For there and then, for a number of consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, because the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one signal of the Zodiac. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind however the Levanter and Simoon, may blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod’s circumnavigating wake. But within the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning truth above mentioned, nevertheless flattering it is likely to be to these hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow may he so tranquillize his unquiet coronary heart as to postpone all intervening quest. In the instance the place three years intervened between the flinging of the 2 harpoons; and I feel it could have been something more than that; the man who darted them taking place, within the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the inside, the place he travelled for a period of almost two years, typically endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the opposite common perils incident to wandering in the center of unknown regions.
It was socially acceptable for a freeborn Roman man to want intercourse with each feminine and male companions, so long as he took the penetrative role. There it was, too, that a lot of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there additionally was that tragic spot where the monomaniac previous man had found the terrible motive to his vengeance. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck should also have been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; however to no goal. Had you adopted Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that passed off on the evening succeeding that wild ratification of his goal along with his crew, you’d have seen him go to a locker within the transom, and bringing out a big wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, unfold them earlier than him on his screwed-down table.
At intervals, he would check with piles of previous log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and locations by which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating whales could with great confidence be appeared for. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s meals; and, also, calling to thoughts the common, ascertained seasons for searching him specifically latitudes; may arrive at cheap surmises, virtually approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground looking for his prey. So assured, certainly, is the actual fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters imagine that, may he be carefully noticed and studied all through the world; had been the logs for one voyage of your entire whale fleet rigorously collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale can be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. Though, in these cases, the route taken by anyone whale be straight as a surveyor’s parallel, and although the road of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake, but the arbitrary vein wherein at these occasions he is claimed to swim, usually embraces some few miles in width (roughly, because the vein is presumed to develop or contract); but never exceeds the visible sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding alongside this magic zone.
First, allow us to see thus (as I stated) in a stage, what time the shot after it’s gone out of the Piece taketh to arrive on the mark; which we know to be little or no, and is definitely not more than that wherein a travailer walketh two steps, which also is lower than the second of a minute of an hour; for supposing that the travailer walketh three miles in an hour, that are 9 thousand paces, being that an hour containes three thousand, six hundred second minutes, the travailer walketh two steps and an half in a second, a second therefore is greater than the time of the balls movement. I say I, myself, have identified three cases just like this; that’s in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second assault, noticed the two irons with the respective marks minimize in them, afterwards taken from the lifeless fish. Secondly: It is well-known within the Sperm Whale Fishery, nonetheless ignorant the world ashore could also be of it, that there have been several memorable historic situations the place a selected whale within the ocean has been at distant instances and locations popularly cognisable. Within the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the many Bays of latest Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with loads of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to search for it when it shall have ascended again.
