.. < chapter I 2  LOOMINGS >

     Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago--never mind how
long precisely --having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular
to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the
watery part of the world.  It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and
regulating the circulation.  Whenever I find myself growing grim about the
mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find
myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the
rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an
upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me
from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

     This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a philosophical flourish
Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.  There is
nothing surprising in this.  If they but knew it, almost all men in their
degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the
ocean with me.  There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round
by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf.

     Right and left, the streets take you waterward.  Its extreme down-town is
the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by
breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.  Look at the
crowds of water-gazers there.  Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath
afternoon.  Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by
Whitehall northward.  What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all
around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean
reveries.  Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads;
some looking over the bulwarks glasses!
.. <p 2 >
of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a
still better seaward peep.  But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up
in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.
How then is this?  Are the green fields gone?  What do they here?  But look!
here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for
a dive.  Strange!  Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the
land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice.
No.  They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling
in.  And there they stand--miles of them--leagues.  Inlanders all, they come
from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, --north, east, south, and west.
Yet here they all unite.  Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of
the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?  Once more.  Say, you
are in the country; in some high land of lakes.  Take almost any path you
please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there
by a pool in the stream.  There is magic in it.  Let the most absent-minded
of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his
feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in
all that region.  Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert,
try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
professor.  Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

     But here is an artist.  He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the
Saco.  What is the chief element he employs?  There stand his trees, each with
a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps
his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a
sleepy smoke.  Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to
overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.  But though
the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs
like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the
shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.  Go visit the
Prairies in June,
.. <p 3 >
when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what
is the one charm wanting? --Water --there is not a drop of water there!  Were
Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see
it?  Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls
of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or
invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach?  Why is almost every
robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other
crazy to go to sea?  Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you
yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your
ship were now out of sight of land?  Why did the old Persians hold the sea
holy?  Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove?
Surely all this is not without meaning.  And still deeper the meaning of that
story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image
he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.  But that same
image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.  It is the image of the
ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.  Now, when I say
that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the
eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it
inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger.  For to go as a passenger you
must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something
in it.  Besides, passengers get sea-sick --grow quarrelsome --don't sleep of
nights --do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing; --no, I never go as a
passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.  I abandon the glory and distinction of
such offices to those who like them.  For my part, I abominate all honorable
respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.  It is
quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of
ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.  And as for going as cook, --
though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of
officer on ship-board --yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls; --though
once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered,
there is no one who will
.. <p 4 >
speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I
will.  It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled
ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in
their huge bake-houses the pyramids.  No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple
sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there
to the royal mast-head.  True, they rather order me about some, and make me
jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow.  And at first,
this sort of thing is unpleasant enough.  It touches one's sense of honor,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van
Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.  And more than all, if just
previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a
country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you.  The
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor,
and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin
and bear it.  But even this wears off in time.  What of it, if some old hunks
of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks?  What does
that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New
Testament?  Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me,
because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular
instance?  Who aint a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, however the old
sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I
have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else
is one way or other served in much the same way -- either in a physical or
metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed
round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be
content.  Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny
that I ever heard of.  On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay.  And
there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.  The
act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two
orchard
.. <p 5 >
thieves entailed upon us.  But being paid, --what will compare with it?  The
urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous,
considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly
ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.  Ah!  how
cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!  Finally, I always go to sea as
a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle
deck.  For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds
from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for
the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second
hand from the sailors on the forecastle.  He thinks he breathes it first; but
not so.  In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many
other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.  But
wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant
sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this
the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance
of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way --he
can better answer than any one else.  And, doubtless, my going on this whaling
voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a
long time ago.  It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more
extensive performances.  I take it that this part of the bill must have run
something like this: Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the
United States.  Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael.  Bloody Battle in
Affghanistan.  Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage
managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage,
when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short
and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces --though I
cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the
circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which
being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set
about
.. <p 6 >
performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was
a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale
himself.  Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity.
Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the
undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending
marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my
wish.  With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements;
but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.  I
love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.  Not ignoring what
is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with
it--would they let me --since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all
the inmates of the place one lodges in.  By reason of these things, then, the
whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung
open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two
there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid
most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
.. <p 6 >