Moby Dick

In chapter 51, “The Spirit-Spout”, the Pequod runs into a massive storm. For the whalers, nothing clarifies their predicament like the times when the sea is most dangerous.

In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then captain and crew become practical fatalists… Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted soldiers in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast.

The overwhelming power of the sea renders the men silent and fatalistic, as the possibility of death and the helplessness of man in the face of nature dominate the minds of the crew. Melville also links the sea to madness, demonstrating that it requires a certain degree to cope with such a devastating and common event while whaling. Ahab is portrayed as resolute, even sleeping while exposed to the storm because of his relentless defiance of the sea. Yet he clearly possesses no agency or ability to influence the sea or the storm, regardless of his declarations of being God and master of the Pequod. This  reminder of forces greater than Ahab and the wider world only occurs when nature intervenes on the ship. The single-mindedness of the Pequod’s and Ahab’s goal requires such a larger force in order to provide the perspective of madness that Melville cultivates in the crew. When the sea turns hostile, there is no possibility for Ahab to influence events either on the ship or in the sea. His manic obsession with the white whale does not diminish, but the reader and, one hopes, the crew, can see through the extreme example of the storm to the broader fact that the sea is ultimately in control of the Pequod’s fate, not the captain.

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