This is one of my wife’s favourite works of literature, and whilst reading it she was intrigued to the point of obsession by its descriptive majesty concerning the whale hunter’s trade. Not that Sal is an adherent of whale killing, you understand, but in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick no stone is left unturned in his descriptions of life at sea for a nineteenth century whaler, and to read the book, as I did myself later, is a fascinating voyage indeed.

D H Lawrence called it the “greatest book of the sea ever written”. It is a sweeping and detailed study of the obsessive quest by the enigmatic one-legged Captain Ahab to track down and kill the elusive white whale that was responsible for his missing limb. The ship that Ahab captains is the Pequod, leaving the Maryland port of Nantucket on a whaling expedition and crewed by veterans of this toughest of careers: expeditions typically lasted six months or more, often years (the longest whaling voyage is believed to be that of the Ship Nile from 1858 to 1869 — eleven years!).

The narrative voice is that of Ishmael (Call me Ishmael…the novel’s famous opening line) and he has signed up with the Pequod amid an array of colourful characters. Nantucketers rub shoulders with Polynesians, American Indians, Africans; harpooneers with boatsteerers; blacksmiths with carpenters…and all of them under the absolute control and command of Ahab. Ishmael may be a “green hand” but he is evidently a widely read man, as the literary and Biblical allusions fly thick and fast, alongside a dizzying array of technical expositions, cetological lore, and abundant nautical vocabulary and seaman’s slang.

Long regarded in the last century as a “Great American Novel”, the book was actually a commercial failure during Melville’s lifetime and had only sold about three thousand copies by the time of his death. Like many works of genius, it perhaps needed the rest of the world to “catch up” with it its broad sweep.

In any event, here’s a pivotal encounter with Moby Dick himself in which Ahab’s demented obsession is starkly manifested.

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.

“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.

While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.

The harpoon dropped from his hand.

“Befooled, befooled!”–drawing in a long lean breath–“Aye, Parsee! I see thee again.–Aye, and thou goest before; and this, THIS then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die–Down, men! the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.–Where’s the whale? gone down again?”

But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,–which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.

“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”