Moby Dick (nonfiction)
Quotations
Pasteboard masks
AHAB. Mr Starbuck, do you ever ponder the movements of whales around the four oceans?
STARBUCK. I only know that they appear at certain feeding grounds in a certain season.
AHAB. Look here. [HE OPENS A CHART] Log books from the time New Bedford men first went a’ whaling helped me draw this chart. It divides the oceans into areas of 5 degrees of latitude by 5 of longitude. Here the months of the years. The ships that passed. How long they lingered. The whales they saw. What size, what colour, how many, where heading.
STARBUCK. I never saw the like.
AHAB. This way the humpbacks go, the blue, the right, the spermaceti. Sea mile by sea mile, I know their hidden journeys as I know the veins in my arm.
STARBUCK. You mean to say that their journeys can be foretold?
AHAB. Aye, like the blood pumping in my veins, from heart to head.
STARBUCK. If this be so, we can follow along with the herds, killing as we go ... fill our hold in record time.
AHAB. So we shall, Mr Starbuck, so we shall, once we’ve attended to our bigger business.
STARBUCK. What is that business, captain?
AHAB. Him, Mr Starbuck, him. What’s true for the herds holds largely for the great solitaries and hermits. If these sources tell the truth, and my calculations are not faulty, he now swims the waters off Good Hope, and all the Indian Ocean lies before him. Next month he cruises the Bengal Bay; March, the Sulu Sea; running eastward, to the gateway of the Pacific. I shall be waiting for him here [HE POINTS TO BIKINI ATOLL] at new moon in April. [STARBUCK STARTS TO WALK OUT]. Mr Starbuck!
STARBUCK. I must give the helmsman our course.
AHAB. Come about, sir. [STARBUCK TURNS ROUND AND COMES BACK]. Why are you wearing that long face? Are you not game for Moby Dick?
STARBUCK. Captain Ahab, I am game for any kind of death if it comes in the way of the business we follow. That be known. But I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels of sperm oil will thy vengeance yield? What will it fetch on the New Bedford market?
AHAB. Money’s not the measure, man. It will fetch me a great premium ... here.
STARBUCK. To be enraged with a dumb brute that acted out of blind instinct is blasphemous.
AHAB. Speak not to me of blasphemy, man, I’d strike the Sun if it insulted me. Look ye, Starbuck. All visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of their features. The white whale tasks me, he heaps me, yet he is but a mask. It is the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate, the malignant thing that has plagued and frightened man since time began. The thing that mauls and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on with half a heart and half a lung.
STARBUCK. God keep us, keep us all ...
AHAB. The crew stands with me, Mr Starbuck. You heard them swear. Now, what say ye? Surely the best lance out of all New Bedford will not hold back from the greatest hunt of all.
STARBUCK. I say calmly back to thee, sir, I am against thee. But thee needn’t fear Starbuck. Let Ahab beware Ahab. Beware thyself, my captain. [HE TURNS ROUND AND WALKS OUT]
