Ch. 25

NAVIGATION

Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy.

Ahab, “The Quadrant”

After the Pequod survives the typhoon in the Sea of Japan, Ahab trims sail for the equator. A century before GPS, radar, and depth sounders, Ahab had safely steered the Pequod to the other side of the world by navigating with his charts, with celestial navigation, and with deduced reckoning.

In Ahab’s time getting the ship’s latitude with a sun sight at the sun’s highest point in the middle of the day was relatively easy, as long as you had a nautical almanac or a copy of Bowditch on board to help with declination. Declination is how far north or south is the sun in relation to the equator due to the tilt of the Earth and its orbit around the sun.

Getting the ship’s longitude in the mid-1800s required more finesse, planning, and math. Whaleship officers, who rarely had time or interest in lunars or other advanced celestial trigonometry, most commonly calculated their longitude by: (1) the ship’s chronometer—an expensive timepiece but available to American whalemen in the 1840s; (2) keeping a regular record of the compass direction that the ship was steered; and (3) keeping a regular record of the average speed that the ship sailed over the water, which was determined by estimation from experience or by measuring on marked rope how quickly a block of wood, a chip log, was dragged away from the ship. (See fig. 48.) Calculating longitude with this direction and speed of the ship over time, which measured distance from the prime meridian of 0˚ longitude at Greenwich, England, was known as part of deduced reckoning or, more commonly, as “dead” reckoning. This was loaded with potential error because of currents, variable helmsmanship, and leeway, the sideways sliding of sailing ships.1

In “The Quadrant,” “The Needle,” “The Log and Line,” and Stubb’s musings in “The Doubloon,” Ishmael does not get into all the details, such as the means of calculating longitude, but Melville clearly understood navigation at sea and wrote of everything accurately enough to get us reasonably to the equator in the Pacific.

In “The Quadrant,” just before the typhoon, Ahab takes an angle of the sun appropriately at midday. He finds the sun at its highest-most point, its “precise meridian,” as Fedallah, the sun-worshipper, looks on. Mariners since before Columbus measured the height of the sun, stars, and planets with a variety of protractor-like instruments, beginning with the kamal and the cross-staff. These were improved to the octant, quadrant, and sextant, which were all variations of the same tool and all available in the 1840s. On the first voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the captain used an octant. The officers of the sinking whaleship Essex grabbed two quadrants along with their copies of Bowditch.2 (See fig. 48.)

With a pencil, Ahab writes the angle on the special plate that’s been fixed to his ivory leg: “Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant.”3 Ishmael skips declination, but if you’re taking a noon-sight every day, day after day, you have a good sense of what that is without looking at the tables, and even a super accurate timepiece isn’t essential. Ahab then looks back at the quadrant, fingering its “numerous cabalistical contrivances,” and begins to rage at the device:

The world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!4

Ahab smashes the instrument with both his living foot and his dead peg leg. The sailors look on, horrified. Ahab orders the ship to start heading toward the equator. “No longer will I guide my earthly way by thee,” Ahab seethes at the quadrant, “the level ship’s compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea.” It’s not without meaning that a typhoon blasts the ship in the very next scene.5

Ahab, Lucifer-like, lashes out at his inability to rise beyond what he can know. Perhaps part of Ahab’s rage here is that he cannot surmount Agassiz’s chain of being to be more like a God, as had Bulkington at the start of the voyage and as Ahab had declared he would in “The Quarter-Deck.” Ahab does not want to have to look skyward. In rejecting this celestial science, Ahab becomes more animal, choosing to navigate more intuitively with more basic methods, believing man was not meant to gaze up at the stars. You could very well substitute Ahab’s quadrant for a GPS, a smart phone, or even the internet in general—really any technological device, advancement, or even abstract scientific theory. What can these actually do for us beyond providing information? They cannot help with what Ahab wants to know: the future, if and how God controls him, what’s the meaning in one human life, why is he so personally and ceaselessly raging against the White Whale, and all the unknowables that we humans are unable to unmask. The workings of the celestial bodies—the sun, the stars, the moon—and everything humanity has learned become folly to Ahab.6

In this way is Ahab prescient, representative of what was becoming, and still is, an enormous, psychological rending in parts of Western cultures? As reliance on and devotion to science grew, adding skepticism to creation, miracles, and other religious beliefs, is it possible that Ahab’s speech expresses Melville’s concern about a growing, gnawing gap in the ability of Judeo-Christian scriptural teachings to provide that human, intrinsic need for something that resembles faith: pilotage?7

When the energy of the typhoon flips the compass, a phenomenon that had been documented in Melville’s fish documents, mad Ahab uses the knowledge gained from his forty-years’ experience at sea to flaunt his mastery. Now rational science is on his side. Yet for the sailors, Ahab’s repair of the compass is as much black magic as their captain’s calculation of latitude by the sun, but far more foreign. The men are dependent on his navigation for their lives, watching his blasphemous rejections of higher knowledge, which they know would keep them safe. The crew fall into a far deeper, superstitious gloom at their fate.8

Now Ahab vows to navigate only with dead reckoning. The gloomy implication of the phrase is not lost on Ishmael. Starbuck recognizes it, too, but as a less reliable way to navigate. Then the scene in “The Log and Line” delivers still another omen related to their navigation. The officers had been merely estimating the speed of the ship visually and hadn’t bothered with the log and line. The rope had rotted. When Ahab puts it out, the old Manxman warns him that it’ll break, but Ahab won’t listen. The line snaps.