http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/270 ... m#2HCH0052
a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home. As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost.
Reminiscent of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with the albatross around the neck, and the intimations of a ghost ship.
A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea;
More strangeness, with this sense of whalers having lost any sense of civilized standards and regressed to savagery.
"Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?"
Savages or no, Ahab knows what is important.
But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade.
The Albatross is a bad omen! This first conversation about Moby Dick proves difficult.
to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings. "Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced.
Ahab sees a sad and bad omen in the swimming of fish, imagining a magic in the world that to normal people looks insane.
he cried out in his old lion voice,—"Up helm! Keep her off round the world!"
Despite the floundering farcical encounter with the Albatross, Ahab has his eye on the big picture.
Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
This sense of the pointlessness of whaling conveniently omits the pecuniary reason for returning to your origin, that you do it laden with blubbery barrels that fetch a pretty penny. But that is secondary for Ahab against his 'tormented chase of that demon phantom'.
