From “Notes for Fatty Cakes”

By Andrew Spragg.

III

Intros all made. First scene –
FC, a sea captain:

The Ballard of
Captain Cakes

So well met, she begun like this:
our love, dear Fatty Cakes
stood stern aboard her merry ship.
Our captain wails & quakes.

Consoled by map & chart alone
tales told: crude, stark & sad,
of Cakes at night lone wandering:
the deck, her feet would pad.

Cruel hinterland she longed to see,
ship stocked & anchor raised,
set sail, horizon in her sight,
for Cakes a start of days.

The crew, all told, on ration’s wage
idle, mean hearts belie
a bell, telling, rung late one night
& deserted Cakes & I.
& deserted Cakes & I.

From “Moby-Dick, or, The Whale”

By Herman Melville.

And though all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.

Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.