Moby Dick

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all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities
in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to
overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and
endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his
life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that
sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to
spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents
and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the
welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories
of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the
original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those
latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush
of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous
vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no man in my boat," said
Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean,
not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises
from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly