The chapter opens with one of the most famous lines in literature: "Call me Ishmael." He is young, broke, restless, and depressed. He describes a damp, drizzly November inside his soul, hanging around coffin shops and funerals, sometimes so low he wants to pick fights in the street. When he feels that way, he goes to sea. It is his way of staying alive instead of giving up.
He says almost everyone shares this pull toward the ocean. On Sunday in New York, thousands of ordinary workers stand at the piers staring at the water, though they have nowhere to sail. Paths in the country lead downhill to streams. Painters put water in every landscape because it draws the eye. Ishmael says we all see in the sea the same unreachable reflection that drowned Narcissus: life itself, always just out of grasp.
He explains how he travels. He never goes as a passenger, officer, or cook. Passengers pay and get sick; officers carry too much responsibility; cooking means endless kitchen work. He signs on as a plain sailor because he gets paid, gets fresh air, and accepts being ordered around. Everyone is pushed around in some way, he says. The humiliation of scrubbing decks fades after a while.
What he cannot fully explain is why he chose whaling. Maybe fate arranged it between bigger events in history, like an election and a war in Afghanistan. But he admits the real draw was the whale: huge, unknown, and far away. He has an itch for distant places and forbidden seas. The chapter ends with a vision of endless whales, and one great ghostly shape in the mist like a snowy hill in the sky.
Coming Up in Chapter 2
Ishmael packs a carpet-bag and leaves Manhattan for New Bedford on a freezing December Saturday. The packet to Nantucket has already sailed, stranding him until Monday with a few silver coins and no contacts. He walks past jolly inns too expensive for his patched boots, searching waterward streets for cheap shelter.
