ABSTRACT
When Herman Melville (1851) revealed the dark obsessions of Captain Ahab’s soul, he did so by having Ahab destroy the ship’s quadrant and revert to a more elemental form of navigation:
Whatever the allegorical content, the practical consequences of abandoning celestial navigation were immediately apparent to Ahab’s doomed crew, who were later to rue his folly and, in the person of Starbuck, ask, “gropes he not by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log?” (Melville, 1851/1967, p. 422).
