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Chapter Text

Pip tugged on Starbuck’s sleeve and delivered the terse summons: ‘Captain needs you, Sir.’ Four days into the voyage, and all that Starbuck had seen of the Pequod’s enigmatic patriarch was the iron-grey back of his head as he – Starbuck – lingered at the cabin threshold, inadmissible to the unlit sanctum of his solitude, yet necessary as the conduit through which information flowed inward and orders out.

There had been few orders. Ahab trusted Starbuck to run the ship, and the latter had battled against the sin of pride: it was tempting to believe he was to all intents and purposes acting as Captain Starbuck. The schoolmaster had said it outright: ‘I begin to think you are our captain, Mr Starbuck, and this “Ahab” a fiction to make fools of us greenhands.’

Starbuck had shaken his head. ‘Fool thou art, Ishmael, but not for that old Ahab is a figment nor yet that I am a captain. I make choices over everyday matters, it is true: to sail east or north-east; to punish one man or reward another. But a captain is a man who must be prepared to make a captain’s choice, which is to say an impossible choice: one that brings condemnation no matter what he chooses; one where right and wrong, life and death, are tangled weeds that may entwine a ship to its doom.’

Despite gratitude for the limits of his authority, and try as he might to disdain the fripperies of rank and title, one phrase kept coming back to Starbuck: maybe next time. Each time, he put it aside. For what he had now was better than that worldly honour of ‘captain’. Starbuck’s heart swelled with the knowledge that he was trusted by one who did not give his trust easily; nay, who hoarded it like a miser, and was wont to oversee the merest details of the voyages over which he presided with a diligence that was as pedantic as it was magisterial.

When Pip led him once more to the oaken door which divided the one from the many, he was expecting just such another conference with the back of the Captain’s head. But the chair was empty, and he who should have been enthroned upon it sprawled on the floor, his hair and clothes in disarray, his ivory leg absent and the fleshly one ending in a disorderly tapestry of bandages.

Even as Pip carefully shut the door and retreated up on deck, the boy’s words took on new meaning for Starbuck: his Captain needed him. His chest heaved with pity and fear as he ran to help the stricken man, who it seemed was reviving from some swoon, his strong, calloused fingers scrabbling vainly at the floorboard for purchase.

‘Captain!’

Yet already Ahab was sitting up, and his voice lacked none of its wonted strength and authority. ‘None of that, Mr Starbuck. I took a fall some weeks ago and the wound is giving me trouble, that is all: it is no deathly matter. With this new affliction, Moby Dick means only to torment and humiliate, not to destroy me. He has deprived me for a time of my prop, and who can blame him, since it was wrought of the bones of his cousin?’ His laugh is dark and mirthless. ‘What does it matter if he forces me for a time to hop and crawl like some base insect? Hop and crawl I will toward him, and my sting shall be all the more deadly for the new inducement he has given me to seek his destruction.’

Starbuck lifted Ahab from behind, pulling him into a sort of embrace and helping him onto the crisp linen of his bunk: crisp still because it was Ahab’s habit to eschew the usual comforts afforded one of his station, swinging like a deckhand in a hammock with a homespun blanket; though Starbuck liked him the better for this Quakerish inclination to simplicity, on this occasion practicality dictated the bunk to be the better destination. As their bodies touched, the pity and fear deepened into a more complex feeling, a sense of something almost metaphysical about their closeness, an understanding that Ahab was placing trust in more than just his competence as a mate, and a sombre, reverent joy that it should be so.

Over the fifteen years that he had known Ahab, half of Starbuck’s life, their alliance had undergone almost constant metamorphosis. On their first voyage, he had grown from boy to man under his Captain’s stern guidance; on the second he had been transformed through Ahab’s advice and example from a shy and bookish third mate into a leader who was beginning to read the inclinations of men from all parts of the world and most strata of society as though they too were words on a page; and who, furthermore, was learning either to use or to overcome those inclinations as circumstances dictated, in order to mould a crew both more-or-less harmonious in itself and deadly to cetacean-kind. As Starbuck had changed, so had his interactions with Ahab. They were not friends: Starbuck doubted that a lofty spirit like Ahab’s could stoop to something as human as friendship, but sometimes they conversed as though they were, and there was that hard-won trust, which Starbuck treasured as a priceless jewel.

Starbuck had not been present on Ahab’s last voyage, a fact he bitterly regretted, for it hurt him to think of the agonies and indignities of body and spirit that his Captain must have endured alone. Until that voyage, Ahab had been as fixed and immutable as a lighthouse: as Starbuck grew and shifted, he saw different facets of him, learned more about his ways and something of his thoughts, but the man himself was unchanged.

Until that time.

‘Sit with me awhile, Mr Starbuck.’ Ahab patted the bunk, and Starbuck sat beside him, their arms not quite touching. ‘Tell me of my ship and my people. Is all well among them? How fares the schoolmaster?’

Starbuck had groaned aloud when he met the greenest of the greenhands, whose obvious inexperience was matched only by his enthusiasm, which manifested in the sharing of countless scientific facts and literary quotations about whales. When Starbuck had asked what inspired him to come to sea, his answer had involved altogether too much following the funerals of strangers, weeping theatrically, and barely resisting the urge to throw himself in front of the hearse.

It was not that Starbuck objected to eccentricity, even in its more melancholy forms: his increasing devotion to his Captain was testament to that. But he felt that certain manifestations of melancholy should be reserved for those who had earned them, by dint either of great suffering or by venerable experience, or ideally both.

However, not all his fears about the stranger had been realised: Ishmael threw himself into the hard work with great aplomb, albeit with little skill. Starbuck said as much to Ahab, then gave voice to a more delicate concern. ‘He is very taken with my harpooner, and Queequeg with him.’

Such matters onboard a ship were not unusual, and Ahab’s view was that the men could indulge in all the debaucheries of Sodom, nay, and of Gomorrah too, so long as they were passably discreet about it, were not the cause of the discord that can arise from jealousy, and that they continued to do all the work that was expected of them. On land, folk spoke of frightening the horses, but men of their profession had a different parlance: ‘They are not doing aught which might keep the whales from us?’ asked Ahab.

‘Indeed not,’ said Starbuck. ‘There is a tenderness between them that is touching to see, and Queequeg has taken it upon himself to be schoolmaster unto the schoolmaster, already having corrected much of his ignorance about the whaleman’s art.’

‘I have seen such savage Socrateses before,’ said Ahab, ‘imparting our rugged philosophy to a soft-handed Alcibiades. It is a wholesome kind of love.’

‘Aye,’ said Starbuck, ‘and a useful one too.’

Ahab smiled then, a rare thing: ‘Ah, Starbuck, my boy, it is always ‘use’ with you; always toil and always profit.’

Starbuck looked away. ‘Captain,’ he said. ‘I am here to do a job, and I will do it to the best of my ability. As for profit, you know I am not a greedy man. My wife’s work …’ For Mary Starbuck, being herself daughter to a runaway slave, ran a little school for such as she had been, and most of what Starbuck earned went toward its upkeep.

‘Aye,’ said Ahab. ‘The philanthropy of doubloon and dollar. But what of the heart, man? What of the heart?’

Starbuck did not think that Ahab would greatly care for what was in his heart, but throughout their conversation it had been weighing heavily upon him. Yet still he spoke. ‘My Captain,’ he said. ‘Your leg. I don’t know what happened–’ Ahab was about to say something, but Starbuck held up his hand. ‘And I don’t need to know. But even true and trained physicians do not as a rule treat themselves. Your absence from the deck affects us all–’

‘So I’m not useful enough?’ Ahab drew away from Starbuck and shifted himself so his wounded leg was resting on the bunk. ‘Is that what you’re saying? What do you want from me? That I show myself wounded and bleeding to all? That I crawl up among the men and open my legs and say here, here, is where I am afflicted and damn near unmanned? Is that what you want? Out with it, man!’

Starbuck, much distressed by this outburst, reached out an instinctive arm to comfort his stricken Captain, then pulled it back at once. ‘No, Captain. I am not saying that. But you need not, should not, suffer absolutely alone. When did you last change the dressing? Let me do it for you. You asked about my heart, and it is filled with manly sympathy for your undeserved sufferings.’

He thought at first that he had pushed Ahab’s trust beyond its limits, that he was to be met with wrath and – worse – a snuffing out of the fragile intimacy he had felt kindling between them. But whatever tumultuous war of passions was showing itself in his Captain’s face, its final outlet was calm, almost meek. ‘Yes, Mr Starbuck. That would be … useful.’

Ahab sat on his bunk, his unbowed back supported by several pillows and his legs stretched out in front of him. He closed his eyes as Starbuck began gently to unwind the stained bands of linen that swathed the poor truncated ruin of his thigh, unable to look upon his shame.

When he spoke, it seemed to be almost to himself. ‘It was a simple walk after supper,’ he said. ‘I go out to the rocks, sometimes, to view the stars and howl out imprecatory psalms toward the unforgiving sea.’

Starbuck paused for a moment in his ministrations and blinked. But it was Ahab’s way to speak of his unusual habits as though they were commonplace ones, and the imprecatory psalms had been a comfort to Starbuck too at times when the injustices of the world lay heavy upon him. The anger of the children of Israel in the face of slavery and exile echoed through the centuries too, too plainly.

Ahab opened his eyes for a moment. ‘I used to do it in the house,’ he confided, ‘but Bess complained that it woke the baby.’ He closed his eyes again.

Ahab the married man was a mystery to Starbuck. It was difficult to imagine the Captain in the domestic sphere, or indeed anywhere save upon the roiling waves. But sturdy, round-faced Bess had confided to Mary that she was happy enough with her choice of husband and did not mind his peculiarities one bit. All men are strange creatures, she had said. I prefer to have one who wears his mystery on his sleeve.

‘Well,’ Ahab continued, as Starbuck took stock of the long, jagged wound that spliced his inner thigh from the knee almost to the groin. ‘Such a walk I was taking, the same as any night, when the hooting of an owl disturbed my unquiet contemplation.’

The wound was neither so high nor so deep as Starbuck had feared. There was no sign of rot, and the scab, though ugly, was peeling at the edges, with fresh pink skin peeking out beneath.

‘I strained to hear,’ said Ahab, ‘and lost my footing. My ivory heel slipped against the wet rock, and somehow as I fell, the treacherous leg stayed upright, the leather harness ripping it from my body, and some jagged edge slicing me as you now see. Had it gone a few inches further …’

Starbuck nodded, unseen, as he massaged ointment around the tender edges. ‘I am glad it did not,’ he murmured.

‘Are you?’ said Ahab, and Starbuck wondered what he was reading into his words. ‘Well. A few days later, the wound began to stink and I took a fever. Bess nursed me well, and the fever broke the day before we were due to depart. Yet I was still weak and – worse – entirely unable to use the new leg that I commissioned as soon as it was clear the old one had turned so utterly against me. Bess brought me to the harbour on crutches, Starbuck, crutches! And in the dead of night so that no-one could see to what depths I had been reduced. They hauled me aboard in a sort of bucket, aye, and the crutches too.’ He gestured to a corner of the room where the offending objects lay discarded.

Starbuck wondered whom ‘they’ might be, since the Captain’s boarding had been as much of a surprise to him as to anyone, but he put that thought aside as he carefully began to rewrap the leg in strips white linen. He also wondered what was particularly shameful about crutches.

‘So it was that I have skulked here these past four days, contemplating nought but the beast who laid me thus low,’ said Ahab. ‘Thus was I brought to this pass whereby the voyage from chair to hammock confounded the profoundest efforts of my will and bodily strength,’ said Ahab.

Starbuck finished his bandaging and tied and pinned everything off neatly. Ahab was not wont to carry surgeons aboard his ships, and so all the mates were trained in some of the necessities and it was not the first time he had performed such a service, though never for his Captain. ‘The beast?’ he said. ‘Do you mean–’

‘Aye,’ said Ahab. ‘Thou art right: he is no mere beast, the white whale whose malevolence stretches beyond that single chaw that ripped flesh, crushed bone (ah – I hear it even now) and reft my soul in twain. ‘Tis he who dwelt within that hooting owl, he whose adamantine essence hardened the rocks, he who treacherously beslimed them; he and only he whose putrid breath turned my wound rotten and who stoked the fever in my head.’

‘You speak figuratively, of course,’ said Starbuck, wishing desperately it might be so. He feared what his Captain’s wild words might portend. There were rumours abroad in Nantucket that he had returned from his last voyage broken not only in body, but in mind too: the dread word ‘madness’ was whispered among market gossips and dockside lumpers alike. It was said he ascribed to Moby Dick a more-than-mortal wickedness, a puissance beyond that of any mere creature, and that his intellect was all but consumed by a thirst for revenge.

At last Ahab opened his fathomless, tawny eyes. He gazed down on his bandaged leg, then up at Starbuck, contemplating him for a long moment. ‘Aye,’ he said at last. ‘I speak only in emblems and allegories. Leave me now, for I must rest.’

Chapter Text

Ahab and Starbuck leaned against the rail and watched the carpenter as he finished turning Queequeg’s coffin into a life buoy. It was quiet moment between two unquiet hearts, and though it happened a bare two months since that night when circumstances forced stricken Ahab to accept the tender ministrations of his first mate, and yet Starbuck’s heart and soul had aged a century.

‘Death into life,’ Ahab said, half to himself. ‘Emblems and allegories. There is something in that.’

Starbuck knew better than to hope, but he spoke the words anyway. ‘Aye, Captain. It is never too late to turn one’s course.’

Ahab’s laugh was mirthless. ‘Where are we, Starbuck?’

‘Off the coast of Japan.’

‘Do you remember what I told of the Japanese innkeeper I met once in Malagasy?’

‘You ate raw fish with him,’ said Starbuck. ‘He told you he worshiped a god who was born without legs and who took the shape of a whale.’

‘I wished to buy a barrel of salted pork,’ said Ahab. ‘But he came from a community that disapproved of whaling, so when he learned my profession, he said he had none to sell.’

Starbuck vaguely remembered the anecdote.

‘My first mate, Mr Connor, was incensed, because he had seen the barrel already and he took the lie as an insult, but I understood. It was about saving face, mentsu wo tamotsu, the innkeeper said it was called. He said that I must have been Japanese in a previous life, just as I would be a whale in a future one, because it was not a thing that true foreigners could understand.’

Starbuck said nothing: sometimes Ahab spoke about heathen beliefs as though they were his own, and it discomforted him.

‘Well,’ continued Ahab. ‘A piece of wood has no face, so it can turn easily from a thing of death into a thing of life, but I do not have that privilege.’ He pushed himself away from the rail and resumed his restless pacing.

Starbuck was left to ponder the significance of this anecdote. He had known for weeks how little Ahab valued truth. Moby Dick’s continuance as a malign presence in Ahab’s life was not to him a mere metaphor for his maiming’s lingering pains and inconveniences, but a literal truth, an utmost article of faith, central to his deranged understanding of the world.

Pity and fear still filled Starbuck’s being, still for Ahab, yes: he yet had that Aristotelian presentiment that here was greatness, here tragedy in its truest and most ancient sense. But now those words – fear and pity, pity and fear – had a bigger meaning, chaotic and rotten and all-encompassing. He feared for all of them, hurtling as they were headlong to their destruction. And not just the men and boys of the Pequod. He pitied Mary and little Tom back in Nantucket, and Bess too, and the others who were widows and orphans already, though their husbands and fathers still breathed. He feared the agonies of physical death, and he feared the fires of hell.

If he could have laughed at all, he would have laughed at his fastidious examen of conscience that feared the prideful temptation to see himself as Captain Starbuck. Now temptation had brought him twice to the brink of mutiny and once to that of murder, and pacifist though he was, his addled mind could not tell whether the guilt was for having nearly done it or for not having done it.

‘Ship ahoy!’

Starbuck looked up and saw another Nantucket whaler, the Rachel. The Rachel’s decks were crowded with men, men who looked as they did: aye, as exhausted and weatherbeaten too, and yet who were as different from them almost as the saved are from the damned. Starbuck would have given all his worldly goods if he might in good conscience change places with the lowliest of them. And yet he knew his duty.

Before they were even alongside, Ahab shouted his customary salutation: ‘Hast thou seen the white whale?’

Captain Gardiner’s reply was a death knell that sent a stir among all upon the Pequod, though few understood it meant their doom: ‘Aye, yesterday.’ It was his second utterance that stirred some men to groaning: ‘Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?’ For scarcely a man aboard but had wept for a shipmate lost to a like disaster.

Though their acquaintance was slight, Starbuck knew Gardiner to be a decent man and a fair-minded captain. Six years ago, when Starbuck had scandalised the town by forgoing the girls from good families and instead wooing and winning Mulatto Mary from behind the bar at the Porpoise, Gardiner had attended the wedding with all his family, the only captain to do so save Ahab himself, who stood in as Starbuck’s father, his begetter’s bones then lying deep at the bottom of Ocean.

A whale-boat adrift is always a heavy matter, but when Gardiner came aboard the true weight of his woes became apparent. He had embarked from Nantucket with his two sons aboard, and last night they had both lowered, in each a separate boat, both of which had been lost, and in opposite directions.

It is forgivable that in such a family circumstance that a captain might refuse to make a captain’s choice, and so it fell to Gardiner’s mate to give the order that both rule and custom dictated: to follow the boat that cradled more souls within its fragile hull, and among them the younger Gardiner boy, but twelve winters old.

In the hollow eyes of the grieving father that came aboard, Starbuck saw a misery deep enough to drown for a moment even his presentiment of the Pequod’s doom. Gardiner regarded no man but Ahab. ‘I will not go,’ he said, ‘till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a child of your old age too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.’

Starbuck held his breath, his soul and body in absolute prayer: their lives turned upon this moment, he knew it, and more, so did a man’s salvation.

‘Avast,’ cried Ahab, ‘touch not a rope-yarn.’ And then in a voice that seemed to relish every unholy word: ‘Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.’

Starbuck stepped forward. To obey Captain Ahab was instinct to him; to obey his own inclinations under such circumstances seemed impossible. And yet it was to the wheel he strode, and not to the binnacle. Could it be that even here, under a man’s absolute tyranny, another Authority guided his feet? When in later times he played over that moment, he dearly wished it could be so, but he feared deceiving himself. Memories, and memories of memories, overlayering themselves so many times that the act of remembering becomes indistinguishable from forgetting.

It was to the wheel that Starbuck strode. With such a stride of measured disobedience his earliest foremother must have approached the tree of mankind’s doom. Had he made the opposite choice, his sin would have been that of her husband: to acquiesce to the transgression that damned them both, damned them all.

The hands that gripped that wheel were then a captain’s hands, for he had made a captain’s choice, which is to say an impossible choice, between fault and fault, between misery and misery. But the voice that rang out sounded to him like that of a mutineer: ‘It is my duty as first mate to relieve our captain from his command, due to his mental incapacity. Whither must we steer, Captain Gardiner?’

He barely heard the gasps from around the deck nor even Ahab’s roar of outrage. But he saw Gardiner’s nod and heard three simple words: ‘Starboard, Captain Starbuck’.

Then there was chaos: people shouted, someone screamed, and Starbuck held fast to the wheel. Ahab in front of him, a musket in his shaking hand: ‘Avast, avast, thou traitor, thou mutineer. Is all obedience forgotten? Do not think our long acquaintance will save thee; do not think that memories of tenderness between us will prevail.’

Starbuck held fast to the wheel, but met once more those fathomless eyes: ‘you must do as your conscience dictates, my Captain, and I must follow mine.’

He was piteously afraid. How would it feel, when the bullet tore through skin and muscle, shattered bone, and found at last his heart? Would the death be quick or lingering? How would poor Mary and little Tom fare without his protection? And how would he be judged, he who knew not how to judge himself? Still, Starbuck held fast to the wheel.

‘I warn thee, my boy.’

Ahab’s hands were shaking, but Starbuck doubted not that he would shoot. Aye, but what if he should shoot only to wound? It would be hard indeed to cling to the wheel with a knee taken out from beneath him, and he shrank from the knowledge of his duty. Still he held fast.

The pain did not come. Ahab’s hands were shaking more and he let fall the musket. Then those shaking hands were on Starbuck, grasping his arms from behind, pulling him away with more strength than they should possess. Starbuck held fast to the wheel. Two other men were fighting, he knew not who; Ahab was torn roughly away (be gentle with my Captain) and still and again, Starbuck held fast.

Ahab’s strong voice: ‘Prepare to gybe, lads! Trim the sails. There’s more than one way to turn a ship.’

It was true. If enough men chose to obey Ahab, then holding fast would be in vain. Still Starbuck held fast, but he stood more upright and allowed his eyes to focus on what was happening around him. There were fewer men than before: some must have retreated belowdecks. Flask, Stubb and Gardiner stood together by the rail; Queequeg was protecting his schoolmaster. But five figures scurried in acquiescence to the tyrant’s command.

Starbuck groaned to see Fedallah climb serpent-like up the rigging, his four subordinates holding the ropes in place.

‘Gybe-ho!’

There was nothing Starbuck could do. He was a man bound to the wheel (emblems, allegories), helpless; the disciple of a helpless God.

It began of a sudden to rain. The wind shifted, a sudden gust that almost made him lose his footing. (A helpless God whose power is in helplessness.) The spar swung sharply, knocking Fedallah to the deck, scarlet blood pulsing from his head.

Through some infernal sympathy, Ahab fell at the same moment as his dark shadow, arms flailing, his wild howl suddenly truncated as his head hit the rail.

‘My Captain!’ Starbuck ran to him and fell to his knees, for once all heart, but even as he did so, his mind, use, caught up with his body and words. ‘Mr Stubb – the Pequod is at Captain Gardiner’s disposal. We are to find that whale-boat.’

He placed one arm beneath Ahab’s back, one beneath his knee, and lifted him, first squatting, then standing. He cradled him close, the grey head nestled into the crook of his neck. He was surprised to see Stubb nod and begin to confer with Gardiner. Captain Starbuck, and nothing could be more wrong.

Something caught his eye. Iridescent scarlet among the dull browns and greys of the ship. Blood. Fedallah. Dead? No, his chest moved. Starbuck’s gorge rose in revulsion: he could not but see this shadow as less than a man, as the venomous snake that had corrupted the ship and the heart of his dear, dear Captain. If the Parsee were to die here, the world would be a better place for it; if he were to be thrown into the ocean, the Pequod would be safer.

Yet Starbuck remembered his principles and strove to forget Fedallah’s macabre influence. Who was he to judge a man to be less than a man? That was the world’s affliction, his peoples’ evil, and his choice was to have no part it. ‘Captain Gardiner – thou hast a surgeon aboard the Rachel, is it not so? Then take this man, I beseech thee, and give him all the care thou canst.’

Chapter Text

Ahab, stripped out of his wet clothes and now in his nightshirt, his ivory leg beside him in the bunk, moaned and writhed in unquiet sleep. Starbuck watched the bruise on his forehead blossom from red to purple to a hue of dark and mottled complexity. What if he should die? What if his great heart should break forever, his intelligence be snuffed out and his soul meet judgment in a state so angry, addled and unready. It was inconceivable to Starbuck that his actions could be the cause of so great a calamity, and yet he feared, he feared.

He had told himself it was not mutiny, but rather obedience not only to his own conscience but to Ahab’s truer self; not violence but passive resistance. Such assurances now rang hollow.

‘Ahab, Ahab, my Captain, my father …’

Ahab groaned louder and grasped at nothings; Starbuck longed to reach out and touch him, hold him, but it was violation enough that of necessity he had taken the man’s clothes and his leg. He would not do more.

The door burst open and young Pip ran in, placing his small body between Starbuck and their unconscious lord and master. ‘Do not hurt him, I beg you, Sir – he is a strange person but not evil one, it’s only that his leg hurts him so, you see. It’s only–’ And the boy began to sob.

‘Hush,’ said Starbuck, taking the boys shoulders and gently shaking him. ‘Calm yourself, Pip. I will not hurt him. Why would you think such a thing?’ Aye, Starbuck, but you have hurt him already and to the core.

‘The others said, the men, they whispered that poor Starbuck had no choice now but to strike the killing blow, and one would die that all the rest might live and not be dragged down to the deeps. Only it isn’t so, Sir. It can’t be. Kill me if someone must die.’

‘Oh Pip, my poor Pip. Come here.’ Starbuck held him as though he were one of his own children. ‘I have never yet killed a man and will never do so as long as I have control over my thoughts, my limbs. Ahab is as a father to me – aye, and you too, I see it, so then we are as brothers, Pip – and his life is more precious to me than my own.’

Pip stared deep into his eyes for several moments, then nodded. ‘It is so,’ he said, and pulled away from Starbuck’s embrace. ‘Sir. Do not hold me, but hold the Captain, Sir. Lie beside him. Rescue and recover him. Hug his soul back into his body, Sir. He will need you when he wakes.’

If he wakes. ‘Oh sweet child. Would that the world were as simple as thou thinkst it to be. Among grown men …’ He sighed. ‘It is difficult to explain, Pip.’

Pip shook his head most vehemently. ‘I did not mean anything Ishmael-and-Queequeg-ish by it, Sir. Only that he calls for you sometimes at nights, when his leg is hurting him, and when the wall between our souls is soft I hear his thoughts too, and he longs for you to hold him.’

His small voice, not yet fully broken, was vehement and pleading, but there was nothing in it that suggested he knew that speaking of soft walls between two souls was in the least unusual. Starbuck’s reason rebelled against the idea such things were aught but the imaginings of an overwrought mind, and yet …

‘And now, Pip?’ He matched the boy’s quietness of voice. ‘Are the walls soft now?’

Pip looked away. ‘A little, Sir. A little on the thin side, at least.’

‘And what do you hear?’ After all, Ahab had not slipped on the wet deck: Starbuck had seen him fall, and it was as though he were Fedallah’s reflection in a mirror. If there could be a diabolical sympathy between two men, why not a softer one between a man and a boy? All three were touched with something that Starbuck felt in his heart to be deeper than mere madness.

Pip nodded, as though the question were a sage one, still not looking at Starbuck. ‘When he wakes, there will be a chance to start anew.’ His voice was stronger, a prophet’s voice, or perhaps a psychopomp’s. ‘There will be remembering and forgetting, and love may yet show him a better way.’

When Pip’s dark eyes finally met Starbuck’s, he felt hollowed out and filled with light, as he had once or twice in chapel, days deep into prayer and fasting. He felt as though he too could see into Ahab’s mind and taste the profound truth in Pip’s words.

‘I will go, Sir,’ said Pip at last. ‘And leave you to do what you must.’

Despite the thick blanket, Ahab was icy cold when Starbuck slipped in beside him and cautiously put an arm around his middle. At once, Ahab turned and pulled him close. ‘My Starbuck,’ he murmured, the first intelligible words since he fell.

‘It’s all right, my Captain,’ Starbuck said, rubbing his hands between his own. Ahab put his leg over Starbuck’s hip, and Starbuck had to tell himself there was nothing Ishmael-and-Queequeg-ish about the gesture, just a cold man seeking warmth and his friend’s despair becoming tinged with delight that he could provide it.

‘Oh Starbuck,’ said Ahab again. ‘I dreamed the most fearful dream: a whale past the size of any living creature that might be, who took me by the leg and dragged me from the boat down to fathomless depths, until the water pressed in on me more terribly than his pitiless jaws. Methought I had drowned already and was on the way to hell, when there was pain more piercing even than the screaming of my poor, airless lungs. I felt my flesh tear and heard the cracking of my bones and then I was free, all of me save for the leg he swallowed, and hurtling up, up, up, the red of mine own blood swirling around me.

‘Ah, the agony of renewed life was a thousand times worse than that of death. As the air rushed into my lungs I felt impudent hands upon me, pulling me out of the water, and then my whole being was subordinated to the anguish of my wound. Starbuck, Starbuck, such does the infant feel when she is pulled from the safety of the womb into this unfeeling world; such does the worst of sinners feel as he is dragged by demons into the pits of Tartarus: such a birth it was into utter desolation; such a death of all I had been until that moment …’

Ahab was sobbing openly into the crook of Starbuck’s neck. ‘It’s all right,’ Starbuck murmured. ‘It’s over now. It’s long, long over and thou shalt–’

‘Over?’ said Ahab, pulling away from Starbuck. ‘Nay, man: say yet it never was. For dreams are less than shadows: they are airy nothings, and no mortal power may give them substance.’

Memories and forgetting. A chance to start anew. Starbuck was lost for words for a few moments, then said, as gently as he could: ‘It is not altogether so, my Captain. But fear not–’

The old Ahab was then back for a moment: the roaring, furious tyrant, yet still constrained by Starbuck’s grasp. ‘Not altogether so? What are these mincing words? What … what …’ Then his voice cracked, and its smallness was more terrible than its former wrath. ‘My leg,’ he said, feeling for it and finding its lack. ‘True, then? Not a dream but a memory?’

He turned in Starbuck’s arms, and his face, too close, was a picture not (as Starbuck had feared) of wild, anguished bereavement, but of puzzled consternation, as though it was not his leg that had been taken, but his favourite hat or pipe.

‘Aye,’ said Starbuck gently. ‘The memory of a wound long healed.’

‘Nay,’ said Ahab. ‘For ‘tis the heel I want: toe, heel, calf, shin and knee, all gone.’

When Ahab flipped into dark and Shakespearean badinage, Starbuck knew he had to tread carefully. It was a deceptive signal of extreme emotion: one that could quickly decompose into despair as but which, handled correctly, could also be a way out.

Starbuck was out of practice: it had been a long time since there had been humour in Ahab’s way of relating to the world, a long time since hope. Starbuck searched his brain: if Ahab was going to out-Lear Lear, outTitus Titus, he must find the clown’s part. ‘Yet you forgot that it was so,’ he said at last. ‘Alas, my Captain, that am-KNEE-sia should be added to thy woes.’

Ahab’s glare was all thunder, until he twitched his nose and gave a reluctant laugh. ‘Woes I have aplenty,’ he said. ‘Would that they were toes.’

‘Toes thou hast yet five,’ said Starbuck. ‘And thou art still alive.’ He winced, knowing he had not the skill to play this game well.

‘Aye,’ said Ahab, serious of a sudden. ‘There is truth in that. Other men live happily with but three limbs. Why should I not do likewise?’ He sat up in the bunk and in the same motion pulled Starbuck to him once again.

Why indeed? ‘My Captain …’

‘The carpenter will make me a wooden leg, aye, and a spare too, and I will have more legs than ever I had before. And there will be no forgetting, for each morning I will re-member myself.’

Despite himself, Starbuck relaxed into Ahab’s embrace, for against the odds it soothed the turmoil of emotions that fought within his unquiet bosom. A few scant hours earlier, he had awoken to another day of certainty that death was imminent, and now that certainty was shattered into jagged pieces of guilt and pride; empathy for another father’s grief, and remembrance of his own like sorrow; a metamorphosis of his pity and fear for Ahab’s obsessive madness into … well, pity and fear for whatever this new madness was.

‘And yet,’ Ahab was saying. ‘My poor Bess. How she will chide me when she sees me thus reduced.’

The very act of holding that comforted Starbuck, brought with it a new disquiet when Ahab spoke of his wife: was there something altogether too marital in their embrace? He put that thought aside: the were as father and son, and it was obscene to imagine anything different. ‘Chide?’ he said. She had, of course, done no such thing.

‘Aye, Starbuck, and with reason too. Who but an unthrifty husband takes two legs away to sea and returns with but one?’

Starbuck and Mary had been visiting with Bess on the day of her husband’s unexpected return, brought to the gate on a cart and from thence to the door delivered leaning on a bow-legged sailor. Her eyes had opened wide, but only for a moment. ‘My poor dear husband,’ she had said, putting down little Zebulon and taking the burden upon her own broad shoulder. ‘How you must have suffered.’ Her voice was filled with utmost affection.

‘Well,’ she went on. ‘It need not be any great matter I suppose – no, Zeb, Mama is busy, go to your aunt Mary – there are men who go about on one leg better than many do on two, and I have little doubt that you will be such. Come in, my love and rest, if you will, or else tell me what happened.’

Starbuck said as much, not hiding the fact that these things had already occurred, hoping that doing so might go some way to restoring Ahab’s lost memory.

But Ahab laughed. ‘What?’ he said. ‘My Starbuck turned prophet? Well. It may be so. Bess is a good, sensible girl, with a level head and a strong arm. Ah – fortune smiled upon me the day I spoke to her father.’

Starbuck opened his mouth to say more plainly that these things had already happened, but then he closed it again. Memories and forgetting. Perhaps, after all, it was better if for now that Ahab remain a little lost in the maze of past and present. A chance to start anew, and never to embark upon the path that had been leading them all to their ruin.

Chapter Text

The sun had just risen when they found the little whaleboat, and the six figures huddled together within were illuminated with a soft orange glow. Or so Starbuck was told. He remained below with Captain Ahab, whose all-overburdened mind, whether sleeping or waking, was tossed in every tempestuous passion, save the one that had hitherto dominated. It did not seem to occur to him to blame the white whale for what he still insisted was his recent catastrophe: though he raged against God, fate, his crew, the ship’s owners and – above all – his own self, he ascribed no malice, nor even the faculty of consciousness, to the owner of the jaws that cut him off.

When he saw the whalebone leg he laughed and said he would not go about like a piece of scrimshaw, and demanded for his support something less heavy, less brittle, sending Starbuck immediately to the carpenter with orders for a sturdy wooden leg. In the meantime, he saw no shame in using the crutches to move from his chair to his bunk and back again.

At first, Starbuck strove to guide his Captain to recover his memories, for he felt himself to blame for their loss, and wished to remedy the injury he had caused. But as the hours went on, his efforts waxed perfunctory, for though it was true that rage, grief and regret remained Ahab’s dominating passions, there were also times of calmness and laughter such as he had not manifested for many years. And furthermore, the rage being unable to settle on any particular target, it still did not bring with it any designs on revenge. For the first time in weeks, Starbuck could envisage the possibility of the Pequod sailing back to Nantucket in peace and safety.

It was Pip who brought the news of young Reuben Gardiner’s safe recovery, along with his five doughty shipmates, who had kept up his spirits and their own through the singing of hymns and also songs that in other circumstances would have been unfit for his tender ears, but which Starbuck could forgive as a means to divert the desperate melancholy into which he might otherwise have fallen.

After giving up a prayer of thanks, Starbuck entrusted his Captain to Pip and went on deck. The six survivors were already being taken over to the Rachel, but Captain Gardiner had remained, standing tall, his hands behind his back, a lingering tear the only sign of the distress he had endured or the bittersweet relief he now enjoyed.

They shook hands, stiff and awkward.

‘I’m glad young Reuben is safe,’ said Starbuck. ‘And I’m sorry about Arthur.’

Gardiner bowed his head.

‘How fares the Parsee?’ asked Starbuck after a few moments. He was unsure what manner of answer he hoped for. Though he wished no man ill, he had a superstitious instinct that Captain Ahab’s change for the better was in part due to the absence of his strange shadow.

Gardiner looked away, out to see. ‘Mr Fedallah is gone,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ said Starbuck. ‘May he rest in peace.’

‘No,’ said Gardiner, still not meeting his gaze. ‘I do not mean that he died, although … well … he is gone, and one of our boats is gone too. No-one saw him depart from us.’

A shudder ran down Starbuck’s spine, and he wanted to search the whole Pequod lest Fedallah had somehow crawled back on board.

After a moment: ‘And how is …’ He paused, unsure whether to use the title.

‘Captain Ahab is better than he was,’ said Starbuck. ‘He is resting in his cabin.’

‘That is good,’ said Gardiner. ‘Really. I am pleased.’

The silence hung between them.

‘There are some facts about our voyages,’ Gardiner said, ‘which, were they to get out, would not reflect well upon either of us.’

‘We should talk in private,’ said Starbuck, relieved both that the subject had been broached and that the dread word ‘mutiny’ had not been uttered.

‘The stateroom?’ asked Gardiner, as they stood on the threshold.

‘Aye,’ said Starbuck. ‘I will keep nothing from my Captain.’

Ahab sat in his leather chair, a cushion behind his back and half reclined, his whole leg resting on a footstool, the other covered by a blanket across his lap: it was a grandfatherly pose, neither frail nor lacking dignity; not soft, yet without the unrelenting hardness that had hitherto characterised everything about the man.

‘Good afternoon, Captain Ahab,’ Gardiner bowed stiffly, and Starbuck pointed him to one of the dining chairs.

‘Always a pleasure, Captain Gardiner,’ said Ahab. ‘Forgive me for not getting up. As you may have heard, a parmacetti ripped off more than half of my left leg, and I am not yet recovered.’ He spoke without emotion, recounting facts.

Captain Gardiner looked at Starbuck, who said: ‘In the Captain’s mind, this was a recent event. His recollection of the past years, months, days, hours is … imperfect.’ He did not lower his voice, yet Ahab showed no sign of having heard. ‘We may – we must – speak freely in front of him.’

Gardiner nodded and went on, uncertainly. ‘I am grateful for the action you took to save my son,’ he said. ‘My family will forever be in your debt, Mr Starbuck. And yet …’

And yet. Even if the good folk of Nantucket would to a man, woman and child avow that Starbuck’s action was virtuous, yet it was still mutiny. And who would want to take on a mutinous first mate, however worthy? Smith, the mate who on his last voyage had tied the raving Captain to a mast, was no longer seen in Nantucket, no longer heard of among the whaling ships.

Gardiner too would be judged, at best as one who had encouraged mutiny and perhaps as one who had compelled it. And Ahab. Though he was the victim of the putative mutiny, Starbuck doubted if the facts were known, he would be entrusted with command again.

‘I will not lie,’ said Starbuck.

‘No,’ said Captain Gardiner. ‘But it is permitted for a man to be circumspect about what he does and does not say.’

‘Aye,’ said Starbuck.

‘Yet I fear,’ said Captain Gardiner, ‘that sailors are not, as a rule, thus circumspect.’

‘Aye,’ said Starbuck. Flask and Stubb, he trusted: they, after all, could be implicated nearly as deep as himself. And though he hated himself for thinking this, he knew that the crew members who lacked the benefit of white skin and European ancestors would not be believed above those who possessed it. But there were still too many others. The schoolmaster, for one, appeared to have very little facility for holding his tongue. He said something of the sort.

‘The schoolmaster is our friend,’ said Captain Ahab suddenly, looking steadily between the other two men.

Starbuck jumped. Ahab usually seemed incapable of following any talk of recent events. ‘Yes, my Captain,’ he said. ‘Ishmael is a good man and a hard worker, but he lacks a certain judiciousness of speech. He likes a good story.’

‘A good story,’ said Ahab. ‘Aye, that he does. And the only way to fight story and myth is with story and myth. He already spends his evenings scribbling notes that turn us to figures in his scene. We must persuade him to write a different ending for us: virtuous Mr Starbuck, standing firm against temptation; noble Captain Gardiner, putting duty above family. And perhaps through Ishmael’s pen, poor mad Captain Ahab will find his whale.’

Chapter Text

‘Are we lovers?’

They were a few days away from Nantucket, when Captain Ahab looked up from the notes he was writing to aid the schoolmaster’s authorial endeavours and asked the question casually of Starbuck, who was spending an hour or so off duty in his company.

Starbuck opened his mouth, then closed it again. ‘In what sense do you mean, Captain?’ he said at last.

‘In the erotic sense,’ said Ahab, crossing out something he had written. ‘I believe you are correct when you tell me I have lost some part of my memory. But certainly I remember waking up in a bed with you, so I wondered if we are lovers?’

‘Captain,’ said Starbuck stiffly. ‘We are both married men.’

Ahab laughed. ‘Oh, Bess doesn’t mind. She says it is quite natural for men at sea to seek each other’s company in that regard. Her only condition is that I must tell her everything. I think perhaps she is disappointed that it is a liberty of which I have not availed myself.’

Starbuck stared at him.

Ahab put down his pen. ‘I am sorry, my dear friend, if I have caused offence. I did not mean to.’

‘No offence taken,’ said Starbuck, aware he was blushing. As a Quaker, he tried not to judge others, except in cases when by taking action on a judgment he could prevent some great harm from happening. Ishmael and Queequeg were quite the married couple now and he did not even think of it as sin. And if Ahab felt … desire for him, that was not a sin either. Where he came unstuck was his own feelings about that desire.

‘It’s just …’ Ahab sighed. ‘I have found the hole where my memories should be, and I feel there is something there … a name … a great passion, an obsession. I had hoped it was for you, and fear it may be something less wholesome.’

Starbuck felt the devil at his shoulder, offering a new temptation. Ahab’s current affliction was a strange one. Maybe poor mad Captain Ahab will find his whale. That suggested he was not entirely without memory of Moby Dick, and of his monomania, and yet, as now, he commonly spoke as though it were so. For a moment, Starbuck entertained the idea of saying that they were lovers, and becoming so in truth: would it really be a sin if it were done to keep his Captain from the madness that had nearly killed them all?

Then he imagined what he would say to Mary. ‘My dear wife, it has become necessary that Captain Ahab and I imitate the men of Sodom in the commission of their eponymous sin, purely, you understand that his fragile sanity, now regained, might be preserved.’

‘Why are you smiling, Starbuck?’

Starbuck shook his head. ‘I was thinking the passion of which you speak may be your love for Bess, which has surely grown during the time you were apart. And I was thinking of Mary too, and how we will both see our dear ones soon.’ None of it was quite a lie.

There was a knock on the cabin door. The schoolmaster, in need of a conference about the magnum opus which was swiftly becoming a collaborative endeavour. Starbuck let him in on his way up to the deck to benefit from the chilly night air.

Chapter Text

On the day Starbuck returned from his first voyage as Captain, he was met onshore by a small crowd, and soon learned that there was more to celebrate than his crew’s safe return, and a hold nicely filled with oil.

First, and most importantly, there was the baby in Mary’s arms, and the older children at her skirts, plump and healthy, waving at him fit to burst. Secondly, there was the book which the schoolmaster was waving with scarcely less enthusiasm: it must be done then, finished and published.

Ahab and his family were there too, including Pip, whom they had adopted, looking dapper in a neat morning coat and top hat. He was a student now, training to be a teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth in Pennsylvania, but was back in Nantucket for the long vacation.

‘Ishmael, Ishmael!’ Starbuck’s first mate, Mr Queequeg, ran past him and flung his huge body at the schoolmaster, picking him up and whirling him around. Starbuck had to stop himself from running too, with un-Captainly dignity, to be with them all sooner.

‘Papa, papa!’ Tom and Annie ran and hugged him, one leg each.

Starbuck ruffled their hair and approached Mary, pulling her and the baby both into an embrace.

‘I named her Eve,’ Mary said. ‘I hope that’s …’

‘Beautiful,’ said Starbuck, ‘beautiful.’ He was not in the least embarrassed to feel tears in his eyes.

Zebulon and Tamar Ahab, hand in hand, with solemn faces, were showing something to Mr Queequeg: carved whalebone, Starbuck thought, but then he heard a polite cough and raised his eyes to see Captain Ahab – for even in retirement, and even for one whose faith dictated that honorifics must be eschewed wherever possible, Starbuck could not countenance truncating him of that title. After all, are not all folk entitled to two names? And since the Captain insisted that ‘Ahab’ was both fore- and surname to him, he must be allowed a little leeway.

‘Captain Starbuck,’ Ahab leant on the first word as he enfolded his old friend in a manly embrace. ‘My boy, my boy.’

They took afternoon tea in the Ahabs’ parlour. Starbuck held baby Eve, mesmerised by her big brown eyes and chubby hands. ‘She has your hair, Mary.’ He stroked it, ever so gently. ‘Once she’s bigger, will you teach me how to braid it?’

‘Of course.’ She touched his knee, and the effect on him was so strong that he had to move away.

‘… the review in the New York Albion was tolerable,’ Ishmael was saying, ‘but the London Athenaem didn’t seem to understand Mocha Dick at all. I am certainly going to take it up with the editor. They are Philistines, utter Philistines. Isn’t that right Captain Ahab?’

Captain Ahab held up his hands. ‘Everyone’s entitled to their view,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been one to hold a grudge.’ He fixed Starbuck’s eyes, as though daring him to deny this.

‘Unlike your namesake in the book!’ Ishmael laughed. Story and myth. Was the Captain’s amnesia contagious? Surely Ishmael would not have laughed, had he remembered?

A week later, Starbuck finished reading Mocha Dick: or, The Whale.  It wasn’t like anything he had read before. He suspected it wasn’t like anything that had ever been written before. Still being unwilling to lie, he was unable to call it ‘good’, but he felt that when he saw them later, he could at least tell Ahab and Ishmael that it was a work of genius.

It was unsettling to read his namesake, words he had said in the mouth of this Starbuck of paper and ink: worse to read words he should or shouldn’t have said, actions he should or shouldn’t have taken. And … Ahab. If the Captain had truly forgotten his monomania, then how had he written it out so plainly?

So Starbuck sat in his study looking back at the pages he’d bookmarked, wondering what to say and what not to say.

Mary came in, Eve at her breast, put her spare arm round him from behind and kissed his cheek. ‘So,’ she said. ‘What did you think of the ending?’

She sat down on the chaise longue and he joined her. ‘It is … somewhat extreme,’ he said. ‘Everyone dies?’

Mary patted his knee. ‘Except Ish and the fish,’ she said. ‘Yes. That’s Bess’s line, not mine, by the way.’

Eve unlatched herself and hiccuped, replete. Mary handed her over to Starbuck who put her over his shoulder and patted her little back.

‘The Captain uses the word katharsis,’ Mary said. ‘It’s Greek. Means the cleansing of the tragic emotions of pity and fear. Purging.’

Eve burped a bit of milky sick onto his shoulder. His heart jumped. ‘Is she all right?’ he said. ‘Is she …’

Mary smiled. ‘She’s fine. It’s normal. I forget you weren’t around when Tom and Annie were this little. Maybe she’s demonstrating katharsis for you.’

Starbuck didn’t laugh. He handed Eve back, wiping his shoulder with a handkerchief and checking it for signs of blood.

‘My love,’ said Mary. ‘Nathaniel didn’t die because you did anything wrong.’

Starbuck looked down. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that really. And Nathaniel rests with Jesus. I have done wrong though.’

Mary picked up the book. ‘Have you? Would it have been better if you’d done nothing, like this Starbuck?’

‘I could have trusted God.’

‘God trusted you.’

Later that afternoon, the Starbucks were due to visit the Ahabs again, including Ishmael and Queequeg, who were lodgers there. Starbuck was rather dreading the schoolmaster’s interrogation concerning his views on Mocha Dick: he had hitherto refused to say a word on the grounds that he would reserve judgement on any part until the whole was consumed. He had prepared a mental list of five things he liked about it, and rehearsed them in his head on the walk over. If asked for a criticism of the more constructive variety, he was going to say it didn’t quite hang together in the way he expected of a novel, but that was probably his own lack of sophistication as a reader.

But as he raised his fist to knock on Ahab’s front door, it opened and Zeb came out, his eyes shining. ‘Another ship is coming back!’ he says. ‘Can Thomas come and meet it with me?’

In the end they all went, save Pip, who wished to study. Bess and Ahab, Ishmael and Queequeg, the Starbucks and all five children. Tamar, the smallest except for Eve, rode on Queequeg’s back.

Another ship was coming back, and Starbuck knew her from the shape of her sails and her false gun-ports painted on the side by the prudent Captain Gardiner, who believed in taking precautions against piracy. Starbuck had not seen the Rachel, nor its captain, since the morning when the writing of Mocha Dick was first mooted.

Something caught in his throat, a foolish trepidation: what was Captain Gardiner more than Ahab himself, or Ishmael, or their book, that should send his soul rushing pell mell backward in time to those fateful hours when he made the captain’s choice? Yet he did not think it coincidence that the two of them had not met again: though there had been no conscious decision, at least on his part, to avoid Gardiner during his last sojourn in Nantucket, there were certainly invitations to the houses of mutual friends which he had declined, chapel picnics and musical evenings to which he had not gone, from which he had left early, and at which he had stayed to one side of the room, Gardiner being on the other.

Well, the Rachel was coming back, but what of it? It would be hours before Captain Gardiner would descend. Ishmael and Queequeg offered to take the three older children to watch the unloading, and the ladies wanted to visit the nicest teashop near the dockside with Eve and Tamar. He and Ahab could join them and they could all head back before the afternoon was half done.

‘Captain Gardiner requests your presence on deck.’

Starbuck put down his teacup. Ahab stared at the sailor intensely.

‘You should go,’ said Bess, wiping some crumbs from Tamar’s mouth. ‘I can see you’re both bored here, and besides, Mary and I have some Women’s Abolitionist Society business to discuss.’

The object on the deck drew their eyes before even boarding the ship. It gleamed preternaturally white, and seemed too big to have ever belonged to a living thing. Starbuck’s gorge rose.

Captain Gardiner was not the first to greet them. He held back and another stepped forward in his place. At first, Starbuck did not recognise the tall youth who offered them his handshake: though his beard was still wispy, his shoulders were broad, and his strong arms spoke of his profession. A boy-harpooner of eighteen, such as Ahab had been when he struck his first whale, was this lad, in whom Starbuck found little of the pale, frightened features of little Reuben Gardiner, the first whose life had been saved by Starbuck’s disobedience.

Reuben’s voice trembled as he addressed Ahab. ‘We did it! When I threw the last harpoon, I did it for you, Sir. I remembered what you did for me and it gave me strength. It’s him, Sir. The skull of Moby Dick.

Ahab circumnavigated the vast, uncanny thing, only reaching out to touch a gleaming tooth when he got back to where he started. ‘Aye,’ he says. ‘This is he. This is–’ His voice caught but then he shook his head. ‘And I’ll warrant he filled a fair few barrels of profit for your father too?’

Reuben held himself a little taller. ‘That he did, Sir. But the skull is for you, Sir.’

And Ahab smiled a smile such as Starbuck had never seen on him before: there was freedom in it, relief from a great burden. Katharsis. And kindness. ‘Thank you, my boy. Young man, I should say, and a fine one, a fine whaler. Is it permissible that I should share in your father’s pride?’

Reuben was about to say something, but Ahab waves his hand. ‘Well, none of that, none of that. This is a mighty gift you have given me. He will grace my garden, and the children will climb on him.’

Then Ahab turned away and looked out to sea.