Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning
of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could
enable her commander to make the great passage southwards,
double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude
arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there.
Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.
Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps,
been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion
of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five
days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of
impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;
if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas
far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up
his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay,
or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race.
So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind
but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious
zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.
But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly,
seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad
boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered,
should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter,
even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares
of Constantinople? Yes.
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