“Haul in the chains! Let the carcass drift astern!”
The heavy lifting rigs had finally finished their work for the day.
Stripped of its blubber and severed from its head, the whale’s pale, raw body glinted on the water like a white marble tomb. Its color was gone, washed out and ghostly, but its massive size had barely shrunk at all. It was still an enormous, towering mass.
Slowly, the corpse drifted farther and farther from the ship.
Sharks swarmed beneath it, tearing and thrashing at the flesh without mercy, churning the surrounding sea into chaos. Above, flocks of greedy seabirds circled and screamed endlessly. Their sharp beaks stabbed down at the dead whale again and again, like countless tiny, cruel daggers picking at its body.
The great headless white phantom floated steadily away.
With every yard it drifted, more sharks gathered in the water below, more birds crowded the sky above. The whole scene echoed with a brutal, deafening racket of feeding and squawking.
For hours on end, the stationary crew aboard the Pequod stared out at that gruesome sight.
Beneath a clear, soft blue sky, atop a calm and sunlit ocean, carried along by gentle, pleasant winds, this huge lump of death drifted onward. It sailed farther and farther out, until it finally faded into the endless stretch of open sea.
What a sad, ridiculous funeral this was.
The sea’s scavengers gathered as if in solemn mourning. The seabirds, nature’s aerial pirates, dressed in dark, mottled feathers as if wearing funeral black.
Not one of these creatures would have lifted a fin or wing to help the whale when it was alive and in need. But now that it was dead and helpless, they all descended devoutly to feast on its remains.
This is the terrible, greedy cruelty of the natural world. Not even the mightiest whale can escape it.
And the horror does not end here.
Even desecrated and torn apart by predators, the whale leaves behind a vengeful kind of ghost that lingers over the waters, haunting the open sea.
Far off, a nervous warship or a clumsy exploration vessel spots something strange on the waves.
From a distance, the swirling flocks of birds blur into faint shadows, but the huge white shape floating in the sunlight is clear to see. They watch white spray crash and surge against the massive unseen mass beneath the waves.
“Dangerous waters ahead,” some anxious sailor jots down in the ship’s log with trembling hands. “Shoals, hidden rocks, and breaking surf. All vessels beware.”
For years after, ships will steer clear of this stretch of ocean.
They swerve around it blindly, just like skittish sheep leaping over empty air simply because the lead sheep jumped first, tricking the whole flock into following suit.
This is the power of precedent.
This is the useless weight of old tradition.
This is how stubborn, groundless old beliefs live on—no longer rooted in fact, not even grounded in sight, yet still clung to fiercely by men.
This is rigid, unthinking convention.
In life, this giant whale struck pure terror into every enemy that dared cross its path.
In death, its harmless ghost haunts the world, stirring up pointless fear in anyone who nears its final resting place.
Do you believe in ghosts, my friend?
There are far more ghosts in this world than the famous old haunting of Cock-Lane. And there are far wiser men than Doctor Johnson who swear they have seen and felt them.