67 
THE WHITE WHALE 
Scripture names — a singularly common fashion on the island — and 
in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of 
the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless 
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unout- 
grown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy 
a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when 
these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with 
a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness 
and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and 
beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think 
untraditionally and independently ; receiving all nature’s sweet or 
savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and con- 
fiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental 
advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language — that man 
makes one in a whole nation’s census — a mighty pageant creature, 
formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, 
dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he 
have what seems a half wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom 
of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a 
certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal 
greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an 
one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, 
it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by 
individual circumstances. 
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whale- 
man. But unlike Captain Peleg — who cared not to rush for what was 
called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things 
the veriest of all trifles — Captain Bildad had not only been originally 
educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but 
all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely is- 
land creatures, round the Horn — all that had not moved this native 
born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his 
vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common 
consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from con- 
scientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself 
had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn 
foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled 
