Plot Summary
Chapter 111 of Moby-Dick marks the Pequod's entrance into the Pacific Ocean. As the ship glides past the Bashee Isles, Ishmael greets the vast sea with deep emotion, declaring that "the long supplication of my youth was answered" as a thousand leagues of blue roll eastward before him. This brief, lyrical chapter serves as a threshold moment in the novel: the crew has reached the final ocean, the waters where Moby Dick is known to swim, and the tone shifts unmistakably toward the story's climax.
Ishmael's Meditation on the Pacific
Ishmael devotes most of the chapter to an extended meditation on the Pacific's mystery and grandeur. He describes a "sweet mystery" about the sea, whose "gently awful stirrings" suggest a hidden soul beneath its surface, comparing the ocean's undulations to the fabled movement of the earth over the buried Evangelist St. John at Ephesus. The Pacific becomes a vast graveyard and dreamscape: its waves roll over "sea-pastures" and "Potters' Fields of all four continents," where "millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries" lie dreaming. The restlessness of the dead, Ishmael suggests, is what makes the waves themselves roll unceasingly.
The Pacific as the World's Heart
Ishmael elevates the Pacific to a cosmic status. He calls it "the sea of his adoption" for any "meditative Magian rover" and asserts that it "rolls the midmost waters of the world," with the Indian and Atlantic oceans serving merely as its arms. The Pacific washes both the new towns of California, "planted by the recentest race of men," and the ancient coasts of Asia, "older than Abraham." Between these shores float "milky-ways of coral isles" and "impenetrable Japans." declares that this "mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about" and "seems the tide-beating heart of earth." The imagery of the god Pan appears: lifted by the ocean's eternal swells, one must bow one's head to the seductive god of nature.
Ahab's Contrasting Response
The chapter's final paragraph pivots sharply from Ishmael's transcendent reverie to Captain Ahab's monomaniacal focus. Standing like "an iron statue" at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, Ahab unconsciously snuffs the sugary musk from the Bashee Isles while consciously inhaling the salt breath of the new sea -- the sea "in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming." Where Ishmael sees divinity and mystery, Ahab sees only a hunting ground. His lips press together "like the lips of a vice," and the veins on his forehead swell "like overladen brooks." Even in sleep, Ahab cries out, "Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!" This stark contrast between the two perspectives -- Ishmael's wonder and Ahab's obsession -- crystallizes one of the novel's central tensions as the Pequod glides toward its final, fatal cruising ground.