Plot Overview
Chapter 50 of Moby-Dick opens with a conversation between Stubb and Flask, who marvel at Captain Ahab’s decision to personally take to a whaleboat despite his missing leg. Flask pragmatically argues that since Ahab retains one knee and part of the other, the handicap is manageable, while Stubb admits he has never seen the captain kneel. then steps back to address the broader question debated among "whale-wise people": whether a whaling captain should risk his irreplaceable life in the active dangers of the chase.
Ahab’s Secret Preparations
Ishmael reveals that the joint-owners of the Pequod never intended Ahab to serve as a headsman in the hunt, and Ahab wisely never asked their permission. Instead, he took "private measures" of his own. The crew had noticed Ahab fashioning thole-pins, cutting wooden skewers for the whale-line groove, adding an extra coat of sheathing to a boat’s bottom to support his ivory leg, and carefully carving the thigh board (or clumsy cleat) to brace his knee. While these preparations attracted curiosity, the sailors assumed they were for the eventual confrontation with Moby Dick, not that Ahab had secretly arranged an entire boat’s crew for himself.
The Phantom Crew Assimilates
After the initial shock of discovering Ahab’s hidden stowaways, the crew’s amazement quickly fades. Melville explains that whalers routinely encounter "unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations" from the far corners of the earth, picking up castaway creatures from wreckage, canoes, and blown-off Japanese junks. In such a world, even Beelzebub himself might climb aboard without causing undue excitement. The subordinate members of Ahab’s secret crew gradually find their place among the Pequod’s sailors, though they remain somehow distinct.
The Mystery of Fedallah
While the lesser phantoms blend in, the "hair-turbaned" Fedallah remains "a muffled mystery to the last." Melville describes him as a creature that civilized, domestic people see only dimly in dreams—someone from the "unchanging Asiatic communities" and "Oriental isles" that still preserve the "ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations." His unaccountable tie to Ahab hints at influence or even authority over the captain. The chapter closes with a sweeping meditation on humanity’s earliest ages, when men "eyed each other as real phantoms" and angels and devils alike consorted with the daughters of men, firmly establishing Fedallah as a figure who operates outside the boundaries of the ordinary world.