whale fishery at large, than to the
individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and
the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
    And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them,
almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that
species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults - not
restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations
- but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses,
all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby-Dick; those things had gone
far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White
Whale had eventually come.
    Nor did wild rumours of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more
horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous
rumours naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events, -
as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more
than in that of terra-firma, wild rumours abound, wherever there is any adequate
reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter,
so the whale-fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the
wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumours which sometimes circulate there.
For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and
superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all
odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly
astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels,
but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that
though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not
come to any chiselled hearthstone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the
sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does,
the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant
with many a mighty birth.
    No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the
wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumours of the White Whale did in the end
incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal
suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby-Dick with
new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases
such a panic did he finally