Today, as you mount the deck at the forenoon watch and glance at the taffrail, foreboding shivers over you….
The Captain stands upon his quarter-deck.
He looks like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them. His whole high, broad form seems 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, you see a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembles 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.
So powerfully does the whole grim aspect of the Captain affect you that for the first few moments you hardly note the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stands: an ivory leg that, you’ll later learn, was at sea fashioned from the polished bone of a sperm whale’s jaw.
There is an auger hole, bored half an inch or so, into the plank on the Captain’s quarter deck. His bone leg steadies in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; the Captain stands erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There is an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance—
especially now, as it turns its crucified face to you.
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