180 
MOBY DICK; OR 
were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voy- 
ages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. 
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains 
over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for 
ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, 
till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and 
courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing 
lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead. 
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his 
cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they 
were brought out ; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, 
and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans 
before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with 
a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought 
of his soul. 
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the levia- 
thans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one 
solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. 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 food ; and, also, 
calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in 
particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost ap- 
proaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this 
or that ground in search of his prey. 
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodioalness of the 
sperm whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, 
could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were 
the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then 
the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in 
invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. 
On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory 
charts of the sperm whale . 1 
1 Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an 
official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, 
Washington, 16th April 1851. By that circular, it appears that precisely 
such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented 
in the circular. “This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees 
of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of 
