The Devious-Cruising Rachel

The Rachel appears twice in Moby-Dick, and the distance between those two appearances is the closing argument of the book.

First appearance, Chapter 128. The Pequod is in the Pacific, the chase nearly complete. A ship comes toward them, flying no colors, its captain frantic in the rigging before he's even brought to — "as if the waves had been fulsome steeds." Captain Gardiner of the Rachel. He's lost a whale-boat. More than that: his twelve-year-old son was in it, came aboard the Pequod as a passenger, begged to join the chase, and is now somewhere out there in an open boat on the Pacific.

He begs Ahab to help search. Two days. He'll charter the ship. He'll pay whatever is required. He appeals to Ahab as a father — "for you too have a boy, Captain Ahab — though but a child, and nestling safely at home now. Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—"

"Avast. Not a rope-yarn. I will not do it. Even now I lose time."

He turns away. The Rachel sails, "by her still halting course and winding, woeful way." Melville names her directly: she is Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.

Second appearance: the Epilogue. The Pequod has sunk. Ahab is gone. The crew is gone. Ishmael floats in the wreckage on Queequeg's coffin — the chest built when Queequeg expected to die of fever, repurposed as a life-buoy when he chose to live, and now floating beneath his friend. A day and a night. The sharks circle but don't take him. The sea-hawks fly with sheathed beaks.

"It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."

What the Rachel is doing in the Epilogue is exactly what she was doing in Chapter 128: searching for her lost children. She didn't find them. What she found instead was Ishmael.

Gardiner's son is not recovered. That grief doesn't complete. The Rachel keeps searching because she cannot stop — "devious-cruising" is the phrase, which means wandering, indirect, following the currents and the wind in a pattern that has no clear end. She wasn't looking for Ishmael. She was looking for a twelve-year-old boy who went overboard after the White Whale. But in the course of that search — in the devious route her grief took — she swept up someone else who needed rescuing.

This is not a consolation. Melville does not offer one. The boy is still out there, or isn't. The grief that drove the Rachel's course was not resolved by finding Ishmael. She found "another orphan" — the word is precise, it collapses Gardiner's son and Ishmael into the same category, the lost, the ones adrift. She set out for one orphan and found a different one. The search continues. It always continues.

Think about what Ahab refused in that earlier scene.

He refused to be interrupted. He refused the appeal of another's loss. Captain Gardiner came to him father-to-father, grief to power, and Ahab turned away because he was losing time — losing time in the chase for a whale that he would reach in two more days anyway. The refusal is not even strategic. It's constitutive. Ahab is a man who has configured himself so that another's grief cannot reach him. He has burned out the center that could be moved by it.

"Even now I lose time." Time measured by the gap between himself and Moby Dick. Every other claim on his attention is loss. Gardiner's son, weeping somewhere in an open boat: loss. The forty men who will die with him: loss. His own wife and child, waiting at home: "left but one dent in my marriage pillow — wife? wife? — rather a widow with her husband alive!"

The same man who wept a single tear into the Pacific in the Symphony chapter — "nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop" — and then said lower away. He can feel. He chooses not to be moved.

The Rachel's grief was available to him. He could have been the one who helped search, who delayed his own chase by two days, who joined the deviation from the direct course. He might still have found the whale. He might not. But he closed himself off from the possibility. He chose the straight course.

Ishmael survives by floating. By being on the margins — not in the boat with Ahab when the line takes him, not in the water when the ship goes down, dropped out on the third day and circling in the wreckage. His survival is not a form of virtue. He doesn't do anything particularly heroic to stay alive. He floats on Queequeg's coffin because Queequeg made it well, because the wood was sound, because the dead man's preparations were thorough.

And then the Rachel finds him.

What the Rachel has that the Pequod lacks is the capacity to be devious-cruising — to wander in grief, to follow a course that is not straight toward any destination, to search without certainty of finding. The Pequod sailed toward the whale in a line, as direct as Ahab's will could make it. The Rachel searches in the indirect pattern that grief describes when it won't give up. She crosses the water that the Pequod crossed and finds the person the Pequod left behind.

The lesson is uncomfortable. Ishmael is not saved by someone. He is saved incidentally — swept up in the trajectory of someone else's loss. He didn't earn this. He didn't send a signal or call for help or do anything that made him findable. He just floated where the Rachel happened to be searching. He happened to be an orphan in the water when a ship that had already accepted one orphan in the equation discovered another.

There's something here about what survives.

Ahab's mission fails absolutely. The ship goes down. The whale escapes. The thirty men die. The project reaches the most complete possible defeat — not just the goal unachieved, but everything sacrificed for the goal also gone.

What survives? The account. Ishmael, floating on Queequeg's coffin, will write this down. Call me Ishmael. He names himself at the beginning of the story that the Rachel made possible. The Epilogue gives way to Chapter 1, which is already written, which we've already read. The rescue precedes the narrative; the narrative was always going to require the rescue.

And the Rachel's grief survives too, unresolved, still searching. Melville doesn't tell us whether Gardiner's son was ever found. He leaves the grief open. She sweeps up Ishmael and keeps cruising. The orphan she found was real and she took him in; the orphan she was looking for is still the reason she searches.

Ahab's refusal to be interrupted has a consequence he didn't anticipate: the Rachel, uncompleted in her grief, stays on the water. If Ahab had helped — if they had searched, found the boy, sent the Rachel home satisfied — she would not have been there when Ishmael floated to the surface of the vortex. The grief he refused to join became, in its continuation, the instrument of rescue.

Not poetic justice. Not the universe returning what Ahab turned away. Just the way uncompleted grief keeps moving through the world, taking its devious course, and sometimes that course intersects with something or someone who needed exactly that kind of rescue.

The book's last sentence: "It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."

Only found another orphan. The word is both diminishment and gravity. It wasn't what she was looking for — only this. It was a man's life — only this. The rescue is narrated as a failed search. The survival is narrated as a consolation prize for grief that didn't complete.

And that's the right way to end it. Ishmael doesn't get a triumphant rescue. He gets a devious-cruising ship that wasn't there for him, finding him while looking for someone else. Alive because grief doesn't stop. Alive because the Rachel wouldn't come home.

The sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago.