Pilot Fish | 水產百科網

By Richard King

Early in the novel Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab leans over the side of his ship. The captain is navigating across the Atlantic Ocean and has just come upon another whaleship sailing in the other direction. Ishmael, the narrator, tells what happened: “Shoals of small harmless fish that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and arranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger’s flanks.” The small fish, which had been swimming under the hull, leave to choose the other vessel, as if they were rats fleeing a ship on fire. Ahab murmurs, sadly, looking over the rail at the fish: “Swim away from me, do ye?” Ahab sees this as a dark omen for his voyage to hunt the white whale.

When writing this scene in Moby-Dick, Herman Melville was almost certainly imagining these a...