Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab is a fictional character and one of the protagonists in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). He is the monomaniacal captain of the whaling ship Pequod. On a previous voyage, the white whale Moby Dick bit off Ahab's leg, and he now wears a prosthetic leg made out of whalebone. The whaling voyage of the Pequod ends up as a hunt for revenge on the whale, as Ahab forces the crew members to support his fanatical mission. When Moby Dick is finally sighted, Ahab's hatred robs him of all caution, and the whale drags him to his death beneath the sea and sinks the Pequod.
For other uses, see Captain Ahab (disambiguation).Ahab
Melville biographers call Ahab "a brilliant personification of the very essence of fanaticism".[1] Scholar F. O. Matthiessen calls attention to the fact that Ahab is called an "ungodly god-like man". Ahab's "tragedy is that of an unregenerate will" whose "burning mind is barred out from the exuberance of love" and argues that he "remains damned".[2] Writer D. H. Lawrence felt little sympathy for Ahab and found that the whale should have "torn off both his legs, and a bit more besides".[3]
The character of Ahab was created under the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lecture on Hamlet and figures in biblical and classical literature such as Shakespeare and Milton. His prosthesis, for instance, has been taken for an allusion to the Oedipus myth.[4]
Ahab is firmly established in popular culture by cartoons, comic books, films and plays. Most famously, he provided J. M. Barrie with the model for his Captain Hook character, who is obsessed with not a whale but a crocodile.[5][6][7]
Biography[edit]
Ahab was named by his insane, widowed mother, who died when he was twelve months old. The etymology of the name Ahab derives from the Hebrew, meaning "father's brother" as cited in Strong's Concordance no. 256.[8] At age 18, Ahab first took to sea as a harpooner. Less than three voyages earlier, Ahab married a girl, with whom he had a young son. He had been in colleges and among the cannibals and had seen deeper wonders than the waves. He had fixed his lance, the keenest and surest on the isle of Nantucket, in stranger foes than whales.
Years ago, Peleg, now the co-owner of Pequod, sailed as mate under Ahab. During that voyage, a typhoon near Japan swung her three masts overboard. Every moment, the crew thought the ship would sink, the sea breaking over the ship. Yet, instead of thinking of death, Ahab and Peleg thought of how to save all hands, and how to rig temporary masts in order to get into the nearest port and make repairs.
Before the ship sails from Nantucket, Ishmael encounters a man named Elijah, who tells him about some of Ahab's past deeds. According to Elijah, Ahab once lay near death for three days and nights near Cape Horn, took part in a deadly battle against Spanish forces before an altar in Santa, and spat into its silver chalice. Ahab lost his leg during his most recent whaling voyage, leaving him with a grim disposition and a strong desire for revenge against Moby Dick.
In addition to the prosthetic leg, Ahab has a mark that runs down one side of his face and neck: “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...leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.” –(Moby-Dick, p. 129.) The mark and its origins – whether a birthmark, the scar from a wound, or otherwise – are rarely mentioned or discussed. Ahab's leg includes a small flat patch that he uses as a slate for making navigational calculations. The deck planks of Pequod have been bored with shallow holes, the same diameter as the lower end, to allow him to steady himself against the motion of the ship. While at sea, he turns to the ship's carpenter and blacksmith to fashion a replacement leg and fittings after damaging the one he wears.
Ahab is age 58 at the time of Pequod's last voyage. Peleg and Bildad pilot the ship out of the harbor, and Ahab first appears on deck when the ship is already at sea. Instead of embarking on a regular whaling voyage, Ahab declares he is out for revenge and nails a doubloon to the mast, as a reward for the crewmember who first sights Moby Dick. As the voyage proceeds, Ahab gradually abandons the physical comforts of his life, symbolized by such actions as throwing his pipe overboard and giving his shaving razors to the ship's blacksmith for use in forging a special harpoon he intends to use against Moby Dick. When the whale is eventually sighted, a disastrous three-day chase begins. Ahab throws his harpoon and hits Moby Dick, but its line wraps around his neck and drags him off his boat when the whale dives, drowning him.
Peleg refers to Ahab respectfully as a "grand, ungodly, god-like man", but he is also nicknamed "Old Thunder".
Concept and creation[edit]
According to Melville biographer Leon Howard, "Ahab is a Shakespearean tragic hero, created according to the Coleridgean formula."[9] The creation of Ahab, who apparently does not derive from any captain Melville sailed under, was heavily influenced by the observation in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lecture on Hamlet that "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself ... thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances."[10] Whenever Moby-Dick's narrator comments on Captain Ahab as an artistic creation, the language of Coleridge's lecture appears: "at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half-wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature." All men "tragically great," Ishmael says, "are made so through a certain morbidness." All mortal greatness "is but disease."[11]
Ahab's speech combines Quaker archaism with Shakespeare's idiom to serve as "a homegrown analogue to blank verse."[12]
Ahab's death seems to be based on an actual event. On May 18, 1843, Melville was aboard The Star, which sailed for Honolulu. Aboard were two sailors from the ship Nantucket, who could have told him that they had seen their second mate "taken out of a whaleboat by a foul line and drowned, as is Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick."[13]
Reception[edit]
Critical[edit]
When the book was first published, reviewers mostly focused on Ahab and the whale. According to George Ripley in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for December 1851, Ahab "becomes the victim of a deep, cunning monomania; believes himself predestined to take a bloody revenge on his fearful enemy; pursues him with fierce demoniac energy of purpose."[46] Ripley admires the creation of Ahab, who "opens upon us with wonderful power. He exercises a wild, bewildering fascination by his dark and mysterious nature."[47]
During the onset of Melville's rediscovery there was no change of emphasis on Ahab and his struggle with the whale.[48] During the 1950s and 1960s literary scholars shifted their attention to narrative technique and point of view, which for Melville studies meant that the spotlight switched from Ahab to Ishmael.[49]