Seeing Captain Ahab Anew

In Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab, the captain of the whaling ship The Pequod, lost his leg to a great white whale named Moby Dick. This “demasting” of Ahab brought on an obsessive vengeance against Moby Dick. The cause of his anger and vengeance was clear and within memory.

The men of his ship have signed on without having seen their captain. It becomes evident quickly that Ahab is obsessed with finding and killing Moby Dick. Every ship they encounter on the seas, Ahab’s first question is whether they have seen Moby Dick.

The ship Samuel Enderby comes along side, captained by Captain Boomer, an Englishman. Ahab has difficulty boarding the other ship. Ahab has outfitted his ship with devices to accommodate his ivory stump. He has a hole in the floor that secures his stump. But he is clumsy and helpless in places other than his own ship. When Ahab boards The Enderby, the gracious captain aids Ahab’s climb onto his ship. This captain has seen Moby Dick, in fact, has lost an arm to the white whale. His reaction to the loss is the opposite of Ahab’s. He came across Moby Dick twice again. Ahab assumes the captain would want to catch him. But Boomer said, “Didn’t try to; ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I am thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he swallows. . . . No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me…. There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he is the best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?” p. 461 Ahab only wants to know which way the whale was headed. Captain Boomer asks, “Is your Captain crazy?” p. 462

As Ahab disembarks The Enderby he splinters his ivory leg. The carpenter on board The Pequod must make him a new one. As the carpenter works, he and Ahab discuss whether Ahab feels pain in his leg even though it’s no longer there. Ahab says he does feel pain. He has “only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul.” p491 Ahab can’t see why if there is pain where there is no body, then an afterlife could be the “fiery pains of hell forever” even though the body is no more. Ahab is always aware of the pain from this wound even though it appears to be healed and replaced.

Ahab sees the skill of the carpenter to smooth cracks and dents. He asks if he can smooth any dent. The carpenter says, “Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.” When Ahab asks about a scar on his face, the carpenter says he can’t do that one. And the crack in Ahab’s soul/psychy is one the carpenter cannot smooth over.

Ahab admits, though his natural soul knows otherwise, he must press on. It might not be his will, but God’s. Perhaps he is a tool of Fate and not a self-willed individual. Perhaps Ahab thinks he can place his actions, his vengeance at the feet of a greater power controlling him, but it would be clear to most that his actions are a direct result of his wounds and the injury done to him.

The Pequod encountered a horrific storm at sea which altered the compasses. Ahab figured out how to reset the directional compass his own way, “true as any.”p.539 “Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level lodestone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!” p. 539 “In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.”p. 539

Another ship, The Rachael, comes along side. The captain pleads for Ahab’s help in finding one of their boats that is lost. The captain’s 12 year old son was on it. Starbuck was certain Ahab could not refuse such a request, but Ahab’s focus on Moby Dick cannot not be distracted. Even though Ahab has a young son at home with his wife, any compassion that Ahab might have, cannot rise above Ahab’s obsession with whale. Starbuck, the first mate, makes a last attempt to urge Ahab to go home to his wife and child and quit this lunatic chase.

Ahab is obsessed with striking back at the white whale even risking his life and the lives of his crew. His crew is essentially locked into Ahab’s mission because they signed on for this whaling expedition. Ahab offers gold for the sighting of Moby Dick. He does not heed any omens or actions from any of his crew and they do not seriously press him to give up this demon driving him. They are all on this ship together, and they would all die together for the sake of Ahab’s vengeance, with the exception of Ismael who much survive to tell the story of the tragedy of one man’s obsessive vengeance caused by his wound that destroys everything around him.

Surreptitiously brought aboard are some strange looking men, among them a fellow named Fedallah. The ship’s mates, Stubb and Flask, talk about what they think of this strange man they call a devil.

Flask asked, “What’s the old man (Ahab) have so much to do with him for?”

Stubb answers that the devil is seeking a bargain with Ahab. “Why, do you see,

the old man is hard after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he’ll surrender Moby Dick.” p.346

Starbuck sees Ahab’s mad obsession and decries his inability to defy Ahab’s will.

“My soul is more that matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who’s over him, he cries;—aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it….

“Oh,God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them!” p.188

The narrator questions what was in men’s minds that they would sign on as crew to a ship captained by a man so disabled, both physically and emotionally. The question also asked is why businessmen with capital invested in the ship and the venture would risk it with this severely wounded captain.

“…considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners must have plainly thought not.” p. 249

Ismael voices his concerns:

“The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.

“Here, then was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.” p203-206

Starbuck, the first mate, is the only man aboard who pleads with Ahab several times to quit the chase. Ahab had a special harpoon made. When it burst into flames in a storm, Starbuck told Ahab that this voyage was cursed and they should go home, but Ahab was committed body and soul to killing Moby Dick.

Starbuck later finds the musket that Ahab earlier had threatened him with. He ponders the possibility that he could kill Ahab and save the crew. He says, “But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?” p. 535

Starbuck debates with himself, but he can think of no legal way to wrest the ship from Ahab so he relents and returns to his work. As for the crew, their “fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate.”

Ahab offers a gold doubloon to the first man to sight Moby Dick, but in the end it is Ahab who claims the doubloon, saying he sighted the great whale first. The gold doubloon has an engraving of three Andes summits—a flame, a volcano, a crowing cock and the zodiac depicting the seasons of life. Everyone who looks at the doubloon sees whatever emanates from within himself. Each man sees the world from his eyes and creates his own vision interpreted by his own essence.

Just as with the doubloon, when the ship is sailing on peaceful, beautiful seas, each man looks out and sees his own soul (his essence): Ahab see himself as an orphaned bastard; Starbuck sees his good life, not wanting to know about the sharks beneath; and Stubb says he’s always been jolly. It would seem that Melville sees man’s view of his world as an outpouring of what is inside him. Ahab later analyzes himself , “I am darkness leaping out of light.” p. 527 The reader assumes that his darkness came out of his demasting by Moby Dick.

In the chase, Ahab exhorts his crew. “Ye are not other men, but my arms and legs; and so obey me.”

In the end Ahab is killed pursuing Moby Dick, his ship sinks, and all his men, save one, are lost. The Rachael picked up Ishmael the second day, floating in Queequeg’s coffin that had been waterproofed as a lifebuoy, ironically saving Ismael’s life.

Ahab is only one of many humans that have been wounded emotionally or psychically. Some are able to come to terms with their injuries, but some, like Ahab, are relentless in their vengeance, even when it brings harm to others. As Ahab tells Starbuck in the final chapters, “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.”

A wound need not be physical, as with ahab, but can be caused by other kinds of abuse. Other wounds can be such a part of someone’s existence that they are not recognized. Some people are just angry and seek vengeance because they don’t recognize that they are injured. Thus there might be no single target for the vengeance but a general lashing out.

Great literature does not just tell about one-man in one time, but tells us something about humanity, its courage and its frailties. The hope for all of us is that one man or woman does not long effect the course of history; history goes on, much like the universe continues to expand. The final lines of Moby Dick, when the ship has sunk, iterate this hope for humanity. “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” p.592

[All references are from Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, Toronto, 1991.]