y involves intellectual
mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a
sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced will
were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; still
he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his
captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from
it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would elapse
ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck
would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his
captain's leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial
influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle
insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly
manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing
that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that
strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that
the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure
background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation
unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches,
his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby
Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the
announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less
capricious and unreliable--they live in the varying outer weather, and
they inhale its fickleness--and when retained for any object remote and
blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the
end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and
employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the
final dash.

Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even
breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the
love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food
for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and
chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two
thousand miles of land to fight for th