“Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun.  Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!  Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”

But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.

“East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.

“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. 
“Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”

Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.

Thrusting his head half-way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger.  Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.

But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it!  It has happened before.  Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses—­that’s all.  Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.”

“Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate, gloomily.

Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms.  The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be.  In instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle.  But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.

Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be changed accordingly.  The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her.

Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—­who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings—­likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced.  As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate.  But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.