 and point lance at such an apparition as the sperm whale was not for
mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick
eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may be
consulted.
    Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were
ready to give chase to Moby-Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only
to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any
certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently
hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.
    One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at last coming to be linked with
the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly
conceit that Moby-Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in
opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
    Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether
without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the
currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite
research; so the hidden ways of the sperm whale when beneath the surface remain,
in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have
originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them,
especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth,
he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant
points.
    It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as
well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some
whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been
found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be
gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval
of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence,
by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor-West Passage,
so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the
real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the
inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake
in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more
wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were
believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these
fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the
