
adrift and fall all swooping to the sea. So Ahab's

(01:01:05):
proceedings in this matter were not unusual. The only strange
thing about them seemed to be that Starbuck, almost the
one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him
with anything in the slightest degree, approaching to decision, one
of those two whose faithfulness on the lookout he had
seemed to doubt somewhat, it was strange that this was
the very man he should select for his watchman, freely

(01:01:26):
giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's hands. Now,
the first time Mayhab was perched aloft ere he had
been there ten minutes, one of those red billed savage
seahawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the man
mastheads of whalemen in these latitudes. One of these birds
came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze

(01:01:46):
of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet
straight up into the air, then spiralized downwards and went
eddying again round his head. But with his gaze fixed
upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to
mark this wild bird, nor indeed would anyone else have
marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance. Only now,

(01:02:07):
almost the least heedful I seemed to see some sort
of cunning meaning in almost every sight. Your hat, Your hat, sir,
suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who, being posted at the
mizzen mast head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower
than his level, and with a deep gulf of air
dividing them. But already this sable wing was before the

(01:02:28):
old man's eyes, the long hooked bill at his head.
With a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.
An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, e one removing
his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquial his wife,
declared that Tarquin would be King of Rome. But only
by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good.

(01:02:50):
Ahab's hat was never restored. The wild hawk flew on
and on with it, far in advance of the prow,
and at last disappeared. While from the point of that
disappearance a minute ye black spot was dimly discerned, falling
from that vast height into the sea. Chapter one thirty one,
The Pequad meets the Delight. The intense Pequad sailed on

(01:03:13):
the rolling waves, and days went by. The life buoy
coffin still lightly swung, and another ship, most miserably misnamed
the Delight, was described. As she drew nigh. All eyes
were fixed upon her broad beams cold shears, which in
some whaling ships crossed the quarter deck at the height
of eight or nine feet, serving to carry the spear.
Unrigged or disabled boats. Upon the Stranger's shears were beheld

(01:03:37):
the shattered white ribs, and some few splintered planks of
what had once been a whale boat. But you now
saw through this wreck as plainly as you see through
the peeled, half unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
Hast seen the white whale, look, replied the hollow cheeked
captain from his taffrail, and with his trumpet he pointed

(01:03:58):
to the wreck hast killed him. The harpoon is not
yet forged. That will ever do that, answered the other sadly,
glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides.
Some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together not forged
and snatching Perth's level iron from the crotch. Ahab held
it out, exclaiming, lookye, Nantucketer, here in this hand I

(01:04:21):
hold his death, tempered in blood and tempered by lightning.
Are these barbs, and I swear to temper them triply
in that hot place behind the fin where the white
whale most feels his accursed life. Then God keep thee
old man, seest thou that, pointing to the hammock, I
bury but one of five stopped men who were alive
only yesterday, but were dead air night. Only that one ibery.

(01:04:44):
The rest were buried before they died. You sail upon
their tomb. Then, turning to his crew, are ye ready there?
Place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body.
So then, oh God, advance dancing towards the hammock with
uplifted hands. May the resurrection and the life brace forward Uphelm,

(01:05:10):
cried Ahab, like lightning to his men, But the suddenly
started Pequad was not quick enough to escape the sound
of the splash that the corpse soon made as it
struck the sea. Not so quick indeed, but that some
of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with
their ghostly baptism, as they have now blighted. From the
dejected delight, the strange life buoy hanging at the pequad's

(01:05:32):
stern came into conspicuous relief. Ha yonder look, yonder men,
cried a foreboding voice in her wake, in vain voe, ye, strangers,
you fly our sad burial, ye, but turn us your
taffrail to show us your Coffin Chapter one thirty two

(01:05:54):
The Symphony, it was a clear, steel blue day. The
firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable, and that
al pervading azure only. The pensive air was transparently pure
and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and
manlike sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells as Samson's
chest in his sleep. Hither and thither on high glided

(01:06:17):
the snow white wings of small, unspeckled birds. These were
the gentle thoughts of the feminine air. But to and
fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue
rushed mighty leviathans, swordfish and sharks, And these were the
strong troubled murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. But though
thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows.

(01:06:38):
Without those two seemed one. It was only the sex,
as it were, that distinguished them. Aloft like a royal
czar and king. The sun seemed giving this gentle air
to this bold and rolling sea, even as bride to groom,
and at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft
and tremulous motion most seen here at the equator. They

(01:07:00):
noted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms with which
the poor bride gave her bosom away, tied up and twisted,
Gnarldon nodded with wrinkles, haggardly, firm and unyielding, his eyes
glowing like coals that still glow in the ashes of ruin. Untottering,
Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn, lifting
his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead.

(01:07:22):
Of heaven, Oh, immortal infancy and innocency of the azure,
invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us, sweet childhood
of air and sky. How oblivious were ye of Old
Ahab's close coiled woe. But so have I seen little
Miriam and Martha laughing at elves, heedlessly gambol around their

(01:07:44):
old sire, sporting with the circle of singed locks which
grew on the marge of that burnt out crater of
his brain. Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab
leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in
the water sank and sank to his gaze. The more
and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.
But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did it last,

(01:08:05):
seemed to dispel for a moment the cankerous thing in
his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky did
at last stroke and caress him. The step mother world
so long cruel forbidding, now threw affectionate arms round his
stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him,
as if over one that, however wilful and erring, she

(01:08:26):
could yet find it in her heart to save and
to bless. From beneath his slouched hat, Ahab dropped a
tear into the sea. Nor did all the Pacific contain
such wealth as that one we drop Starbuck saw the
old man saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side,
and he seemed to hear in his own true heart
the measureless sobbing that stole out of the center of

(01:08:47):
the serenity around. Careful not to touch him or be
noticed by him, he yet drew near to him and
stood there. Ahab turned Starbuck, Sir, oh, Starbuck, it is
a mild, mild wind and a mild looking sky on

(01:09:08):
such a day, very much such a sweetness as this,
I struck my first whale, a boy harpooneer of eighteen
forty forty forty years ago ago, forty years of continual wailing,
forty years of privation and peril and storm time, forty
years on the pitiless sea for forty years? Has Ahab

(01:09:30):
forsaken the peaceful land for forty years to make war
on the horrors of the deep? I, and yes, Starbuck.
Out of those forty years, I have not spent three ashore.
When I think of this life, I have led the
desolation of solitude. It has been the mass owned wold
town of a captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance
to any sympathy from the green country without oak, weariness, heaviness,

(01:09:56):
guinea coo, slavery of solitary command. When I think of
all this only half suspected, not so keenly known to
me before, And how for forty years I have fed
upon dry salted fare fit emblem of the dry nourishment
of my soul, when the poorest landsman has said fresh
fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh
bread to my moldy crusts away whole oceans away from

(01:10:16):
that young girl wife. I wedded past fifty, and sailed
for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent
in my marriage pillow wife, wife, rather a widow with
her husband alive. I I widowed that poor girl when
I married her Starbuck. And then the madness, the frenzy,
the boiling blood, and the smoking brow, with which for

(01:10:38):
a thousand lowerings oll they have has furiously, foamingly chased
his prey, more a demon than a man. I I
what a forty year's full full old fool has all
they have been? Why this strife of the chase, Why
weary and palsy, the arm at the oar and the
iron and the lance. The richer or better is a

(01:11:01):
have now. Behold, oh, Starbuck, is it not hard that
with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should
have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old
hair aside. It blinds me that I seem to weep
locks so gray did never grow but from out some ashes.

(01:11:22):
But do I look very old? So very very old, Starbuck?
I feel deadly, faint, bowed and humped, as though I
were at him, staggering beneath the piled centuries since paradise, God, God, God,
crack my heart, stave my brain. Mockery, mockery, bitter, biting,

(01:11:45):
mockery of gray hairs? Have I lived enough joy to
wear ye and seamen feel less? Intolerably? Old clothes? Stand
close to me, Starbuck. Let me look into a human eye.
It is better than to gaze into sea your sky,
better than to gaze upon God, by the green land,
by the bright hearthstone. This is the magic glass. Man.

(01:12:07):
I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no,
stay on board, on board lower. Not when I do.
When branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick, that hazard
shall not be thine. No, no, not with the far
away home I see in that eye, oh, my captain,

(01:12:29):
my captain, noble soul, grand old heart. After all, why
should anyone give chase to that hated fish? Away with me,
Let us fly these deadly waters. Let us home. Wife
and child too are starbucks, wife and child of his

(01:12:50):
brotherly sisterly playfellow youth, even as thine, sir, are the
wife and child of thy loving, longing paternal old age. Away,
let us away this instant. Let me alter the course.
How cheerily, how hilariously, O, my captain, would we bowl
on our way to see old Nantucket again? I think, sir,

(01:13:12):
they have some such mild blue days, even as this
in Nantucket they have, they have, I have seen them
some summer days in the morning about this time. Yes,
it is his new nap. Now the boy vivaciously wakes,
sits up in bed, and his mother tells him of me,
of Cannibal, old me, how I am abroad upon the deep,

(01:13:33):
but will yet come back to dance him again? Tis
my Mary, my merry herself. She promised that my boy
every morning should be carried to the hill to catch
the first glimpse of his father's sail. Yes, yes, no more,
it is done. We head for nantucket. Come, my captain,

(01:13:56):
study out the course, and let us away. See see
the boy's face from the window, the boy's hand on
the hill. But Ahab's glance was averted, like a blighted
fruit tree. He shook and cast his last cindered apple
to the soil. What is it? What nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing?

(01:14:18):
Is it? What cousining, hidden, lord and master and cruel,
remorseless emperor commands me that, against all natural lovings and longings,
I so keep pushing and crowding and jamming myself on
all the time, recklessly making me ready to do what
in my own proper natural heart I durst not so
much as dare is a hab a hab? Is it

(01:14:40):
I God or who that lifts this arm? But if
the great sun move not of himself, but is as
an errand boy in heaven, nor one single start can
revolve but by some invisible power, how then can this
one small heart beat, this one's small brain? Thing thoughts?
Unless God does that beating? Does that thinking? Does that? Living?
And not I? By heaven man, we are turned round

(01:15:03):
and round in this world like yonder, windless and fade
is the handspike and all the time lo that smiling
sky and this unsound sea. Look see yon Albacore, who
put it into him to chase and fong that flying fish.
Where do murderers go? Man? Who's to doom? When the

(01:15:26):
judge himself is dragged to the bar. But it is
a mild, mild wind and a mild looking sky, and
the air smells now as if it blew from a
far away meadow. They have been making hay somewhere under
the slopes of the Andes Starbuck and the moors are
sleeping among the new mown hay, sleeping. I twill we
how we may we all sleep at last on the

(01:15:48):
field sleep Aye and rust him at greenness as last
year's sides flung down and left in the half cut
Swath's Starbuck, but blanched to a corpse's hue with despair
the mate had stolen away. Ahab crossed the deck to
gaze over on the other side, but started at two
reflected fixed eyes in the water. There Fedala was motionlessly

(01:16:13):
leaning over the same rail. Chapter one thirty three, The Chase.
First day that night in the mid watch, when the
old man, as his wont at intervals, stepped forth from
the scuttle in which he leaned and went to his
pivot hole. He suddenly thrust out his face, fiercely snuffing

(01:16:34):
up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will.
In drawing nidism barbarous isle. He declared that a whale
must be near soon. That peculiar odour, sometimes to a
great distance, given forth by the living sperm whale, was
palpable to all the watch. Nor was any mariner surprised when,
after inspecting the compass and then the dog vein, he won,

(01:16:54):
and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odour as
nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to
be slightly altered and the sail to be shortened. The
acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at daybreak
by the sight of a long sleek on the sea
directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in

(01:17:14):
the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it the polished, metallic like
marks of some swift tide rip at the mouth of
a deep rapid stream. Man the massed heads call all hands,
thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the
forecastle deck ded gourouse the sleepers with such judgment claps

(01:17:35):
that they seemed to exhale from the scuttle. So instantaneously
did they appear with their clothes in their hands. What
dc of, cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky. Nothing, nothing, sir,
was the sound hailing down in reply, scallon sails, stun sails,
a low and aloft, and on both sides, all sail

(01:17:59):
being set. He now casts loose the lifeline reserved for
swaying into the main royal mast head, And in a
few moments they were hoisting him thither, when, while but
two thirds of the whal aloft, and while peering ahead
through the horizontal vacancy between the main topsail and top
gallant sail, he raised a gull like cry in the air.
There she blows, There she blows, a hump like a

(01:18:20):
snow hill. It is moby Dick. Fired by the cry,
which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three lookouts, the
men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the
famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had
now gained his final perch. Some feet above the other lookouts,
tash Tago standing just beneath him on the cap of

(01:18:40):
the top gallant mast, so that the Indian's head was
almost on a level with Ahab's heel. From this height,
the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead
at every roll of the sea, revealing his high, sparkling
hump and regularly jetting his silence spout into the air.
To the credulous mariners, it seemed the same silent spout
they had had so long ago, beheld in the moonlit

(01:19:01):
Atlantic and Indian oceans. And did none of ye see
it before? Cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him.
I saw him almost that same instant, Sir, that Captain
Ahab did, And I cried out, said tash Tago. Not
the same instant, not the same. No, the doubloon is mine.

(01:19:22):
Fake reserved the dubloon for me. I only none of
ye could have raised the white whale. First. There she blows,
there she blows, there she blows there again there again,
he cried, in long, drawn, lingering, methodic tones attuned to
the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets. He's going

(01:19:44):
to sound in stun sails down, top gallant sails, stand
by three boats, mister Starbuck. Remember stay on board and
keep the ship helm there luff a point, so steady man, steady,

(01:20:05):
there go flukes. No, no, only black water already the
boats there stand by. Stand by. Lower me, mister Starbuck, lower, lower, quick, quicker,
and he slid through the air to the deck. He
is heading straight to leeward, Sir, cried Stubb, right away

(01:20:27):
from us. Cannot have seen the ship yet, be dumb man.
Stand by the braces hard down the helm, brace up.
Shiver her, shiver her so while that boats boats. Soon
all the boats but Starbucks were dropped, all the boat

(01:20:49):
sails set, all the paddles plying with rippling swiftness, shooting
to leeward and ahab heading the onset. A pale death
glimmer lit up the dall of his sunken eyes, a
hideous motion, not his mouth, like noiseless nautilus shells. Their
light prows sped through the sea, but only slowly. They

(01:21:10):
neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew
still more smooth, seemed drawing a carpet over its waves.
Seemed a new meadow so serenely it spread at length.
The breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey
that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible. Sliding along
the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set

(01:21:31):
in a revolving ring of finest fleecy greenish foam, He
saw the vast involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head
beyond before it far out on the soft, turkish, rugged waters,
went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead,
a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade, and behind the
blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of

(01:21:54):
his steady wake, and on either hand, bright bubbles arose
and danced by his side. But these they were broken
again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowls,
softly feathering to sea, alternate with their fitful flight, and,
like to some flagstaff rising from the painted hull of
an argacy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent
lance projected from the white whale's back, and at intervals,

(01:22:14):
one of the cloud of soft toed fowls hovering and
to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish,
silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail
feathers streaming like pennons. A gentle joyousness, a mighty mildness
of repose, and swiftness invested the gliding whale. Not the
white bull Jupiter, swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to

(01:22:36):
his graceful horns, is lovely, leering eyed sideways, intent upon
the maid, with smooth, bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the
nuptial bower and crete. Not Jove, not that great Majesty
Supreme did surpass the glorified white whale, as he so
divinely swam on each soft side, coincident with the parted
swell that, but once laving him, then flowed so wide

(01:22:59):
away on each bright side the whale shut off enticings
no wonder, there had been some among the hunters who
namelessly transported an allured by all this serenity, had ventured
to assail it, but had fatally found that quietude. But
the vesture of tornadoes yet come enticing calm, oh whale,
thou blightest on to all hoof of the first time,

(01:23:21):
mighty no matter how many in that same way thou
mayst have be juggled and destroyed before and thus through
the serene tranquilities of the tropical sea, among waves whose
hand clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, moby Dick moved
on still withholding from sight the full terrors of his
submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.

(01:23:45):
But soon the forepart of him slowly rose from the water.
For an instant, his whole marbleized body formed a high
arch like Virginia's natural bridge, and warningly, waving his bannered
flukes in the air, the Grand God revealed himself sounded,
and went out of sight, hoveringly halting and dipping on
the wing. The white sea fowls longingly lingered over the

(01:24:05):
agitated pool that he left with oars a peak and
paddles down the sheets of their sails adrift. The three
boats now stilly floated, awaiting moby Dick's reappearance. An hour
set Ahab standing rooted in his boat's stern, and he
gazed beyond the whale's place towards the dim blue spaces
and wide wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant,

(01:24:29):
for again his eyes seemed whirling round in his head
as he swept the watery circle. The breeze, now freshened,
the sea began to swell the birds. The birds cried
tash tago in long Indian file, as when herons take wing.
The white birds were now all flying towards Ahab's boat,
and when within a few yards, began fluttering over the water, there,

(01:24:51):
wheeling round and round with joyous expectant cries. Their vision
was keener than man's. Ahab could discover no sign in
the sea. But suddenly, as he peered down and down
into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot,
no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity, uprising
and magnifying as it rose till it turned, and then

(01:25:12):
there were plainly revealed two long, crooked rows of white,
glistening teeth floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was
Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw, his vast shadowed
bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea.
The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open
doored marble tomb, and giving one side lung sweep with

(01:25:33):
his steering or ahab whirled the craft aside from this
tremendous apparition, then, calling upon Fedala to change places with him,
went forward to the bows, and, seizing Pert's harpoon, commanded
his crew to grasp their oars and stand by the stern.
Now by reason of this timely spinning round the boat
upon its axis its bow, by anticipation, was made to

(01:25:55):
face the whale's head while yet under water. But as
if proceeded this stratagem, moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence
ascribed to him, sidlingly transplanted himself, as it were, in
an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat,
through and through through every plank, in each rib it
thrilled for an instant. The whale, obliquely lying on his

(01:26:18):
back in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and
feelingly taking its bows full within his mouth, so that
the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into
the open air, and one of the teeth caught in
a rollock. The bluish pearl white of the inside of
the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's head and
reached higher than that. In this attitude, the white whale

(01:26:39):
now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat
her mouse with unastonished eyes. Fed Allah gazed and crossed
his arms, But the tiger yellow crew were tumbling over
each other's heads to gain the uttermost stern and now
while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as
the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way,

(01:27:00):
and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he
could not be darted at from the bows, for the
bows were almost inside of him, as it were. And
while the other boats involuntarily paused as before, a quick
crisis impossible to withstand. Then it was that monomaniac a Hab,
furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed
him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated.

(01:27:23):
Frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with
his naked hands and wildly strove to wrench it from
its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove the jaw
slipped from him. The frail gunneales bent in, collapsed and
snapped as both jaws like an enormous shears, sliding further aft,
but the craft completely in twain and locked themselves fast

(01:27:43):
again in the sea midway between the two floating wrecks.
These floated aside the broken ends, drooping the crew at
the stern wreck, clinging to the gunwales and striving to
hold fast to the oars to lash them across. At
that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped. Ahab
the first to perceive the whale's intent by the crafty

(01:28:03):
upraising of his head, a movement that loosed his hold
for the time. At that moment, his hand had made
one final effort to push the boat out of the bite,
but only slipping further into the whale's mouth and tilting
over sideways. As it slipped, the boat had shaken off
his hold on the jaw, spilled him out of it
as he leaned to the push, and so he fell
flat faced upon the sea, ripplingly withdrawing from his prey.

(01:28:28):
Moby Dick now lay at a little distance vertically thrusting
his oblong white hat up and down in the billows,
and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body,
so that when his vast, wrinkled forehead rose some twenty
or more feet out of the water, the now rising swells,
with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it, vindicatively
tossing their shivered spray still higher into the air asterisk

(01:28:50):
so in a gale, the but half baffled channel Billow's
only recoil from the base of the eddystone triumphantly to
overleap its summit with their scud. But soon resuming his
horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round and round the
wrecked crew sideways, churning the water in his vengeful wake,
as if lashing himself up to still another in more

(01:29:12):
deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to
madden him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast
before Antiochus's elephants in the book of Maccabee's. Meanwhile, Ahab
half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent tail,
and too much of a cripple to swim, though he
could still keep afloat even in the heart of such
a whirlpool as that helpless Ahab's head was seen like

(01:29:34):
a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst
from the boat's fragmentary stern Fedalah incuriously and mildly eyed him.
The clinging crew at the other drifting end could not
succor him. More than enough was it for them to
look to themselves, For so revolvingly appalling was the white
whale's aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever contracting circles

(01:29:55):
he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And
though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by, still
they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest
it should be the signal for the instant destruction of
the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all. Nor in that case
could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then

(01:30:16):
they remained on the outer edge of the direful zone,
whose sent her had now become the old man's head. Meantime,
from the beginning all this had been described from the
ship's mast heads and squaring her yards, she had borne
down upon the scene, and was now so nigh that
Ahab in the water hailed her sail on them, but
that moment of breaking sea dashed on him from moby

(01:30:37):
Dick and warned him for the time. But struggling out
of it again and chancing to rise on a towering crest,
he shouted, sail on the whale, drive him off. The
pequod's prow was pointed, and breaking up the charmed circle,
she effectually parted the white whale from his victim, as
he sullenly swam off the boats flew to the rescue

(01:31:00):
into Stubb's boat with bloodshot, blinded eyes, the white brine
caking in his wrinkles. The long tension of Ahab's bodily
strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's
doom for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom
of Stubb's boat like one trodden under foot of herds
of elephants far inland. Nameless whales came from him as
desolate sounds from out ravines. But this intensity of his

(01:31:24):
physical prostration did but so much the more abbreviated in
an instant's compass, great hearts, sometimes condensed to one deep pang.
The sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through
feebler men's whole lives, and so such hearts, though summary
in each one's suffering. Still, if the gods decreate in
their lifetime, aggregate a whole age of woe wholly made

(01:31:46):
up of instantaneous intensities. For even in their pointless centers,
those noble natures contained the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
The harpoon set Ahab half way, rising and draggingly, leaning
on one bended arm. Is it safe, I, sir? For
it was not darted? This is it, said Stubb, showing it.

(01:32:08):
Lay it before me. Any missing men? One, two, three,
four five? There were five oars, sir, And here are
five men. That's good. Dot help me man, I wish
to stand so so I see him there there, going

(01:32:29):
to leeward. Still, what a leaping spout? Hands off from me.
The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again, set
the sail out oars the helm. It is often the
case that when a boat is stove, its crew being
picked up by another boat helped to work the second boat,
and the chase is thus continued with what is called

(01:32:50):
double banked oors. It was thus now, But the added
power of the boat did not equal the added power
of the whale, for he seemed to have trebled his
every fin, swimming with a velocity which plainly showed that,
if now under these circumstances pushed on, the chase would
prove an indefinitely prolonged if not a hopeless one. Nor

(01:33:10):
could any crew endure for so long a period such
an unintermitted intense straining at the oar, a thing barely
tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then,
as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means
of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her,

(01:33:31):
and were soon swayed up to their cranes, the two
parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her,
and then hoisting everything to her side and stacking her
canvas high up and sideways outstretching it with stun sails
like the double jointed wings of an albatross. The pequad
bore down in the leeward wake of Moby Dick at
the well known methodic intervals. The whale's glittering spout was

(01:33:53):
regularly announced from the manned mast heads, and when he
would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take
the time, and then, pacing the deck vinacal watch in hand.
So soon as the last second of the allotted hour expired,
his voice was heard to whose is the doubloon? Now
d you see him? And if the reply was no, sir, straightway,

(01:34:13):
he commanded them to lift him to his perch. In
this way the day wore on Ahab, now aloft and motionless,
Anon unrestingly pacing the planks. As he was thus walking,
uttering no sound except to hail the men aloft, or
to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to
spread one to a still greater breadth. Thus to and fro,

(01:34:34):
pacing beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed
his own wreck boat, which had been dropped upon the
quarter deck and later reversed broken, bought a shattered stern.
At last he paused before it, and as in an
already overclouded sky, fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across,
so over the old man's face there now stole some
such added gloom. As this Stubb saw him pause and

(01:34:57):
perhaps intending not vainly, though, to evince it his own
unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in
his captain's mind. He advanced, and, eyeing the wreck, exclaimed
the thistle. The ass refused it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir,
ha ha, What soulless thing is this? That laughs before
a wreck? Man? Man? Did I not know thee brave,

(01:35:20):
as fearless fire and as mechanical? I could swear thou
word a poltroon, groan nor laugh should be heard before
a wreck, I, sir said, Starbuck drawing near 'tis a
solemn sight, an omen and an ill one omen omen
the dictionary. If the gods think to speak outright to man,

(01:35:42):
they will honorably speak outright, not shake their heads and
give an old wive's darkling hint at begone. Ye two
are the opposite poles of one thing. Starbuck is Stubb reversed,
and Stub is Starbuck. And ye two are all mankind,
and they have stands alone among the millions of the
peopled earth, nor God, odds, nor men, his neighbors. Cold cold,

(01:36:03):
I shiver, how now aloft there d'ye see him sing
out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second.
The day was nearly done. Only the hem of his
golden robe was rustling. Soon it was almost dark, but
the lookout men still remained unset. Can't see the spout now, sir,

(01:36:27):
too dark, cried a voice from the air. How heading
when last seen as before, sir, straight to leeward. Good
he will travel slower now tis night, down royals and
top gallon stunsails. Mister Starbuck, we must not run over

(01:36:47):
him before morning. He's making a passage now, and may
heave to a while helm there, keep her full before
the wind aloft come down, mister Stubb, send a fresh
hand to the foremast head and see it man till morning.
Then advancing towards the doubloon and the mainmast men, This
gold is mine, for I earned it. But I shall

(01:37:09):
let it abide here till the white whale is dead,
and then whosoever of you first raises him upon the
day he shall be killed. This gold is that man's,
and if on that day I shall again raise him,
then ten times its sum shall be divided among all
of ye. Away Now the deck is thine, sir, And
so saying he placed himself halfway within the scuttle, and

(01:37:31):
slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at
intervals rousing himself to see how the night wore. On
chapter one thirty four, the chase, second day, at daybreak,
the three mast heads were punctually manned afresh d see him,
cried Ahab, after allowing a little space for the light

(01:37:53):
to spread. See nothing, sir, turn up all hands and
make saye he travels faster than I thought. For the
top gallant sails, I they should have been kept on
her all night. But no matter tis but resting for
the rush. Here be it said that this pertinacious pursuit

(01:38:16):
of one particular whale, continued through day and to night,
and through night and to day, is a thing, by
no means unprecedented in the south Sea fishery, for such
as the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence
acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders,
that from the simple observation of a whale, when last descried,

(01:38:37):
they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both
the direction in which you will continue to swim for
a time while out of sight, as well as his
probable rate of progression during that period, and in these
cases somewhat as a pilot when about losing sight of
a coast whose general trending he well knows, and which

(01:38:58):
he desires shortly to return to a g again, but
at some further point, Like as this pilot stands by
his compass and takes the precise bearing of the cape
at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit
art the remote unseen headland eventually to be visited, so
does the fisherman at his compass with the whale, For
after being chased and diligently marked through several hours of daylight,

(01:39:21):
then when night obscures the fish, the creature's future wake
through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious
mind of the hunter as the pilot's coast is to him,
So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence
of a thing written water awake is to all desired
purpose as well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land,

(01:39:42):
and as the mighty Eyeon Leviathan of the modern railway
is so familiarly known in its every pace that with
watches in their hands. Mentime is raid as doctors that
of a baby's pulse, and lightly say of it, the
uptrain or the down train will reach such or such
a spot at such or such an hour. Even so,
almost there are occasions when these nantucketers time that other
leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of

(01:40:04):
his speed, and say to themselves, so many hours hence
this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have
about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude.
But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end,
the wind and the sea must be the whaleman's allies.
For of what present avail to the becombed or windbound

(01:40:25):
mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly
ninety three leagues and a quarter from his port. Inferable
from these statements are many collateral, subtle matters touching the
chase of whales. The ship tore on leaving such a
fur in the sea, as when a cannon ball is
sent becomes a plowshare and turns up the level field

(01:40:46):
by sultanhamp cried Stubb. But this swift motion of the
deck creeps up one's legs and tingles at the heart
this ship and I are two brave fellows. Ha ha.
Someone take me up and low munch me spine wise
on the sea, for by live oaks. My spine's a
keel ha ha. We go the gate that leaves no

(01:41:10):
dust behind. There. She blows, she blows, she blows right ahead.
Was now the mast head cry I I don't cried Stub.
I knew it. Ye can't escape. Blow on and split
your spout, o wail. The mad fiend himself is after ye.
Blow your trump, blister your lungs. Ahab will dam off

(01:41:30):
your blood as a miller shots his watergate upon the stream,
and Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all
that crew. The frenzies of the chase had by this
time worked them bubblingly up like old wine worked anew.
Whatever pale fears and foreboding some of them might have
felt before, these were not only now kept out of

(01:41:51):
sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were
broken up and on all sides, routed as timid prairie
hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of
fate had snatched all their souls, and by the stirring
perils of the previous day, the wreck of the past
night's suspense, the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which
their wild craft, when plunging towards its flying mark. By

(01:42:12):
all these things, their hearts were bowl along the wind
that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the
vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible. This seemed the
symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to
the race. They were one man, not thirty. For as
the one ship that held them all, though it was
put together of all contrasting things, oak and maple and pinewood,

(01:42:36):
iron and pitch and hemp, yet all these ran into
each other in the one concrete hall, which shot on
its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel.
Even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor,
that man's fear, guilt and guiltlessness, all varieties were welded
into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal
which ay have their one lord and keel did point

(01:42:59):
to the rigging lived. The mast heads, like the tops
of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted, with arms and legs
clinging to a spar with one hand. Some reached forth
the other with impatient wavings. Others, shading their eyes from
the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards,
all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and

(01:43:21):
ripe for their fate. Ah how they still strove through
that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might
destroy them? Why sing ye not out for him if
you see him? Cried Ahab, when after the lapse of
some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.
Sway me up, men, ye have been deceived. Not moby

(01:43:43):
dick casts one not jet that way and then disappears.
It was even so in their headlong eagerness, the men
had mistaken some other thing for the whale spout, as
the event itself soon proved. For hardly had Ahab reached
his perch, hardly was the rope belayed to its pin
on deck when he struck the knot to an orchestra
that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharges

(01:44:04):
of rifles. The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was
heard as much nearer to the ship than the place
of the imaginary jet less than a mile ahead, moby
Dick bodily burst into view. For not by any common,
indolent spoutings, not by the peaceable gush of that mystic
fountain in his head, did the white whale now reveal
his vicinity, But by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching,

(01:44:28):
not ey one, rising with his utmost velocity from the
furthest depths. The sperm whale thus booms his entire bulk
into the pure element of air, and piling up a
mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance
of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn
and raged waves he shakes off seems maine. In some cases,
this breaching is his act of defiance. There she breaches,

(01:44:53):
There she breaches, was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes.
The white whale tossed himself salmon like to heaven, so
suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and
relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky. The
spray that he raised for the moment intolerably glittered and
glared like a glacier, and stood there, gradually fading and
fading away from its first sparkling intensity to the dim

(01:45:15):
mistiness of an advancing shower in a veil. I breach
your last to the sun, moby Dick cried, Ahab, thy
hour and thy harpoon are at hand, down, down, all
of ye but one man at the fore. The boats
stand by, unmindful of the tedious rope ladders of the shrouds.

(01:45:36):
The men, like shooting stars, slid to the deck by
the isolated backstays and halliards, while Ahab, less dartingly but
still rapidly, was dropped from his perch lower away, he cried,
so soon as he had reached his boat, a spare
one rigged the afternoon previous, mister Starbuck, the ship is
thine heap away from the boats, but keep near them, lower,

(01:46:00):
all as if to strike a quick terror into them.
By this time, being the first assailant himself, moby Dick
had turned and was now coming for the three crews.
Ahab's boat was central, and cheering his men, he told
them he would take the whalehead and head, that is,
pull straight up to his forehead, a not uncommon thing,
for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes

(01:46:22):
the coming onset from the whale side lung vision, but
ere that close limit was gained, And while yet all
three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to
his eye, the white whale, churning himself into furious speed,
almost in an instant, as it were, rushing among the
boats with open jaws and a lashing tail, offered appalling
battle on every side, and heedless of the irons darted

(01:46:43):
at him from every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating
each separate plank of which those boats were made, but
skillfully maneuvered incessantly, wheeling like trained chargers in the field.
The boats for a while eluded him, though at times
but by a plank's breadth, while all the time Ahab's
unas earthly slogan toward every other cry but his two shreds.

(01:47:04):
But at last, in his untraceable evolutions, the white whale
so crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled
the slack of the three lines now fast to him,
that they foreshortened and of themselves warped the devoted boats
towards the planted irons in him. Though now for a
moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to
rally for a more tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab

(01:47:26):
first paid out more line, and then was rapidly hauling
and jerking in upon it again, hoping that way to
disencumber it of some snarls. When low a sight more
savage than the embattled, teeth of sharks caught and twisted
corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, Loose harpoons and lances,
with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing and
dripping up to the chalks in the bows of Ahab's boat.

(01:47:49):
Only one thing could be done. Seizing the boat knife,
he critically reached within, through and then without the rays
of steel, dragged in the line beyond, passed it inboard
to the Bozeman, and then twice, sundering the rope near
the choks, dropped the intercepted faggot of steel into the sea,
and was all fast again. That instant, the white whale

(01:48:11):
made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the
other lines. By so doing irresistibly dragged the more involved
boats of Stubb and flashed towards his flukes dashed them
together like two rolling husks on a surf beaten beach,
and then diving down into the sea, disappeared in a
boiling maelstrom, in which for a space the odorous cedar
chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the

(01:48:32):
grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch, while
the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching
out after the revolving line tubs ors an other floating furniture,
while a slope little flask bobbed up and down like
an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the
dreaded jaws of sharks, and Stubb was lustily singing out
for someone to ladle him up, and while the old

(01:48:54):
man's line, now parting, admitted of his pulling into the
creamy pool to rescue whom he could. In that way
wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils ahabs, yet unstricken
boats seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires as
arawlike shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the white whale dashed
his broad forehead against its bottom and sent it turning

(01:49:16):
over and over into the air till it fell again
gunneled downwards, and Ahab and his men struggled out from
under it like seals from a seaside cave. The first
uprising momentum of the whale, modifying its direction as he
struck the surface, involuntarily launched him along it to a
little distance from the center of the destruction he had made,

(01:49:37):
And with his back to it, he now lay for
a moment, slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side,
and whenever a stray or bit of plank the least
chip or chrumb of the boats touched his skin, his
tail swiftly drew back and came sideways smiting the sea.
But soon, as if satisfied that his work for that
time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and,

(01:49:58):
trailing after him the enturretain angled lines, continued his leeward
way at a traveler's methodic pace. As before, the attentive ship,
having descried the whole fight, again came bearing down to
the rescue and dropping a boat picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars,
and whatever else could be caught at and safely landed
them on her decks. Some springed shoulders wrists and ankles,

(01:50:22):
livid contusions, wrenched harpoons and lances, inextricable intricacies of rope,
shattered oars and planks. All these were there, but no
fatal or even serious ll seemed to have befallen anyone.
As with Fedala the day before, so Ahab was now
found grimly clinging to his boat's broken half, which afforded
a comparatively easy float. Nor did it so exhaust him

(01:50:43):
as the previous day's mishap. But when he was helped
to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him, as,
instead of standing by himself, he still half hung upon
the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the
foremost to assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off,
leaving but one short sharp splinter. I A starbuck tis

(01:51:05):
sweet to lean sometimes be the leaner who he will,
And what old ay have had leaned oftener than he has.
The Ferrell has not stood, sir, said the carpenter, now
coming up. I put good work into that leg, but
no bones broken, sir, I hope, said Stubb with true concern.
I and all splintered to pieces. Stub de see it it.

(01:51:28):
But even with a broken bone. Old ayhab is untouched,
and I account no living bone of mine one jot
more me than this dead one that's lost, Nor white whale,
nor man nor fiend can so much as Gray's old
Ay have in his own proper and inaccessible being. Can
any lead touch yonder floor, any mast, scrape yonder roof
aloft there which way dead to leeward, Sir Uphelm. Then

(01:51:56):
pile on the sail again. Ship keepers on the rest
of the spare boats and rig them, mister starbuck away
and muster the boat's crews. Let me first help thee
towards the bulwarks. Sir, oh, oh, oh, how this splinter
gores me now, a cursed fate that the unconquerable captain

(01:52:20):
in the soul should have such a craven mate, Sir,
my body man, not thee. Give me something for a
cane there that shivered lance will do. Muster the men.
Surely I have not seen him yet, By Heaven, it
cannot be missing. Quick call them all. The old man's

(01:52:44):
hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsi
was not there. The Parsi cried, Stubb, He must have
been caught in the black vomit wrenched thee run all
of the above a low cabin. Folks'll find him not gone,
not gone. But quickly they returned to him, with the

(01:53:05):
tidings that the parseea was nowhere to be found at, Sir,
said Stubb. Caught among the tangles of your line, I
thought I saw him dragging under my line. My line
gone gone? What means that little word? What death knell
rings in it? That old a hab shakes as if

(01:53:26):
he were the belfry, the harpoon too, toss over the
litter there d'e see it? The forged iron men, the
white whales. No, no, no blistered fool, this hand did dart.
It tis in the fish aloft there. Keep him nailed. Quick,
All hands to the rigging of the boats. Collect the oars, harpooneers,

(01:53:47):
the irons, the irons, hoist the royals higher, a pull
on all the sheets. Helm there, steady, steady, for your life.
I'll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe, yea, and dive
straight through it. But I'll slay him yet, Great God,
but for one single instant show thyself, cried Starbuck. Never

(01:54:08):
never wilt thou capture him, Old man in Jesus name,
no more of this that's worse than devil's madness. Two
days chased twice stove to splinters, thy very leg once
more snatched from under thee, thy evil shadow gone, All
good angels mobbing thee with warnings. What more wouldst thou have?
Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps
the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to

(01:54:31):
the bottom of the sea. Shall we be towed by
him to the infernal world? Oh, oh, impiety and blasphemy
to hunt him more? Starbuck of late, I've felt strangely
moved to thee ever since that hour we both saw
thou know'st what in one another's eyes. But in this
matter of the whale, be the front of thy face.

(01:54:52):
To me is the palm of this hand, A lipless, unfeatured,
blank ahab is for ever ver ahab man. This whole
acts immutably decreed, twas rehearsed by thee in me a
billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool, I am the fates, Lieutenant,

(01:55:13):
I act under orders. Look thou underling that thou obeyest
mind dot stand round me, men, ye see an old
man cut down to the stump, leaning on a shivered lance,
propped up on a lonely foot. 'tis Ahab his body's part?
But Ahab souls a centipede that moves upon a hundred legs.

(01:55:35):
I feel strained, half stranded as ropes the tow dismasted
frigates in a gale. And I may look so, but
ere I break, Ye'll hear me crack, and till ye
hear that, know that Ahab's hawser toes his purpose. Yet
believe ye, men in the things called omens, then laugh
aloud and cry OnCore, for ere they drown. Drowning things

(01:55:57):
will twice rise to the surface, then rise again to
sink Forevermore so with moby Dick. Two days he's floated.
Tomorrow will be the third. I men, He'll rise once more,
but only to spout his last. Do you feel brave? Men?
Brave as fearless? Fire cried stub and as mechanical muttered

(01:56:21):
a hab. Then as the men went forward, he muttered
on the thing's called omens. And yesterday I talked the
same to Starbuck there concerning my broken boat. Oh, how
valuably I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's
clinched so fast in mine the parsi? The parsi had
gone gone, and he was to go before, but still

(01:56:43):
was to be seen again. Ere I could perish? How's that?
There's a riddle now? Might baffle all the lawyers, backed
by the ghosts of the whole line of judges, like
a hawksbeak a pecks my brain. I'll I'll solve it. Though,
when dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward,
so once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed

(01:57:04):
nearly as on the previous night, only the sound of
hammers and the hum of the grindstone was heard till
nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns in the
complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening
their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken
keel of Ahab's wrecked craft, the carpenter made him another leg.
While still, as on the night before slotch Dahab stood

(01:57:25):
fixed within his scuttle, his hid heliotrope glance, anticipatingly gone
backward on its style, set due eastward for the earliest sun.
Chapter one thirty five, The chase, third day The morning
of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once
more the solitary night man at the foremast head was

(01:57:46):
relieved by crowds of the daylight lookouts, who dotted every
mast in almost every spar d see him, cried Ahab.
But the whale was not yet in sight in his
infallible wake, though, But follow that wake, that's all Helm there,
steady as thou goest and hast been going. What a

(01:58:07):
lovely day again. We're at a new made world, and
made for a summer house to the angels, and this morning,
the first of its throwing open to them. A fairer
day could not dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought.
Had a have time to think? But Ahab never thinks.
He only feels, feels, feels. That's tingling enough for mortal
man to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege.

(01:58:33):
Thinking is or ought to be a coolness and a calmness.
And our poor hearts throb and our poor brains beat
too much for that. And yet I've sometimes thought my
brain was very calm, frozen calm. This old skull cracks
so like a glass in which the contents turn to
ice and shiver it. And still this hair is growing
now this moment growing, and heat must breed it. But no,

(01:58:56):
it's like that sort of common grass that will grow
anywhere between the earthy cluffs of greenland. Eyes are in
vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it. They whip
it about me, as the torn shreds of split sails
lash the tossed ship. They cling to a vile wind
that has no doubt blown air this through prison corridors
and cells and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and

(01:59:17):
now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces out upon it.
It's tainted or I the wind, I'd blow no more
on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to
a cave and slink there. And yet 'tis a noble
and heroic thing, the wind. Whoever conquered it, in every

(01:59:40):
fight it has the last and bitterest blow, run tilting
at it, and you but run through it. Ha a
coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not
stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a
braver thing, a nobler thing than that would now the
wind but had a but all the things that most

(02:00:01):
exasperate and outrage mortal man. All these things are bodiless,
but only bodyless, as objects, not as agents. There's a
most special, almost cunning, oh, a most malicious difference. And
yet I say again and swear it now, that there's
something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm

(02:00:22):
trade winds, at least that in the clear heavens, blow
straight on in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness, and veer
not from their mark. However, the baser currents of the
sea may turn intact and mightiest mississippis of the land
swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go. At last,
and by the eternal poles, those same trades that so

(02:00:42):
directly blow my good ship. On these trades, or something
like them, something so unchangeable and full as strong, blow
my keeled soul along to it. Aloft there what d see? Nothing, sir, nothing?
And noon at hand the doubloon goes a begging, see

(02:01:07):
the sun. I I it must be so, I've oversailed him.
How got the start? I he's chasing me? Now? Not
I him? That's bad. I might have known it too, fool.
The lines the harpoons. He's towing. I I I have

(02:01:28):
run him my last night, about about come down all
of ye, but the regular lookouts man the braces, steering
as she had done. The wind had been somewhat on
the pequad's quarter, so that now being pointed in the
reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze

(02:01:49):
as she returned the cream in her own white wake
against the wind. He now steers for the open jaw,
murmured Starbuck to himself, as he coiled the new hauled
main brace upon the rail. God keep us, but already
my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside
wet my flesh. I missed out me that I disobey
my God in obeying him. Stand by to sway me up,

(02:02:13):
cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket. We should meet
him soon, I ay, sir, and straightway. Starbuck did Ahab's bidding,
and once more Ahab swung on high. A whole hour
now passed. Gold beaten now to ages time itself now
held long breaths with keen suspense, But at last, some

(02:02:36):
three points off the weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again,
and instantly from the three mastheads. Three shrieks went up,
as if the tones of fire had voiced it. Forehead
to forehead. I meet thee this third time. Moby Dick
on deck there, brace sharper up, crowd her into the
wind's eye. He's too far off to lower yet, mister Starbuck.

(02:02:59):
The sails shake stand over that helmsman with a top
mall so so he travels fast, and I must down.
But let me have one more good round look aloft
here at the sea. There's time for that, an old
old sight, and yet somehow so young, aye, And not
change to wink since I first saw it a boy

(02:03:20):
from the sand hills of Nantucket. The same, the same,
the same to Noah as to me. There's a soft
shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings. They must lead somewhere
to something else than common land, more palmy than the
palms leeward the white well goes that way. Look to windward,

(02:03:44):
then the better if the bitterer quarter. But goodbye, goodbye,
old masthead. What's this green? Aye? Tiny mosses in these
warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab's head.
There's the difference now between man's old age and matters.

(02:04:04):
But I fold mast. We both grow old together, sound
in our hulls, though are we not my ship? I
minus a leg, That's all by heaven. This deadwood has
the better of my live flesh. Every way I can't
compare with it. And I've known some ships made of
dead trees. I'll last the lives of men made of
the most vital stuff, of vital fathers. What's that he said?

(02:04:29):
He should still go before me, my pilot, and yet
to be seen again? But where will I have eyes
at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those
endless stairs. And all night I've been sailing from him
wherever he did sink to I aye, like many more,
thou told'st direful truth as touching myself, Oh PARSI, but

(02:04:51):
ahab there thy shot fell short. Goodbye, masthead. Keep a
good eye upon the whale the while I'm gone. We'll
talk tomorrow, nay tonight, when the white well lies down there,
tied by head and tail. He gave the word, and,
still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the cloven
blue air to the deck. In due time the boats

(02:05:13):
were lowered. But is standing in his shell up stern.
Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent. He
waved to the mate, who held one of the tackle
ropes on deck, and bade him pause. Starbuck, Sir, for
the third time, my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck,
I sir, thou wilt have it so some ships sail

(02:05:37):
from their ports and never afterwards are missing, Starbuck. Truth, sir,
saddest truth. Some men die at ebbtide, some with low water,
some at the full of the flood. And I feel
now like a billow. That's all one crested comb, Starbuck,
I am old. Shake hands with me, man, Their hands met,

(02:05:59):
their eyes fastened. Starbucks tears the glue. Oh, my captain,
my captain, noble heart, go nut. See it's a brave
man that weeps. How great the agony of the persuasion.
Then lower away, cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him.
Stand by the crew. In an instant, the boat was

(02:06:22):
pulling round close under the stern the sharks. The sharks
cried a voice from the low cabin window. There o, master,
my master, come back, but Ahab heard nothing, for his
own voice was high lifted. Then and the boat leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true, for scarce had he pushed

(02:06:43):
from the ship, when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from
out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at
the blades of the oars every time they dipped in
the water, and in this way accompanied the boat with
their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to
the whale boats in those swarming seas, the sharks at
times apparently following them in the same pression way that

(02:07:04):
vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east.
But these were the first sharks that had been observed
by the pequad since the white whale had been first described.
And whether it was that Ahab's crew were all such
tiger yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to
the senses of the sharks, a matter sometimes well known
to affect them. However, it was they seem to follow

(02:07:25):
that one boat without molesting the others. Heart of wrought steel,
murmured Starbuck, gazing over the side and following with his
eyes the receding boat canst thy, yet ring boldly to
that sight lowering, they keel among ravening sharks, and followed
by them open mouthed to the chase. And this the
critical third day. For when three days flow together in
one continuous, intense pursuit, be sure the first is the morning,

(02:07:49):
the second the noon, and the third the evening. And
the end of that thing be that end what it may?
Oh my god, what is this that shoots through me
and leaves me so deadly, calm yet expectant, fixed at
the top of a shutter. Future things swim before me
as in empty outlines and skeletons. All the past is

(02:08:10):
somehow grown dim merry girl, thou fadest in pale glories
behind me, boy I seem to see, but thy eyes
grown wondrous blue, strangest problems of life seem clearing, but
clouds sweep between. Is my journey's end coming? My legs
feel faint like his who has footed it all day.

(02:08:32):
Feel thy heart beats it yet stir thyself, starbuck, stave
it off, move, move, speak aloud, mast head, There see
my boy's hand on the hill, crazed all off. There,
Keep thy keenest eye upon the boats, mark well the
whale ho again, drive off that hawk. See he pecks,

(02:08:57):
he tears the vein, pointing to the red flag flying
at the main truck. Ha. He soars away with it.
Where's the old man now? Seizt thou that sight? Oh
Ahab shudder shudder. The boats had not gone very far when,
by a signal from the mast heads, a downward pointed
arm Ahab knew that the whale had sounded, But intending

(02:09:19):
to be near him at the next rising, he held
on his way a little sideways from the vessel, the
beck armed crew, maintaining the profoundest silence as the head beat.
Waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bough. Drive drive
in your nails, oh ye, waves to their uttermost heads,
drive them in, ye, But strike a thing without a

(02:09:40):
lid and no coffin, and no horse can be mine,
and hemp only can kill me. Ha ha. Suddenly the
waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles, then quickly upheaped,
as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice.
Swiftly rising to the surface, A low rummbling sound was heard,

(02:10:01):
a subterraneous hum, and then all held their breaths as
bedraggled with trailing ropes and harpoons and lances. A vast
form shot lengthwise but obliquely from the sea, Shrouded in
a thin, drooping veil of mist. It hovered for a
moment in the rainbowt air, and then fell, swamping back
into the deep, crushed thirty feet upwards. The waters flashed

(02:10:22):
for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank
in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface cream
like new milk. Round the marble trunk of the whale
give way. Criday happed to the oarsmen, and the boats
darted forward to the attack, but maddened by yesterday's fresh
irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed

(02:10:43):
by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide
tears of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead beneath
the transparent skin looked knitted together as head on. He came,
churning his tail among the boats and once more flailed
them apart, spilling out the irons and lances from from
the two mate's boats and dashing in one side of
the upper part of their bows, believing Ahabs almost without

(02:11:05):
a scar, while de Goo and tash Tago were stopping
the strained planks, and as the whale swimming out from them,
turned and showed one entire flank as he shot by
them again. At that moment, a quick cry went up,
lashed round and round to the fish's back, pinioned in
the turns upon turns in which during the past night
the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him.

(02:11:27):
The half torn body of the Parsi was seen, his
sable raiment frey to shreds. His distended eyes turned full
upon Old Ahab. The harpoon dropped from his hand, befold befold,
drawing in a long, lean breath, eye parse. I see
THEE again, aye an thou goest before. And this, this

(02:11:49):
then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I
hold THEE to the last letter of thy word. Where
is the second hearse? Away mates to the sh ship.
Those boats are useless. Now repair them if he can
in time and return to me. If not Ahab is
enough to die down men, the first thing that but

(02:12:10):
offers to jump from this boat, I stand in that thing.
I harpoon. Ye are not other men but my arms
and my legs, and so obey me do it? Where's
the whale gone down? Again? But he looked too nigh
the boat, for as if bent upon escaping with the
corpsey boar, and as if the particular place of the
last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage.

(02:12:32):
Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward, and had
almost passed the ship, which thus far had been sailing
in the contrary direction to him, though for the present
her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his
utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own
straight path in the sea. Oh, Ahab, cried Starbuck. Not

(02:12:54):
too late, is it even now the third day? To desist?
See moby Dick seeks thee Not it is thou thou
that madly seekest him. Setting sail to the rising wind,
the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to leeward by both
oars and canvas, And at last, when Ahab was sliding

(02:13:16):
by the vessel so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's
face as he leaned over the rail, he hailed him
to turn the vessel about and follow him, not too swiftly.
At a judicious interval, glancing upwards, he saw Tashtago Quek
wake and to go eagerly mounting to the three mastheads,
while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats,
which had but just been hoisted to the side, and

(02:13:38):
were busily at work in repairing them one after the other.
Through the portholes. As he sped, he also caught flying
glimpses of stubborn flask busying themselves on deck among bundles
of new irons and lances. As he saw all this,
as he heard the hammers and the broken boats, far
other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart, but

(02:13:59):
he ran allied, and now marking that the Vaner flag
was gone from the mainmast head, he shouted detached Tago,
who had just gained that perch, to descend again for
another flag and a hammer and nails, and so nail
it to the mast. Whether faggied by the three days
running chase and the resistance to his swimming in the
knotted hamper he bore, or whether it was some latent

(02:14:21):
deceitfulness and malice in him whichever was true. The white
whales way now began to abate, as it seemed from
the boat, so rapidly, nearing him once more, though indeed
the whales last start had not been so long a
one as before. And still, as Ahab glided over the waves,
the unpitying sharks accompanied him, and so partinaciously stuck to
the boat, and so continually bit at the plying oars

(02:14:42):
that the blades became jagged and crunched, and left small
splinters in the sea at almost every dip. Heed them,
not those teeth, but give new row locks to your oars.
Pull on, tis the better rest the shark's jaw than
the yielding water. But at every bite, sir, the thin

(02:15:03):
blades grow smaller and smaller. They will last long enough.
Pull on, But who can tell, he muttered, whether these
sharks swim a feast on the whale or on Ahab.
But pull on. I all alive. Now we near him
the helm, Take the helm, let me pass, And so, saying,

(02:15:23):
two of the oarsmen helped him forward to the bows
of the still flying boat at length, as the craft
was cast to one side and ran ranging along with
the white whale's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance,
as the whale sometimes will an. Ahab was fairly within
the smoky mountain mist, which thrown off from the whale spout,
curled round his great Monadna hump. He was even thus

(02:15:45):
close to him when, with body arched back and both
arms lengthwise highlfted to the poise, he darted his fierce
iron and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale.
As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as
if sucked into a morass. T he Dick's sideways, writhes,
spasmodically rolled his knife blank against the bow, and without
staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat

(02:16:08):
over that had it not been for the elevated part
of the gunnel to which he then clung, Ahab would
once more have been tossed into the sea, as it was.
Three of the oarsmen, who foreknew not the precise instant
of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects.
These were flung out, but so fell that in an
instant two of them clutched the gunnel again, and rising

(02:16:28):
to its level on a combing wave hurled themselves bodily
inboard again, the third man helplessly dropping astern but still
afloat in swimming almost simultaneously with a mighty volition of
ungraduated instantaneous swiftness, the white whale darted through the weltering sea.
But when Ahab cried out to the steersmen to take

(02:16:48):
new turns with the line and hold it so, and
commanded the crew to turn round on their seats and
tow the boat up to the mark. The moment the
treacherous line felt that double stream and tug it snapped
in the empty air. What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks,
tiss hole again, oars, oars burst in upon him. Hearing

(02:17:12):
the tremendous rush of the sea crashing boat, the whale
wheeled round to present his blank foreheaded bay. But in
that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of
the ship, seemingly seeing in it the source of all
his persecutions, bethinking it it may be a larger ennobler foe.
Of a sudden he bore down upon its advancing prow,
Smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam, Ahab staggered

(02:17:35):
his hands smote his forehead. I grow blind, hands stretch
out before me that I may yet grope my way
is night the whale. The ship cried the cringing oarsman, oars,
oars slope downwards to thy depths. Oh see that ere

(02:17:57):
it be forever too late. Ahab may slide this last
last time upon his mark. I see the ship, the
ship dash on my men, will ye not save my ship?
But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
sledge hammering seas the before whale smitten bowens of two

(02:18:18):
planks burst through, and in an instant almost the temporarily
disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves. It's half
waiting splashing crew trying hard to stop the gap and
bail out the pouring water. Meantime for that one beholding instant,
tash Tago's mast head hammer remained suspended in his hand,
and the red flag half wrapping him as with a plaid,

(02:18:39):
then streamed itself straight out from him as his own
forward flowing heart. While Starbuck and Stub standing upon the
bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the downcoming monster. Just as
soon as he the whale, the whale up helm e one,
up Helm, Oh all ye sweet powers of air. Now
hug me clob let not Starbuck die if die he

(02:19:03):
must in a woman's fainting fit. Up Helm, I say,
de fools, the jaw, the jaw. Is this the end
of all my bursting prayers, all my lifelong fidelities. Oh a,
haveb a, haveb lo thy work, steady helmsman, steady, nay nay,

(02:19:28):
up Helm. Again he turns to meet us. Oh, his
unappeasable brow drives on towards one whose duty tells him
he cannot depart. My God, stand by me. Now stand
not by me, but stand under me. Whoever you are
that will now help Stub for Stub two sticks here.

(02:19:50):
I grin at thee thou grinning wail. Whoever helps Stub
or kept Stub awake but stubszone unwinking eye. And now
poor Stubb goes to upon a mattress that is all
too soft. Would it were stuffed with brushwood? I grin
at thee thou grinning whale. Look ye, sun, moon and stars.

(02:20:11):
I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as
ever spouted up his ghost, for all that I would
yet ring glasses with ye would gee but ham the cup.
Oh oh, oh oh, thou grinning whale. But there ll
be plenty of gulping soon. Why fly ye not oh
a hab for me? Off shoes and jacket to it.

(02:20:35):
Let Stub die in his drawers, a most moldy and
over salted death. Though cherries, cherries, cherries, Oh, flask for
one red cherry. Ere we die cherries. I only wish
that we were where they grow, Oh Stub. I hope

(02:20:56):
my poor mother's drawn my part pay air this if
not few cop uppers will now come to her for
the voyages up from the ship's bows. Nearly all the
seamen now hung inactive hammers, bits of plank, lances, and
harpoons mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had
darted from their various employments, all their enchanted eyes intent

(02:21:16):
upon the whale, which, from side to side, strangely vibrating
his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular
foam before him as he rushed. Retribution. Swift, vengeance, eternal
malice were in his whole aspect. In spite of all
that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of
his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow till men and

(02:21:37):
timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces, like dislodged trucks.
The heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull
like necks through the breach. They heard the waters pour
as mountain torrents down a flume. This ship the hearse
the second hearse, cried Ahab from the boat. Its wood

(02:21:59):
can only be American. Diving beneath the settling ship, the
whale ran, quivering along its keel, but turning under water
swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow,
but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where for
a time he lay quiescent. I turned my body from
the sun. What ho tash tago Let me hear thy hammer,

(02:22:25):
Oh ye, three unsurrendered spires of mine, Thou uncracked keel
and only got bullied hull, thou firm deck and haughty
helm and pole pointed prow death. Glorious ship must ye
then perish, and without me am I cut off from
the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains. Oh, lonely death,

(02:22:46):
on lonely life. Oh now I feel my topmost greatness
lies in my topmost grief. Ho, Ho, from all your
furthest bounds pour ye know in ye bowld billows of
my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber
of my death. Towards the I roll thou, all destroying
but unconquering whale to the last. I grapple with THEE

(02:23:08):
from Hell's heart. I stab at THEE for hate's sake.
I spit my last breath at THEE. Sink all coffins
and all hearses to one common pool. And since neither
can be mine, let me then toe to pieces, while
still chasing THEE. Though tie to THEE thout end whale.
Thus I give up the spear. The harpoon was darted.

(02:23:29):
The stricken whale flew forward with igniting velocity. The line
ran through the groove, ran foul ahab stooped to clear it.
He did clear it, but the flying turn caught him
round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes boasting their victim,
he was shot out of the boat. Ere the crew
knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy ice splice

(02:23:49):
in the rope's final len flew out of the stark
empty tub knocked down an oarsman and smiting, the sea
disappeared in its depths for an instant. The tranced boat's
crews stood still, then turned the ship, great God, where
is the ship? He? Too soon they threw dim bewildering
mediums saw her sidelong, fading phantom as in the gaseous

(02:24:11):
fatom organa, only the uppermost masts out of water. While
fixed by infatuation or fidelity or fate to their once
lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts
on the sea, and now concentric circles seized the loan
boat itself and all its crew, and each floating moor,
and every lance pole and spinning animated and inanimate, all

(02:24:33):
round and round. In one vortex carried the smallest chip
of the pequat out of sight, but as the last
whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the
Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the
erect spa yet visible. Together with long streaming yards of
the flag, which calmly undulated with ironical coincidings over the

(02:24:54):
destroying billows, they almost touched. At that instant a red
arm and a hammer hovered backwardly upload lifted in the
open air in the act of nailing the flag, faster
and yet faster to the subsiding spar a skyhawk that
tauntingly had followed the main truck downwards from its natural
home among the stars, pecking at the flag and incommoding
tash tago there this bird now chanced to intercept its

(02:25:17):
broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood, and simultaneously,
feeling that ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath in his
death grasp, kept his hammer frozen there. And so the
Bird of Heaven, with archangelic shrieks and his imperial beak
thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the
flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan,

(02:25:38):
would not sink to Hell till she had dragged a
living part of Heaven along with her and helmeted herself
with it. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet
yawning gulf. A sullen white surfbeat against its steep sides.
Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea
rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago, apologue,

(02:26:00):
and I only am escaped alone to tell the job
the drama's done. Why then, here does anyone step forth?
Because one did survive the wreck. It so chanced that
after the Parsi's disappearance, I was s hee whom the
fates are deagned to take the place of Ahab's bozeman,
when that bozeman assumed the vacant post. The same when

(02:26:22):
on the last day the three men were tossed from
out the rocking boat was dropped astern, so floating on
the margin of the ensuing scene and in full sight
of it. When the half spent suction of the sunship
reached me, I was then but slowly drawn towards the
closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to
a creamy pool, round and round, then and ever contracting

(02:26:45):
towards the button like black bubble at the axis of
that slowly wheeling circle. Like another rick scion, I did
revolve till gaining the vital center the black bubble upward
burst and now liberated by reason of its cunning spring
and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force,
the coffin life buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell

(02:27:06):
over and floated by my side, buoyed up by that coffin.
For almost one whole day and night, I floated on
a soft and dirge like Maine. The unharming sharks they
glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths. The
savage seahawks sailed with sheet beaks. On the second day,
a sail drew near nearer and picked me up at last.

(02:27:28):
It was the deedious cruising Rachel that, in her retracing
search after her missing children, only found another orphan finess
about the offer. Herman Melville was born on August first,
eighteen nineteen, in New York City, the son of a merchant.
His father died when he was only twelve, and Hermann

(02:27:51):
worked as a bank clerk and later an elementary school
teacher before shipping off on a whaling ship bound for
the Pacific. Upon his return, he published a number of
books based on his experiences at sea, which won him
immediate success. By eighteen fifty, he was married and had
acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he wrote Moby Dick.

(02:28:13):
His later works, including Moby Dick, became increasingly complex and
alienated many of his readers. In eighteen sixty three, during
the Civil War, he moved back to New York City,
where he died. In eighteen ninety one. Pigeon Publishing House
presented Moby Dick author Kerman Melville. Thank you for listening

(02:28:39):
to this audio book. We hope you enjoyed it. If
you enjoyed this classic, follow the show and leave a
quick review, and join us every Tuesday and Thursday for

(02:28:59):
more timeless stories. M

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Moby-Dick - Full Audiobook (Herman Melville) | Part 3 of 3

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Moby-Dick - Full Audiobook (Herman Melville) | Part 3 of 3