THE WHITE WHALE ie« 
thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, 
with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him. 
The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly 
ascribed to a kindred cause. .And so too all the added moodiness which 
always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in* the Pequod on the 
present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, 
that far from distrusting his tkness for another whaling voyage, on 
account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent 
isle were inclined to harbour the conceit, that for those very reasons 
he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of 
rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and 
sore without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable 
idea ; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart 
his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, 
if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet 
such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl 
on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it 
is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed 
in h;im, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the 
one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had 
any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what 
was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous 
souls have wrenched the ship from such a fienflish man! They were 
bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from 
the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and super- 
natural revenge. 
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 indiffer- 
ence 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. How it was 
that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire — by what evil 
magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost 
theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how 
