### Chapter 1. 
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 downtown 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 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, 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 honourable
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 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 honour, 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 a 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 ain’t 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 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 fore-castle 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 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.