428 
MOBY DICK; OR 
CHAPTER CV 
ahab's leg 
The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the 
Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small 
violence to his own person. He had alighted with such energy 
upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splinter- 
ing shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot- 
hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command 
to the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering in- 
flexibly enough) ; then, the already shaken ivory received such an ad- 
ditional twist and wrench that though it still remained entire, and 
to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trust- 
worthy. 
And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his 
pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the 
condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. Eor it 
had not been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Han tucket, 
that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and 
insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimagi- 
nable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that 
it had stakewise smitten, and all but pierced his groin ; nor was it with- 
out extreme difficulty that the agonising wound was entirely cured. 
Hor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that 
all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue 
of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most 
poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as 
the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all 
miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, 
thought Ahab ; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further 
than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. Eor, not to hint of this: that 
it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some 
natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the 
other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childless- 
ness of all hell’s despair ; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still 
fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs 
