ers and men, each in his own different way,
could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a
Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the
ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather,
though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every
degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that
merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one
of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the
transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water
with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I
mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I
levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me.
Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.

There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when
the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His
whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out
from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his
tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing,
you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that
perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of
a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and
without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top
to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly
alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it
was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.
By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was
made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old
Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till
he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and
then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in
an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially
negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,
who, having never before sailed