38 
MOBY DICK; OR 
God, we must disobey ourselves ; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, 
wherein the hardness of obeying God consists. 
“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts 
at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by 
men will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only 
the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, 
seeks a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto 
unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been 
no other city than the modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of learned 
men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates ? Cadiz is in Spain ; as far by 
water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient 
days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, 
the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Medi- 
terranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand 
miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. 
See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from 
God ! Miserable man ! Oh ! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn ; 
with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling 
among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So 
disordered, self-condemning is his look; that had there been policemen 
in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had 
been arrested ere he touched a dock. How plainly he’s a fugitive! 
Ho baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag — no friends accompany 
him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging 
search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo ; 
and as he steps on board to see its captain in the cabin, all the sailors for 
the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s evil 
eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confi- 
dence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the 
man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome 
but still serious way, one whispers to the other — Mack, he’s robbed a 
widow’; or, ‘Joe, do you mark him; he’s a bigamist’; or, ‘Harry lad, 
I guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, 
one of the missing murderers from Sodom.’ Another runs to read the 
bill that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is 
moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a 
parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and 
