.. < chapter cxi 2  THE PACIFIC >


     When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged

at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have


     greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication

of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a

thousand leagues of blue.  There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about

this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul

beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried

Evangelist St.  John.  And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures,

wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the

waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions

of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all

that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like

slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their

restlessness.  To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once

beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption.  It rolls the midmost

waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms.  The

same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday

planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous

skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float

milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and


     impenetrable Japans.  Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's

whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating

heart of earth.  Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the

seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.  But few thoughts of Pan stirred

Ahab's brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside

the mizen

.. <p 479 >

rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the

Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with

the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea

in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming.  Launched at length

upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese

cruising-ground, the old man's purpose intensified itself.  His firm lips met

like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like

overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted

hull, Stern all!  the White Whale spouts thick blood!

.. <p 479 >

