Ch. 43, in which Ishmael listens to a brief conversation between two sailors on watch. I am not exactly sure what to make of this strange noise the first sailor hears. If his convictions are true, I am greatly surprised to know that there is someone in the after-hold who hasn’t yet appeared in the book; I had simply assumed that Melville had already completed introducing the important characters on the ship to the reader, and after ch. 40, in which we were introduced to the diversity of the crew members on the Pequod, I didn’t think there would be any more new characters. It is strange how no one on the Pequod has seen this person making the noise (if the first sailor is right about the noise in the first place), considering that even Captain Ahab, who had been a very mysterious figure, had now revealed himself to the crew.

I greatly enjoyed the beginning of chapter 47, when Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a sword-mat together. Since the ship has departed Nantucket, the two hadn’t had much time together because Queequeg was much higher in rank than Ishmael. It was just great to see them together again, weaving together in such a peaceful mood. (This makes great contrast to the second part of the chapter, when Tashtego spots a school of whales about two miles away.) While weaving, Ishmael pays attention to “the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own” and relates the weaving of the threads to his destiny. I found it interesting how Ishmael calls Queequeg’s sword hitting the loom and altering the overall pattern “chance”. This reminded me of Fortuna, the goddess of fortune in Roman mythology and personification of luck. I was introduced to this goddess when I read Dante’s Inferno last year in my Medieval Lit class. Fortuna holds in her hand the Wheel of Fortune, which arbitrarily determines what fortune or misfortune would come to individuals. The Wheel of Fortune is symbolic of the endless changes in life from prosperity to disaster, over which people have absolutely no control to prevent misfortune from coming to him or to keep the fortune he has now from leaving him. The discussion of the Loom of Time and chance must have reminded me of Fortuna; Ishmael’s emotional and psychological ups and downs, as well as the physical ups and downs of the plot, that we have seen from earlier on in the book are also related to the Wheel of Fortune, since Ishmael (or anyone else on the ship for that matter) doesn’t have any control on what is going happen next on the whaling voyage.