now, the pequod had sailed from nantucket at the very beginning of the season-on-the-line. no possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards, double cape horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial pacific in time to cruise there. therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. yet the premature hour of the pequod’s sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the white whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the persian gulf, or in the bengal bay, or china seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. so that monsoons, pampas, nor’-westers, harmattans, trades; any wind but the levanter and simoon, might blow moby dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the pequod’s circumnavigating wake.