2. The Albatross.

South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising
ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross)
by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the
fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro
in the far ocean fisheries--a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.

As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her
spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over
with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to
see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed
clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had
survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to
the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when
the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air
came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the
mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking
fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own
look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.

"Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?"

But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the
act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand
into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make
himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the
distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod
were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first
mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a
moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat
to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking
advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and
knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and
shortly bound home, he loudly hailed--"Ahoy there! This is the Pequod,
bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the
Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them
to address them to--"

At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed,