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silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness

of his habits, the French call him Requin.





Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual

wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails

in all imaginations?  Not Coleridge first threw that spell;

but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.*





*I remember the first albatross I ever saw.  It was during

a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas.

From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck;

and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing

of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime.

At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to

embrace some holy ark.  Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it.

Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost

in supernatural distress.  Through its inexpressible, strange eyes,

methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God.  As Abraham

before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white,

its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had

lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns.

Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage.  I cannot tell,

can only hint, the things that darted through me then.

But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this.

A goney, he replied.  Goney! never had heard that name before;

is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown

to men ashore! never!  But some time after, I learned that goney

was some seaman's name for albatross.  So that by no possibility

could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical

impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck.

For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be

an albatross.  Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish

a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.



I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird

chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this,

that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses;

and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I

beheld the Antarctic fowl.



But how had the mystic thing been caught?  Whisper it not,

and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl

floated on the sea.  At last the Captain made a postman of it;

tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's

time and place; and then letting it escape.  But I doubt not,

that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven,

when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking,

and adoring cherubim!





Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of

the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,

large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity

of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage.

He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses,

whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains

and the Alleghanies.  At their flaming head he westward

trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads

on the hosts of light.  The flashing cascade of his mane,

the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more

resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him.

A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen,

western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters

revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked

majestic as a god, bluff-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed.

Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of

countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains,

like an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing

all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed

them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness;

in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest

Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe.

Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record

of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly,

which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness

had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same

time enforced a certain nameless terror.



But there are other instances where this whiteness loses

all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in

the White Steed and Albatross.



What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks

the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin!

It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed

by the name he bears.  The Albino is as well made as other men--

has no substantive deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading

whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.

Why should this be so?



Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least

palpable but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist

among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible.

From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has

been denominated the White Squall.  Nor, in some historic instances,

has the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary.

How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart,

when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate

White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!



Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all

mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue.

It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect

of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor

lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge

of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here.

And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue

of the shroud in which we wrap them.  Nor even in our superstitions

do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms;

all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog--Yea, while these terrors

seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified

by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.



Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious

thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest

idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.



But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal

man to account for it?  To analyse it, would seem impossible.

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to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into

a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.





"Start her, start her, my men!  Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty

of time--but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that's all,"

cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke.  "Start her, now;

give 'em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego.  Start her, Tash, my boy--

start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool--cucumbers is the word--

easy, easy--only start her like grim death and grinning devils,

and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys--

that's all.  Start her!"



"Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!" screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some

old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat

involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke

which the eager Indian gave.



But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild.

"Kee-hee! Kee-hee!" yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards

on his seat, like a pacing tiger in his cage.



"Ka-la! Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a

mouthful of Grenadier's steak.  And thus with oars and yells the keels

cut the sea.  Meanwhile, Stubb, retaining his place in the van,

still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke

from his mouth.  Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained,

till the welcome cry was heard--"Stand up, Tashtego!--give it to him!"

The harpoon was hurled.  "Stern all!"  The oarsmen backed water; the same

moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists.

It was the magical line.  An instant before, Stubb had swiftly

caught two additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence,

by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke

now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe.

As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before

reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both

of Stubb's hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted

canvas sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped.

It was like holding an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade,

and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.



"Wet the line! wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated

by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed the sea-water into it.*

More turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place.

The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins.

Stubb and Tashtego here changed places--stem for stern--a staggering

business truly in that rocking commotion.





*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here

be stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used

to dash the running line with water; in many other ships,

a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for that purpose.

Your hat, however, is the most convenient.





From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part

of the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring,

you would have thought the craft had two keels--one cleaving the water,

the other the air--as the boat churned on through both opposing

elements at once.  A continual cascade played at the bows;

a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the slightest motion

from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft

canted over her spasmodic gunwale into the sea.  Thus they rushed;

each man with might and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being

tossed to the foam; and the tall form of Tashtego at the steering oar

crouching almost double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity.

Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way,

till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight.



"Haul in--haul in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman! and,

facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling

the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on.

Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee

in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish;

at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out

of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up

for another fling.



The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks

down a hill.  His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood,

which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake.

The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea,

sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed

to each other like red men.  And all the while, jet after jet

of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale,

and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited headsman;

as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line

attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few

rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it

into the whale.



"Pull up--pull up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning

whale relaxed in his wrath.  "Pull up!--close to!" and the boat

ranged along the fish's flank.  When reaching far over the bow,

Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept

it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking

to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed,

and which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out.

But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish.

And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that

unspeakable thing called his "flurry," the monster horribly wallowed

in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray,

so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado

blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear

air of the day.



And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view!

surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting

his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations.

At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been

the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frightened air; and falling

back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea.

His heart had burst!



"He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo.



"Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth,

Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment,

stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.