CHAPTER 52
The Albatross
South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts,a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead,the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh,from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good viewof that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries--a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.
As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleachedlike the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides,this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust,while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branchesof trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set.A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those threemast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn andbepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising.Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swungover a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glidedclose under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to eachother that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of oneship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen,mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our ownlook-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.
"Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?"
But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks,was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehowfell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain,he in vain strove to make himself heard without it.Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between us.While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincingtheir observance of this ominous incident at the first mere mentionof the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused;it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boatto board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade.But taking advantage of his windward position, he again seizedhis trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel wasa Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed--"Ahoy there!This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to addressall future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years,if I am not at home, tell them to address them to-"
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly,then, in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of smallharmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly swimmingby our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins,and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger's flanks.Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must oftenbefore have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man,the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.
"Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deephelpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced.But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the shipin the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lionvoice,--"Up helm! Keep her off round the world!"
Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspireproud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct?Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started,where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we couldfor ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strangethan any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promisein the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of,or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other,swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe,they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.