But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad
secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had
purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and
all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one
of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was
lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous
souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man!
They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted
down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious,
immitigable, and supernatural revenge.
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with
curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew,
too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways,
and cannibals--morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence
of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck,
the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness
in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew,
so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some
infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.
How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old
man's ire--by what evil magic their souls were possessed,
that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale
as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came
to be--what the White Whale was to them, or how to their
unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way,
he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,--
all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go.
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