Chapter Text
“All that we can do is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio; that each, at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation, or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction.” On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.” Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Call me Isaac. It’s my name, as it happens: Isaac William Wardhaugh, and by that name I swear that every word I write here shall be God’s honest truth. Unlike certain other writers (I will not use the word ‘author’, for the individual to whom I refer is entirely lacking in anything resembling authority), I write only of that which I have witnessed with my own eyes and ears.
When I was a young man, I went to sea, and there I saw much that was remarkable. But this is not my story. Rather, it is the story of the greatest man I ever met. He deserves a better biographer than I, but – alas – he had a worse one, and so it is for me to do my best to set things right.
My parents were Londoners of the middling sort, and I attended good schools until my father died when I was thirteen, leaving my mother and myself without the means to continue my formal education. I was then apprenticed to an apothecary, and served four years under him, gaining my License a little after my seventeenth birthday.
As a schoolboy, I liked nothing more than to grub about in gardens, parks and woodland, searching for beetles to identify, classify and collect; or sketching birds and animals. Though during my apprenticeship I had little time for such pursuits, my ardour for them was not dampened, and indeed it was perhaps the same desire to understand the workings of living things that led me to my chosen trade.
Tempting as it was to set up shop in London, I was therefore determined that while I was still young I should see more of the world, and in particular of the variety of animal life therein. And it seemed to me that the easiest and best way of doing that was to sign up as a surgeon on a whaling ship (my apothecary’s License qualifying me in theory, if not in practice, for this responsibility).
So on the day I qualified, I shouldered my way through shoals of fishermen carrying their dripping bundles towards Billingsgate, and went to Custom House, where I presented my License to the Mustering Officer and – to my delight – was immediately accepted onto the Syren. Had I been older and wiser, the Mustering Officer’s eagerness for me to sign the articles might have been a warning sign, but as it was, I simply assumed that he considered me a superior sort of person.
The sad truth of the matter is that no-one who knew the slightest thing about the English whaling trade would have agreed to serve on the Syren, since Captain Jones was a tyrant, his mates lecherous drunkards, and the men desperate souls who chose the ship because it was marginally less unpleasant than the streets or the gaols. Although kind to no-one, Captain Jones seemed to have a particular grudge against me – or against sea surgeons in general. He was legally obliged to carry one, and never once let me forget that I was only there because of this inconvenient law. He banished me to eat with the harpooners (‘and that’s more than you deserve’) and my lay (or share of the profits) was less than that of the carpenter.
The men were a hardy crew, distrustful of the art and science of medicine, and so I had little chance to practice. Though they often got into fights, they generally preferred to bleed than let me stitch them (which may have been fair, since I had never before stitched anyone, though I had read much about the theory). The only visits I received were from two men who were very far gone with the pox, for whom I could do little, since Captain Jones was too mean to keep the medicine chest well stocked, and the calomel was all gone; and from those who sought to beguile me into parting with a dose or two of opium.
But the lack of medical work did not mean I sat idle. Instead, Captain Jones expected me to fulfil the role of an ordinary seaman – or rather, to be an overgrown cabin boy, for I was not trusted to take part in the chase itself, but was instead given double watches, and tasked with cleaning, scrubbing and other such menial work.
Six months into the voyage, a little before my eighteenth birthday, I was approaching something very like despair. Even when another whaler was sighted, and the news spread that we were to meet them in a gam, it did not lift my black mood.
The name of the ship we were to meet was Pequod, and her captain, one Captain Ahab. I believe – and fear – that these names may be not unfamiliar to some who read this. But please, I ask you to put aside your preconceptions from any previous account you may have read, particularly pertaining to events that the writer of said account was not and could not possibly have been witness to.
Captain Ahab came over to the Syren, with one of his mates and half his crew, bringing with him a letter for Captain Jones. He was a most striking man – no longer young, but hale and strong with hair still dark save for a white patch where began a scar that ran from his head down the side of his face and neck, and into his shirt. His sharply formed features might on another man be described as ‘exaggerated’, but they suited him well.
On that one occasion I was granted the favour of dining in the mess with both Captains and their mates – I suppose Captain Jones did not want to seem mean-spirited in front of a well-respected peer.
After exchanging a few pleasantries with my superiors, Captain Ahab turned his bright blue eyes on me, commented upon my youth, and asked for some particulars of my life. While I was stuttering out my history (the intensity of his gaze disconcerting and flattering enough half to lose me for words), Captain Jones was reading his letter.
After a minute, I began to perceive that something was amiss, as did Captain Ahab, for his eyes kept darting to the side. Captain Jones’s face had gone red, and his fists were clenched. Then he stood up, dragged me up by my shirt collar, and punched me squarely in the mouth. When I fell, half dazed, he began to kick me, and got two or three kicks in before I saw Captain Ahab and our second mate pulling him away, at which point I fainted.