508 
MOBY DICK; OR 
whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, 
is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South Sea fishery. For 
such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible 
confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nan- 
tucket commanders, that from the simple observation of a whale when 
last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty 
accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to swim 
for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of progres- 
sion during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, 
when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well 
knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at some 
further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes 
the precise bearing oi: the cape at present visible, in order the more 
certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to 
he visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; 
for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours 
of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future 
wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious 
mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this 
hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in 
water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well-nigh as reliable as the 
steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern 
railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in 
their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and 
lightly say of it, “the up train or the down train will reach such or 
such a spot, at such and such an hour,” even so, almost, there are occa- 
sions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, ac- 
cording to the observed humour of his speed ; and they say to themselves, 
“so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, 
will have about reached this of that degree of latitude or longitude.” 
But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind 
and the sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for of what present avail 
to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him 
he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from this port? In- 
ferable from these statements are many collateral subtle matters 
touching the chase of whales. 
