The Chase for Moby Dick, “the grand god,” continued on Day 2. The crew of the Pequod were transformed by the chase. As Ishmael described it:

“The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirrings of the previous day the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless, way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled 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.

Like the American motto: e pluribus unum. Out of many one. But this crew, were one in this unholy chase. I have always said, the essence of religion is connection. The crew of thirty were connected in an unholy cause. But they were connected, even if the religion was black. As Ishmael said, they “were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.” Now blasphemously, Ahab had become their God.  “How they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them.”

Astonishingly, with the harpoons stuck to him, Moby Dick breached the surface:

“…not by the peaceful 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. 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, show his place to the distance of seven miles and more…this breaching is his act of defiance… as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven.”

Or was it hell? Then Moby Dick turned upon the three “devoted boats” that had “planted irons in him.” They were devoted like true believers clinging to their god. But the god in fury turned on the 3 boats and “seemed intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made.” Finally the men in their mad pursuit had created the vengeful creature Ahab thought he was. The whale attacked Ahab’s boat from beneath the surface:

“Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires,–as arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and sent it turning over and over, into the air, till it fell again.”

The white whale almost succeeded in shoving Ahab toward heaven.

Starbuck again tries to persuade Ahab to give up the quest:

“Great God! But for one single instant show thyself,” cried Starbuck; “never, never, wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness…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 human? Shall we be dragged by him to 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 knows this chase leads to hell, not heaven. Ahab probably knows it to, but still can’t stop. Ahab says, “Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed.. Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fate’s lieutenant; I act under orders.” Ahab thinks, as so many do that are on mad quests, that he is following God’s orders—the grand illusion of so many quests.

Some might think this long past due, but finally, we are drawing to the end of this mad quest. With 25 pages remaining in a 502-page book, Moby Dick, the great white whale is spotted.

Instead of giving up the mad quest, Ahab and his crew see the gliding whale with his white hump above the surface of the sea. Nothing did “surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.” Ahab has found God. The religious quest is over!

It was a calm day at sea. “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…the grand god, revealed himself, sounded and went out of sight.” God revealed himself only for a moment and disappeared again.  That’s what gods do.

As the three boats waited, the whale did return to the surface in time: he peered into the depths of the sea until “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 were plainly revealed two long spoked rows of white, glistening, teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom…the glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored, marble tomb.”

With its “malicious intelligence” that only Ahab could see, the whale ducked its head beneath the boat that carried Ahab in hot pursuit and shook it “as a mildly cruel cat her mouse…as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in his devilish way.” Ahab was in the jaws of the whale, like Jonah, but this drove Ahab even madder. “That monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated.” The whale bit Ahab’s boat in two.

Yet Ahab returned to the ship, and they continued the pursuit. Nothing could stop him. As Stubb said, “O whale! The mad fiend himself is after ye!” The men of the crew had “growing awe of Ahab.” The men were in awe of Ahab, they should have feared him.

The chase was not over, but continued into the second day, with the harpoons in the great white whale.

Starbuck, another member of the crew in Moby Dick, was clearly a  good man caught up in a storm. He was the first mate and was the voice of reason on the ship.  He was also a very religious man, even by the standards of the 19^th century. He was a Quaker and came to realize that Captain Ahab was mad and that unless he killed him the crew would likely die and he would never see his wife and children again. He was the exact opposite of the Captain, but he just could not pull the trigger. Perhaps his religion restrained him. If it was, his God, God cost a lot of lives, as we know before the voyage is over.

Near the end when the ship was in the midst of a rare tranquil sea.  Ishmael described it this way, Ahab learns the painful truth.  “…he seemed to hear in his own true heart, the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around.”

Near the end of the voyage, Ahab realized that  he had “forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep.”   For forty years he had declared war on nature. This is another great theme of the book, that sadly, I have been neglecting in order to talk about the religious quest.  Like the Israelites he had been in the wilderness. But finally, Ahab recognized his huge error. As he said to Starbuck, “for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul.” Ahab knows the quest has shriveled his soul. Not what religious quests should do. They should expand the soul. What went wrong?

Ahab realized he was

“whole oceans away from 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 widowed that poor girl when I married her.”

Ahab finally has the knowledge of what he had done and it is not too late to turn back for home as Starbuck begs him to do. Instead of spending time with his lovely young wife he went a-whaling in mad pursuit of a white whale. As Ahab told Starbuck,

“I married her Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brown, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!”

The quest had turned him into a fiend. Ahab realized he had been a “forty years fool.” Ahab asks God to “crack my heart! Stave my brain.” Ahab begs his first mate Starbuck to “let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! This is the magic glass; I see my wife and child in thine eye.” Finally Ahab has a connection. I would say a real religious connection; not a mad quest.

It seems like at long last Ahab realizes what a mistake he has made for forty years. So, Starbuck gives him one last chance. He begs him to give up this mad chase. “Let us fly these deadly waters! Let us home!”

Despite his new knowledge of his dreadful mistake, Ahab cannot give up the chase. He knows his quest is mad yet this is what he says:

“What is it, what nameless inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, 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 Ahab, Ahab? Is it I? God or who lifts this arm?”

Is God at fault? Why? Ahab cannot resist the mad quest. He is helpless before it. That is precisely why he is mad and why the quest is mad. Any quest like that would be mad.

As Ahab refused to help the woeful Rachel and her captain, it became ever clearer, that Ahab is mad. His pursuit is unbridled madness. Ahab had returned to the very part of the ocean where he had been ravished by Moby Dick in their first encounter. It was also where the captain of the Rachel had said he saw Moby Dick. It was the very place where with “demoniac indifference…the white whale tore his hunters.” At the same time and place where they had returned, “there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see.  As the unsettling 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.”

Then, the crew could feel their doom approaching:

“Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to fine 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.”

The next morning however Captain Ahab was seen on deck on a day where the

“…the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with a long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep…the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks, and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.”

This was the world of the Pacific visited by the crew of the Pequod. In a remarkable description of Ahab Melville continued the theme:

“Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding: his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruins; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.”

Ishmael, the narrator, keeps talking about the masculine and the feminine. Is this the marriage of heaven and hell? On the one hand there is the beautiful azure sea, but there is also “Ahab’s closed coiled woe” and “that burned out crater of his brain.” Ahab could stand at the edge of the ship, lean over the side and see his shadow sink in the water

“the more he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.”

Then astonishingly that azure blue sky had pity on the old man who had no pity for the captain of the Rachel whom he refused to help:

“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 willful and erring, she 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 wee drop.”

After all the madness of the quest, this gentleness, so near the end, seems impossible. Maybe its a miracle?

A shocking incident happens near the end of the book Moby Dick when the Pequod meets another vessel, the Rachel, in the middle of the Pacific. The Captain of the Rachel comes onto the Pequod. Ahab, as always obsessed with the White Whale can think of nothing else and asks the other captain immediately if he has seen the White Whale.  When the captain said he did, Ahab had to “throttle his joy” as that captain asked if Ahab had seen a whale-boat adrift. Ahab did not want to hear the story of the whale boat, he was intent on moving as soon as possible to pursue the white whale. But the captain begs captain Ahab for help.

It turns out that the Rachel had seen the White Whale and sent 4 whale boats in pursuit, like the 4 apostles. Unfortunately, 1 of those 4 whale boats was lost, like Pim had been lost and miraculously picked up.  That lost whale boat held the captain’s 12-year old son. The same age as Jesus when he rose out of his childhood. The captain begged Ahab to join him in the search for the missing boat with his son. But Ahab “still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.” The story did not resonate with Ahab.  Ahab felt no fellow feeling, no empathy. He was like an anvil.

As I have argued elsewhere in  previous blogs, it is my belief that fellow feeling or empathy is the common core of all religion.  Nothing else matters. With it you have religion. Without it you have nothing. And Ahab had nothing.  The Rachel’s captain knows that Ahab has a young son too. He should feel fellow feeling.  The captain of the Rachel begs captain Ahab: “Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case.” He echoed the words of Christ—exactly the words that I assert are the core of all major religions. But Ahab demonstrated clearly, this core was missing in him. He was just an anvil. Ahab replies, “may I forgive myself, but I must go.” Ahab is too obsessed to give any time at all to the Rachel’s plight. He is prepared to let a 12-year old child die rather than take a little time in a 4 year voyage to help someone out. He must go.

As the Rachel left, alone, “By her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that his ship so wept with spray;  still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.” The symbol of Rachel weeping for her children is drawn directly from the book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible. A deep suggestion of human compassion, entirely missing in Ahab.  Ahab has no religion!

In the novel Moby Dick, as the ship Pequod got closer to the seas where the white whale was known to haunt, things got strange. Very strange. It was a night of corpusants or St. Elmo’s fire. According to Professor Google, that is a lightning charge surrounded by an ionization of the surrounding atmosphere. The three tall masts of the ship were hit by lightning and were “silently burning in that sulphurous, air like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.” What an incredible image!

The men are naturally fearful and for good reason.  Ishmael described the scene as if the book of Daniel from the Bible was transformed to a 19^th century whaling ship:

“To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of the calm, and the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin’ has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.”

Those words of course come from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. King Belshazzar held a great feast where drinks were drunk from vessels looted in the destruction of the First Temple. A hand appeared and wrote those words on the wall. King Belshazzar called wise men to read the writing to him,  but they could not read them. The Queen advised him to call Daniel instead. Daniel reminded King Belshazzar that his father Nebuchadnezzar was thrown down when he became arrogant and until he learned to submit to God. Daniel said Belshazzar failed and his kingdom would be given to the Medes and the Persians. That very night Belshazzar was killed as prophesied. The lesson Belshazzar had to learn was humility. That was the very same lesson Captain Ahab had to learn and also failed.

The pagan harpooneers in particular were wildly affected by the strange candles. For example, “Queequeg tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on this body.”

Ishmael said that on the Pequod, “every soul on her decks was wrapped in a pall.” Starbuck, one of the 3 mates on the ship, slowly saw the face of Stubb’s, another mate, “glimmer into sight,” as “the high tapering flames were beheld with redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor” and “the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.” They were like a trinity in hell.

At the same time, Parsee, who was not a Christian, like Ahab supposedly was, but a Zoroastrian said that at one time he worshipped the clear spirit of clear fire in the sacramental act that so burned him that he was left with a huge gash of fire spent on his face. Ahab had a face scarred by lightning. Ahab said that he knew the Parsee’s

“right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill: and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me…but war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.

Ahab comes from a place of fire and knows what it feels like to have lightning flash through his brain.:

“the lightning flashes though my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling in some stunned ground… Oh, oh,! Yet blindfold Yet I will talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness: but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee… There burned the flames! Oh magnanimous now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother I know not…oh thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all they eternity to whom all they eternity is but time, all they creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, though hermit memorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my fire. Leap! Leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee, would fain be wedded with thee; defyingly I worship thee.”

I confess I don’t know exactly what is going on here, but it seems to me I would not want to worship some clear spirit of foundling fire which my scorched eyes somehow dimly saw. It seems to me that would be worshipping something from hell. Ahab was prepared to do it. Not I.

Starbuck, a good Christian, who hears Ahab say this is fearful for the voyage he is on. He pleads with Ahab to forgo the pursuit of the whale. “God, God is against thee, old man forbear! ‘tis an ill voyage ill begun, ill continued.” Starbuck knows it is madness and sinful. Of course, the pleas go unheard. Ahab cannot end the murderous quest so close to its goal. Starbuck considers mutinously killing Ahab to end it but he does not do it. He wrestles with an angel, but lays down his musket which had been shaking in his hand like a drunkard’s arm. He does not do it even though he thinks “this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him.” Instead Starbuck cries, echoing the words of Christ on the cross, “Great God, where art thou?”

And that is the question. You tell me. That is what the quest is all about. Where is God?

There were many quests on the Pequod. It is like the 8 million stories in the naked city. Everyone has a story and each story is different. So it was on the Pequod.

Perth, the blacksmith was an old man of 60 said Ishmael. Though I don’t consider that so old. At that age he “postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow’s technical called ruin.” Until then he had been a famous artisan with ample work thanks to his reputation for fine work. He owned a house and garden, “embraced a youthful daughter-like, loving wife, and three ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove.” Life was perfect.

Yet “one night under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home and robbed them all of everything.” But this was no ordinary burglar that ruined the lives of the family, it was actually the blacksmith himself. He was drawn on a quest not unlike that of Captain Ahab. Perth was not satisfied with his idyllic life and instead “the houseless, familyless staggered off a vagabond in crape, his every woe unreverenced; his gray head a scorn to flaxen curls.” Perth could not resist the call of the sea; he went a-whaling.” He was almost as mad as Captain Ahab. Why would he do that?

For some reason his perfect life, to Perth seemed like death, so he sold everything, leading his family to ruin, and went to sea.  Melville described Perth’s seduction this way:

“Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunction against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! Bury thyself in a life which, to your equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! Put up thy gravestone, too within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee.

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith’s soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.”

 

Perth left his perfect wife an d family only because he wanted more. Why? What drove him to do that? But how many of us have done the same thing? And his family went a dying! He let his family die and chased after the thousand mermaids that were calling him to sea. One more insane quest.

I actually knew a person who gave up his professional practice, sold his lovely house, bought a sailboat, and eventually abandoned his family so he could sail the south seas. He did not go a-whaling, but he had the same idea and frankly, in my opinion ruined his life and wrecked his family.

It was an obsessive quest. These things actually happen.

I know that not many of us are likely to go a-whaling, so our spouses need not fear the specific fate of Perth’s wife and children.  But there is more than one kind of obsessive quest. The quests need not be religious either to be obsessive. It also need not be “successful,” Some people (not just men either) at the expense of ruining important relationships, excessively seek career advancement, business enhancement, wealth, fame, fortune, the attraction of an alluring partner, and many other pursuits. Ahab is not the only irrational quester. All of us need to be careful out there. One can pursue one’s bliss, but that pursuit may have immense hidden costs. We must be careful out there.

Don’t expect wonders supernatural, and above all don’t make gods of our pursuits.

I am not quite finished with Moby Dick. That might disappoint some of you, but so be it. This book is a classic. It really does repay attention.

Ishmael, the narrator of the novel, pointed out that when a whale is boiled it delivers an awful sight and an even worse smell. Wood is only needed to ignite the flames under the huge pots called “try-works.” “Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.”

But like I said the smell of the burning whale was worse. “…for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funeral pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.” Again he suggests that this religious quest is not a holy one. We must remember as well that the whale in the novel stands in for God.  So in a sense, the whalers have killed god.

The work was done at night when the “wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.” It was indeed the ship for a captain driven by revenge lust. It was the ship in hell.

The “pagan harpooneers” use huge, pronged poles to pitch hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.”

Men stood around watching,

“looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads.  Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on , and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then rushing Pequod freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire ship on the sea. Wrapped for that interval, in darkness, myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul.”

 

Have you ever read a more profound description of hell than that? Do you want to? Can there be any doubt that this was a quest for hell not heaven? Yet the ship finds both heaven and hell. “Whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.”

Yet though Ishmael says in the light of day, the only true light, “those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in the far other, at least gentler relief; the glorious golden sun, the only true lamp—others but liars.”

Maybe this hell at night on the dark sea is only an illusion. Maybe heaven will be found in the morning. Or is heaven an illusion? And in a way it was found. The heaven of Tahiti! I will explain more about this later.

As I said earlier, many members of the Pequod crew were on religious quests. One of those was Pip. An astonishing incident occurred to a little negro boy, Pip, “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew.” After all he was a mere boy and a black one at that. Except that Pip was very bright, we are told.

When one of the men who was scheduled to go  the small whaling boats pursuing  a whale that had  harpooned, sprained his hand little Pip was put in the boat to temporarily replace him. Ordinarily he would have stayed with the mother ship.  He was really too young and small. When the boat approach the harpooned the tail of the whale whipped at the small boat and it came right under Pip’s boat  and he veritably leaped out of the small boat and then was dragged by the whale as it fled. The men had to cut Pip free,  but that meant losing the whale. The first time it happened he got a stern lecture from Stubb, one of the mates. He was reminded that “a whale would sell for 30 times what he would sell for.”  Being a black boy in slavery he was worth a lot less than the whale and next time he would not be saved. Stubb told him men loved money more than their fellow men.

Well, sure enough it happened again and this time Stubb was true to his word and the boat in hot pursuit of the whale did not stop to pick up Pip when he was cut loose, although Stubb thought the next whaling boat would pick him up. There were two behind him. After all the ocean was dead calm that day. Unfortunately, the next two boats did not pick him up.  Alas poor Pip was lost at sea. Eventually the mother ship found and rescued Pip, but by then he had suffered such terrible loneliness in the ocean the experience  damaged his mind. In an astonishing but mysterious passage As Ishmael described it this way:

“from that day the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”

What is God doing with his foot on the treadle of a loom?  What is miser-merman wisdom? This abandonment of Pip presaged another abandonment later—that of Ishmael himself.  We will talk about that later. When one feels abandoned by fellows or God, or worse both, one believes one’s God is “indifferent” and madness is apt to follow. I think frequently slaves felt that God had abandoned them. Can you really blame them?  If he did not abandon them, where was he? He was supposed to be omni-present.

In Moby Dick we come to realize Captain Ahab is mad in his monomaniacal quest.  “He was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end.” Yet there was an amazing chance for him to change course. A chance to turn the quest from the malign to the benign.

An amazing encounter is experienced in the Pacific Ocean when the Pequod, of Nantucket,  captained by a madman meets the Samuel Enderby, of London. The captain of that English ship could not have been more different than Captain Ahab. The English captain lost an arm and leg to Moby Dick. He should have been twice as enraged as Ahab. But he saw the whale as noble. It had a tale “like a marble steeple” he said. The English ship and crew escaped with their lives, but had no thought of revenge. Unlike Ahab the captain of the English ship knew resentment was a poison. He thought Moby Dick doesn’t bite as much as he swallows, and he was lucky to have escaped. At sea, he crossed the white whale twice again but gave him a wide birth. He decided not to fight nature. The opposite of Ahab. The English captain said whales could not really eat humans and told Ahab “what you took for the White Whales malice was only awkwardness.”

So, the English ship returned home filled with all she needed. The captain and crew were content. They saw no need for a mad quest. “He’s best left alone, don’t you think” he asked Ahab. Ahab had a surprising admission. “He is, but he will still be hunted for all that. What is best left alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet.” Sometimes the mad quest attracts.

The English mate gave Ahab a wide birth when he walked around him. He could tell that Ahab’s blood “was at the boiling point!—his pulse makes these planks beat!” So it is with the Ahabs of the world. They are cursed by their quests. The quests drive them mad.