It was midday.
Dough‑Boy, the ship’s steward, poked his pale, dough‑like face out of the cabin hatch.
“Sir, dinner’s ready,” he called to his captain.
Ahab sat in the sheltered quarter boat. He’d just taken a sun reading. Now he silently worked out his latitude on the smooth round tablet fixed to the top of his ivory leg.
He gave no sign he’d heard the steward.
After a moment, Ahab grabbed the mizzen rigging, swung himself onto the main deck.
“Mr. Starbuck, dinner.” His voice was flat, no excitement in it. Then he stepped down into the cabin.
Once the sound of Ahab’s footsteps faded away, Starbuck, the first mate, figured the captain was sitting at the table.
Starbuck shook out of his quiet mood. He paced a little across the deck planks. He leaned in briefly to check the compass binnacle.
“Mr. Stubb, dinner,” he said, a faint touch of warmth in his tone. He climbed down through the hatch.
Second mate Stubb loitered by the ropes for a while. He gave the main brace a small shake to make sure the heavy rope held fast.
“Mr. Flask, dinner!” he called sharply, and followed Starbuck below.
Now third mate Flask was all alone on the quarter‑deck. It looked like a weight had lifted off him.
He shot playful, knowing winks in every direction. Kicked off his shoes. Right over where Ahab’s chair would sit below, he broke into a quick, silent hornpipe dance.
With a slick trick, he tossed his cap up onto the mizzen top to leave it there. Then he headed toward the cabin, loud and carefree, bringing up the rear with his own little performance.
Right before he stepped through the cabin door, he stopped. His whole manner changed completely.
Cheerful, cocky Flask walked in to face Captain Ahab, acting quiet and subservient, like a slave.
One of the odd things about life at sea was this.
Up on the open deck, officers might stand their ground and talk back to their captain when they got riled up.
But almost always, the second they went down into that same captain’s cabin for dinner, their whole attitude shifted. Seated around the table with Ahab at the head, they grew mild, even deferential.
It was strange, sometimes almost comical.
What caused that shift? Maybe it was no great mystery.
To host people at your own dinner table, to hold that quiet, unchallenged power over the room‑‑that kind of personal authority outshone even ancient kings. Anyone who’s ever hosted friends for dinner knows a little of what it feels like to hold that sort of sway.
Add on top of that the absolute authority of a ship’s captain, and you get exactly this strange quirk of life on a whaler.
Ahab sat behind his ivory‑inlaid table. He looked like a grim male sea lion on white coral sand. His officers sat around him, tough men, yet respectful toward their captain.
Each man waited his turn to be served. In Ahab’s presence, they acted like small children. Still, Ahab did not seem to carry himself with snobbery.
All three mates fixed their eyes intently as Ahab carved the main roast.
None of them would have dared break that hush with idle chatter‑‑not even to talk about the weather.
Ahab held knife and fork, a slice of beef clamped between them. He gestured Starbuck’s plate closer.
Starbuck took that meat like he was accepting charity. He cut it gently. He flinched if his knife scraped against the plate. He chewed without noise and swallowed carefully.
These cabin dinners felt like formal royal feasts, heavy and quiet. Ahab never banned conversation. He simply never spoke himself.
Stubb nearly choked with relief when a rat started scrabbling loudly in the hold below.
Poor Flask was the junior officer, the youngest at this grim dinner. He got the bony shins of the salt beef, never the juicy drumsticks.
To help himself to food without waiting would have felt to Flask like outright theft. He believed if he ever did that, he could never hold his head up again. Oddly enough, Ahab never actually made a rule against it. Ahab might not even have noticed if Flask had reached for more.
Most of all, Flask never dared help himself to butter.
He told himself maybe the ship’s owners wouldn’t let him have it, worried butter would ruin his clear complexion. Or on this long voyage far from any port, butter was precious‑‑and not for low‑ranking officers like him.
Whatever the real reason, Flask got no butter.
Here was another unfair thing.
Flask was always the last one down to dinner, and always the first one forced to leave.
That left him barely any time to eat. Starbuck and Stubb got a head start, and they could linger at the table afterward.
Even Stubb, only one rank above Flask, might finish eating early. Naval custom said Stubb could not go back up on deck before Flask. So Flask had to wolf down food fast. On days like that, he might only get three bites total.
Flask once admitted privately: ever since he became an officer, he was always more or less hungry. The food he ate barely took the edge off. It just kept the hunger alive inside him.
“Peace and fullness have left my stomach for good,” Flask thought. “I am an officer. But God, I wish I could go back to the forecastle and eat plain old beef like I did when I was just a regular sailor. That’s what promotion gets you. Empty glory. This is the madness of life.”
If any ordinary sailor on the Pequod wanted to get back at Flask, all he had to do was peek through the cabin skylight at dinner time. There sat Flask, stiff and intimidated in front of the terrifying Ahab.
Ahab and his three mates made up the first dinner party in the cabin. When they left, they went out in reverse order of how they arrived.
The pale steward Dough‑Boy rushed to clear the table.
Then the three harpooners were called in to eat the leftovers. The fancy captain’s cabin turned into a rough servants’ mess.
What a contrast this second meal was.
At the captain’s table, everyone was tense, weighed down by invisible power. Among the harpooners, there were no such restraints. They laughed, ate freely, lived by a rough, equal‑feeling code.
The mates had been so cautious they barely dared move their jaws. The harpooners chewed with loud, obvious enjoyment. They ate like lords, stuffing their bellies full.
Queequeg and Tashtego had enormous appetites. Dough‑Boy often had to haul over huge chunks of salt beef, great solid slabs hacked off an ox.
If Dough‑Boy did not hurry, Tashtego would hurl his fork toward the steward’s back, the way you throw a harpoon, to speed him up.
Once Daggoo got playful. He lifted Dough‑Boy clean off his feet and shoved the steward’s face down into a big empty wooden platter. Tashtego held a knife, pretending he was about to scalp him.
Dough‑Boy was a jumpy, nervous little man. His father had been a bankrupt baker, his mother a hospital nurse.
Between Ahab’s menacing presence and these three wild‑mannered harpooners, Dough‑Boy spent every single day trembling.
Once he’d set everything the harpooners wanted on the table, he would scramble into his tiny side pantry. He peered out through the slats in the door, shaking, until the meal was over.
Queequeg sat across from Tashtego, his sharp filed teeth visible. Daggoo sat on the floor. A bench would have made his tall head hit the low cabin beams. Every time his huge muscles shifted, the whole cabin frame shook, like an African elephant riding as ship’s cargo.
For all his size, the giant Daggoo ate surprisingly little, almost dainty. It was hard to see how such small bites kept his massive body going. Perhaps this noble giant drew strength more from the open air around him than from meat and bread.
Queequeg ate noisily, smacking his lips in savage fashion. The terrified Dough‑Boy kept half‑expecting to see bite marks on his own thin arms.
When Tashtego yelled for more meat so he could gnaw on bones, Dough‑Boy would shake so hard he nearly shattered all the crockery stored in his pantry.
The harpooners carried sharpening stones in their pockets for their weapons. At dinner they would loudly sharpen their knives. That scraping sound only made Dough‑Boy more anxious.
Dough‑Boy could not stop imagining that back in Queequeg’s island home, he had taken part in brutal, cannibal feasts.
Poor Dough‑Boy. Serving men who used to eat human flesh‑‑he ought to carry a shield instead of a linen napkin over his arm.
Eventually the three sea‑warriors would stand up and leave. To Dough‑Boy’s overactive imagination, their bones clinked and rattled as they walked, like curved swords in their scabbards.
Even though these harpooners ate and technically slept in the cabin, they were hardly ever there. They only came for meals, and passed through on their way to their own sleeping quarters.
Ahab was typical of many American whaling captains. Most of them believed the cabin was their personal space. Others were allowed inside only by the captain’s good grace.
Truly, the mates and harpooners of the Pequod did not live in the cabin so much as they visited it. They stepped inside briefly, only to be sent back out again. Their real home was out on the open deck.
They lost little by that. There was no real companionship inside the cabin. Ahab kept everyone at a distance. Though counted as a Christian man on paper, he remained alien to that world.
He existed among other men the way the last grizzly bear once lived in settled Missouri. Just as that wild bear would curl up inside a hollow tree to endure winter, sucking on its own paws‑‑Ahab’s soul was trapped inside the cave of his own body. There it fed on nothing but his own bitter, dark gloom.