The Quadrant — Moby-Dick

The season for crossing the Line drew near. Every day the crew watched the nailed doubloon, waiting for Ahab to point the ship toward the equator. At last the order came near high noon. Ahab sat in his high-hoisted boat to take his daily sun sight. The Japanese summer sun blazed like a burning glass on the glassy sea. Ahab used colored glasses on his quadrant to look at the fire in the sky.

While Ahab sighted the sun, Fedallah knelt on the deck below with his face turned up the same way. Ahab wrote the latitude on his ivory leg. Then he spoke to the sun like a high pilot. It told him where he was, he said, but not where he would be. It could not tell him where Moby Dick was swimming at that moment. He asked why the instrument could find him but not his enemy.

Ahab cursed the quadrant as a foolish toy and dashed it to the deck. He said he would guide only by compass and dead reckoning with log and line. He trampled the broken instrument under his live and dead feet. Fedallah's face showed triumph and despair, then he glided away unseen. Starbuck watched and said Ahab's fiery life would burn down to a little heap of ashes. Stubb joked about sea-coal ashes and said Ahab must play the cards he was dealt.