In Token
Of My Admiration and Affection
This Book Is Inscribed
To
John C. Morrison
Contents
List of Illustrations
Extracts
1 A Mild Blue Day
2 The Dirge
3 The Crossing
4 Reverie
5 The Window
6 The Steamboat
7 The Paddlewheel
8 The Island
9 A Difficult Farewell
10 The Giant
11 Winters, Summers
12 New Bedford
13 Boston
14 The Petrel
15 A Storm at Night
16 The Brightness of Brightness
17 A Rose
18 Our Lady of the Rocks
19 The Return of the Petrel, with Three Letters
20 A Comb
21 The Fourth Letter
22 The Camel
23 The Sea-Fancy Inn
24 The Sussex
25 The Cabin Boy
26 The Companion
27 Captain Coffin’s Story—Secondhand
28 A Whaleboat by Moonlight
29 Captain Morrell’s Story—Thirdhand
30 Captain Ahab’s Story—My First Acquaintance with Him
31 Aloft
32 “Pardon Me”
33 Reunion
34 Revelation
35 Sea Storms
36 The Frost Wind
37 Collision
38 The Course
39 The Distance of the Stars
40 The Sentence
41 What Do You Fetch for Your Mouth?
42 The Beginning of the Debate
43 Father and Son
44 The Human Animal
45 The Alba Albatross
46 Ganglion
47 Postscript on the Above
48 Soaring
49 Portrait of a Virgin Listening
50 Icarus
51 The Test
52 The Funeral
53 The Contest
54 I Am Married
55 Aboard the Pequod
56 The Hurricane House
57 Ahab’s Jottings
58 Kit’s Ruminations
59 Starbuck Introduces Himself
60 Ahab Overheard
61 A Letter to the Lighthouse
62 Poor Kit’s a-Cold
63 Arctic
64 Ahab in His Cabin
65 Aloft, the Pequod
66 Starbuck: Ship’s Log
67 Starbuck Communes with Mary, His Wife
68 In the Steward's Pantry
69 Ahab’s Comfort
70 Nantucket—the Faraway Isle
71 Ahab Prepares for the Next Voyage
72 Breakfast
73 Shame
74 B’twixt
75 Enter: The Gaoler and the Judge
76 On the Moor
77 A Slow Spring
78 Churches
79 Baptismal
80 Fire
81 Ahab Addresses the Flames
82 Ahab’s Wife
83 A Sky Full of Angels
84 Resurrection
85 The Purpose of Art
86 The Office of a Friend
87 Childhood as an Island
88 The World of Rebekkah Swain
89 Kentucky Seasons
90 A Winter Tale
91 The Burden
92 The Lantern
93 Shakespeare and Company
94 The Guide
95 Getting Started
96 Forest Murmurs
97 In the Cupola
98 To Summer
99 Wife
100 The Mitchells
101 Vestal Street
102 Ahab
103 From Cupola to Wharf
104 Idyll
105 The Comet
106 Frannie’s Letter from an Inland Lighthouse
107 An Angry Letter from Aunt Agatha
108 Letter to an Inland Lighthouse
109 The Minister in the Woods
110 The History of Snow and Restlessness
111 Altar Rock
112 Mothering
113 Chowder Swirls
114 The Birthing Room
115 The Leg
116 Christmas Eve
117 A Last Glimpse of the Pequod: Christmas Day
118 The Jeroboam Returns
119 The First Part of Ahab’s Third Voyage After His Marriage
120 Moon Watch
121 Letter from Susan
122 The Samuel Enderby of London Puts in for Repairs at Nantucket
123 The Distress of Justice
124 To Siasconset
125 The Hedge
126 Journey Toward the Starry Sky, in Present Tense
127 ’Sconset Morning
128 More of Morning: T ashtego’s Feather Makes the Letter S
129 The Neighbor Beyond the Hedge
130 The Roar of Guilt
131 The Return of the Delight
132 The Perseid
133 The Woolsack
134 Letter from Margaret Fuller, from England
135 Letter from David Poland, Virginia
136 Letter to Beloved Kin
137 Letter from Margaret Fuller, from Italy
138 The Judge’s Invitation
139 Mrs. Maynard’s Note
140 Preparations
141 Frannie
142 Liberty and the Dolphins
143 A Suitable Marriage
144 What Has Proved to Be a Last Visit
145 A Song
146 A Squeeze of the Hand
147 Una Preaches to the Waves
148 The Great Fire: June 1846
149 ReRections on a Wreck
150 During the Pleasure Party
151 Celestial
152 A New Friend
153 A Sermon Overheard
154 Plans
155 Recitation by Beach Fire
156 Letter from Susan, Forwarded
157 The Roof Walk
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
E-Book Extras
An Interview with Sena Jeter Naslund: “The Ship of My Book”
Author’s Note: The Surprise and Pleasure of It
Reading Group Guide: Discussion Points
About Ahab’s Wife or, The Star Gazer
Praise for Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife or, The Star-Gazer
About the Author
By Sena Jeter Naslund
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Illustrations
Frontispiece
“The Crossing”
“The eagle was a flurry of feathers…”
The Harbor of New Bedford
“Aloft”
“He rose in the vertical, jaw agape…”
“All around us in the sea and the sky, there is a black glory we do not share.”
The Hold
“Ahab Addresses the flames”
“Forest Murmurs”
“The Comet”
The Roof Walk and the Starry Sky
The Woodcarver’s Studio
“You want me to kill ’em?”
Extracts
Let them be sea-captains—if they will!
—MARGARET FULLER, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
It was now early spring, and the river was swollen and turbulent; great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and from in the turbid water…. The huge green fragment of ice on which [Eliza] alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it, but she stayed there not a moment. With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped
to another and still another cake:—stumbling—leaping—slipping—springing upwards again!
“Yer a brave gal, now, whoever year!”
—HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851)
“My God! Mr. Chase, what is the matter?!”
I answered, “We have been stove by a whale.”
—OWEN CHASE, Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket (1821)
"Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales…. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one….
Besides, my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man had a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”
—CAPTAIN PELEG TO ISHMAEL, “The Ship,” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
[Starbuck, First Mate of the Pequod:] “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish!…—this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
[Ahab:] “They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”
[Starbuck:] “…my Mary…promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail!…Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy’s face from the window! the boy’s hand on the hill!”
But Ahab’s glance was averted…. “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it: what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time…? By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike…. But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.”
—STARBUCK AND AHAB, “The Symphony,” Moby-Dick
I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye!…Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes!…I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs…Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.
—AHAB, “The Symphony,” Molly-Dick
“There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”
—AHAB, “The Chase—First Day,” Moby-Dick
CHAPTER 1: A Mild Blue Day
CAPTAIN AHAB WAS neither my first husband nor my last. Yet, looking up—into the clouds—I conjure him there: his gray-white hair; his gathered brow; and the zaggy mark (I saw it when lying with him by candlelight and, also, taking our bliss on the sunny moor among curly-cup gumweed and lamb’s ear). And I see a zaggy shadow now in the rifting clouds. That mark started like lightning at Ahab’s temple and ran not all the way to his heel (as some thought) but ended at Ahab’s heart.
That pull of cloud—tapered and blunt at one end and frayed at the other—seems the cottony representation of his ivory leg. But I will not see him all dismembered and scattered in heaven’s blue—that would be no kind, reconstructive vision;no, intact, lofty and sailing, though his shape is changeable. Yesterday, when I tilted my face to the sky, I imaged not the full figure but only his cloudy head, a portrait, glancing back at me over his shoulder.
What weather is in Ahab’s face?
For me, now, as it ever was in life, at least when he was looking at me alone and had no other person in view, his visage is mild—with a brightness in it, even be it a wild, white, blown-about brightness. Now, as I look at those billowed clouds, I see the Pequod. I half raise my hand to bid good-bye, as it was that last day from the eastmost edge of Nantucket Island, when, with a wave and then a steadfast, longing look, till the sails were only a white dot, and then a blankness of ocean—then a glitter—I wished his ship and him Godspeed.