{"id":"01KJNXJVAV1MWRTZR83HA8ZJ4D","cid":"bafkreiggshoel6dyvaxbesp7iczectrfz32fnl2rgjrbiozlpdm2fmuyqq","type":"text_chunk","properties":{"char_end":1177992,"char_start":1170010,"chunk_index":165,"chunk_total":178,"estimated_tokens":1996,"source_file_key":"moby-dick","text":"hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away,\r\nwhole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and\r\nsailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage\r\npillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I\r\nwidowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the\r\nmadness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with\r\nwhich, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly\r\nchased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’\r\nfool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase?\r\nwhy weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance?\r\nhow the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not\r\nhard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been\r\nsnatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me,\r\nthat I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some\r\nashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel\r\ndeadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering\r\nbeneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack my\r\nheart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey\r\nhairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus\r\nintolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a\r\nhuman eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to\r\ngaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is\r\nthe magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no;\r\nstay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives\r\nchase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with\r\nthe far away home I see in that eye!”\r\n\r\n“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all!\r\nwhy should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us\r\nfly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are\r\nStarbuck’s—wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow\r\nyouth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving,\r\nlonging, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant let me alter\r\nthe course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl\r\non our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some\r\nsuch mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”\r\n\r\n“They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the\r\nmorning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy\r\nvivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of\r\ncannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back\r\nto dance him again.”\r\n\r\n“’Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every\r\nmorning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of\r\nhis father’s sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for\r\nNantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away!\r\nSee, see! the boy’s face from the window! the boy’s hand on the hill!”\r\n\r\nBut Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and\r\ncast his last, cindered apple to the soil.\r\n\r\n“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what\r\ncozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor\r\ncommands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep\r\npushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly\r\nmaking me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not\r\nso much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this\r\narm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy\r\nin heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible\r\npower; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain\r\nthink thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does\r\nthat living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round\r\nin this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all\r\nthe time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon\r\nAlbicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where\r\ndo murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged\r\nto the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and\r\nthe air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have\r\nbeen making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and\r\nthe mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we\r\nhow we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust\r\namid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the\r\nhalf-cut swaths—Starbuck!”\r\n\r\nBut blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.\r\n\r\nAhab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at\r\ntwo reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly\r\nleaning over the same rail.\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.\r\n\r\nThat night, in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at\r\nintervals—stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went\r\nto his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing\r\nup the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some\r\nbarbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that\r\npeculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living\r\nsperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner\r\nsurprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane,\r\nand then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as\r\npossible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly\r\naltered, and the sail to be shortened.\r\n\r\nThe acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated\r\nat daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and\r\nlengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery\r\nwrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift\r\ntide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.\r\n\r\n“Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”\r\n\r\nThundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle\r\ndeck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they\r\nseemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear\r\nwith their clothes in their hands.\r\n\r\n“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.\r\n\r\n“Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.\r\n\r\n“T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”\r\n\r\nAll sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for\r\nswaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were\r\nhoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and\r\nwhile peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the\r\nmain-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the\r\nair. “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is\r\nMoby Dick!”\r\n\r\nFired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three\r\nlook-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous\r\nwhale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final\r\nperch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just\r\nbeneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian’s\r\nhead was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this height the whale\r\nwas now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing\r\nhis high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into\r\nthe air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they\r\nhad so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.\r\n\r\n“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men\r\nall around him.\r\n\r\n“I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I\r\ncried out,” said Tashtego.\r\n\r\n“Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate\r\nreserved the doubloon for me. _I_ only; none of ye could have raised\r\nthe White Whale first."},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KJNXEDHZCC8DR4EPSQD0QP4P","peer_label":"moby-dick","peer_type":"text","predicate":"derived_from"},{"peer":"01KJNXECF9R1EZKS5Z7J8A8ZSB","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KJNXM529XJRPQXV0DC58V32N","peer_label":"moby dick","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"whale","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXKW3DZQ5YTC2NQ9Q7VBWR","peer_label":"ahab","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"person","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXKVYKWFDKYWNFAY5N9KE5","peer_label":"starbuck","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"person","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXKYQT8NKB1JV9WAZTZ7F3","peer_label":"cape horn","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"geographical_feature","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXM423TTC0Y0A1Y0X78QFB","peer_label":"nantucket","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"place","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXN7S8BQ2NYCH50940G881","peer_label":"andes","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"mountain_range","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXM6EP73PJRV763QA81RVY","peer_label":"fedallah","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"person","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXKV94RQAJGYF0Y1PBZWSW","peer_label":"tashtego","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"person","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXKV8861P977B7BE45JR4K","peer_label":"daggoo","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"person","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXQ359ZXZP8G5QF2NZ38S9","peer_label":"doubloon","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"object","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXREZGJRZVGTCQQDNPMP3H","peer_label":"sperm whale","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"whale","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXQ9MT08MBJP0S94PRG818","peer_label":"albicore","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"fish","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXRCS1B074RR8SC5H9KG1F","peer_label":"ahabs son","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"person","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXRD3VT5P2TQ3RVMZP0RJX","peer_label":"flying-fish","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"fish","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXSQMMQQE42NN67SD22D0Z","peer_label":"ships course alteration","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"action","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXS43ZANJBEH76X2WG83Y9","peer_label":"peculiar odor","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"entity","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXTBEDA3QXBY5KFN529785","peer_label":"look-out","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"entity","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXTM9TB61BMBA4HATF4Z94","peer_label":"spotting moby dick first","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"entity","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXWB28NHR7HTQRYMK22MVZ","peer_label":"fate","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"concept","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXW2EKN90K6M8WV2P3NH8Z","peer_label":"ahabs wife mary","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"person","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXWPPJ1985QJPGG075CDPD","peer_label":"chapter 133","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"document_structure","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}},{"peer":"01KJNXYCB3S0KAT2RS0972679Y","peer_label":"the chasefirst day","predicate":"extracted_entity","properties":{"entity_type":"event","extracted_at":"2026-03-02T00:08:08.563Z"}}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-03-02T00:01:19.195Z","ts":"2026-03-02T00:08:09.958Z","edited_by":{"method":"system","user_id":"01KJ60XQBHJ0GBGTP9X8HXAPPM"}}