“Who’d have guessed this, Flask!” Stubb shouted. “If I only had one leg, you’d never catch me climbing into a whaleboat. The only thing I’d be good for is plugging a leak with my wooden toe. Man, what an incredible old captain he is!”
“I don’t think it’s all that surprising, honestly,” Flask replied. “If his leg was cut off at the hip, that’d be a whole different story. That would totally cripple him. But he still has one full working knee, plus most of his other leg left.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, kid. I’ve never once seen him kneel down.”
Seasoned whalers had long debated a key question. Since Captain Ahab’s survival was critical to the entire voyage’s success, was it right for him to risk his life in the dangerous chaos of whale hunting?
It was the same dilemma Tamerlane’s soldiers had once wept over. They’d always wondered if their leader’s irreplaceable life should be thrown into the thickest, deadliest battles.
But Ahab’s situation made this debate look completely different. Even a man with two healthy legs stumbles and struggles through the constant dangers of whaling. Every single second of a whale chase holds fresh, unexpected risks.
So why would a disabled man choose to climb into a hunting whaleboat at all? The Pequod’s co-owners certainly thought it was a terrible idea.
Ahab knew this perfectly well. He understood that back home, people would not mind him hopping into a boat during the calmer, less risky parts of the hunt. They’d see it as him wanting to stay close to the action and give orders in person.
But no one on the ship’s ownership team would ever approve of Ahab having his own dedicated whaleboat for active hunting. Least of all would they agree to assign five extra crewmen just to man his personal boat. Ahab knew those kinds of generous, lenient favors were never on the owners’ minds.
That’s why he never asked them for a dedicated crew, or even hinted at what he wanted. Instead, he made all his own secret plans behind the scenes.
No one on board saw this coming—not until Cabaco spilled the secret. Still, the crew had noticed odd behavior from Ahab long before that day.
Shortly after the ship left port, the whole crew finished the usual work of prepping all the whaleboats for hunting. After that, men started spotting Ahab busy with strange handiwork.
He’d spend hours carving wooden rowlock pins by hand for one of the spare whaleboats. He even carefully cut small wooden pegs, the kind used to secure the rope grooves at the boat’s bow when lines were running fast.
People watched him fuss over every little detail. He had an extra layer of protective sheathing added to the boat’s bottom, clearly to cushion the sharp pressure from his ivory prosthetic leg.
He also obsessed over shaping the thick thigh board— the sturdy wooden brace at the boat’s front that hunters press their knee against when spearing whales.
Time and again, he’d stand alone in that spare boat, lock his good knee into the carved semicircular notch of the brace, and chip and smooth the wood with a carpenter’s chisel, tweaking every imperfection until it was perfect.
All these odd, careful preparations sparked plenty of curiosity among the sailors. Everyone assumed he was just getting ready for his final hunt after Moby Dick. He’d already told the crew he planned to hunt the deadly white whale himself.
But it never crossed anyone’s mind that he planned to have a full crew assigned exclusively to his custom-fitted boat.
Before long, the crew got used to the strange new group of silent sailors who’d joined the ship. On a whaling vessel, weird sights never stay shocking for long.
Whaling ships pick up all kinds of bizarre people from every corner of the globe. Sailors often rescue drifters floating on wreckage, oars, small boats, or broken Japanese junks out on the open ocean. By the ship’s standards, even the devil himself walking aboard to chat with the captain wouldn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers.
Still, while the other mysterious new sailors slowly blended into the crew (even if they always felt a little different), the turban-wearing Fedallah remained a total, unsolved mystery to everyone on board.
No one knew where he’d come from, or what strange tie bound him so closely to Ahab’s fate. Worse still, it seemed he had some quiet, hidden influence over the captain—maybe even power over him. No soul on the ship could explain it.
Fedallah was the kind of strange, otherworldly person ordinary civilized people only catch faint glimpses of in dreams. Figures like him rarely appear in Western societies, but they linger in the ancient, unchanging communities of Asia, especially the remote island nations of East Asia.
These isolated, timeless lands still hold onto the ghostly, primitive energy of the world’s earliest days. Back when humanity still remembered the very first man, when all people felt like strangers and phantoms to one another, constantly wondering why the sun and moon existed, and what purpose life served.
Even old religious tales hint at this strange, ancient ambiguity. The Bible tells of angels walking among mortal humans, but older uncanonical stories speak of demons too, descending to earth to mingle and consort with mortal women.