Starbuck has so many chances to stop Ahab on this doomed hunt for Moby Dick. He could have invoked a mutiny, he could have cut his line when Ahab was posted on the mast-head, and he could have shot him with the musket. But Starbuck didn’t do those things, Starbuck the “honest, upright” man of the union hardly recognizes an evil thought when it strikes him. He begins his interior monologue by raising the concept of fairness. “But how fair? Fair for death and doom…” Through Starbuck, Melville explains that fairness does not exist, there is always someone on the other side of it. Starbuck continues on, grappling with the possible murder of Ahab: “But shall this crazed old man… drag a whole ship’s company down.. it would make him the willful murderer of thirty men and more if this ship comes to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm my soul swears this ship will… Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed—” Starbuck’s contemplations when he is handling the musket in chapter 123 is an embodiment of the northern predicament. Is murder justified when it prevents more murder? Is declaring a war that will shed the most ever American blood justified to end the horrors of slavery. We all know the answer to this dilemma, and I doubt there are any rational people who would say the civil war wasn’t worth it. Though how could one know in its looming days. This is why Melville turned his mutiny story into one of doom. If it was a mutiny story, the ship would be saved, everyone would live (well maybe not Ahab) and it would be a happy ending. A happy ending that may not even be equated with American systems. But being made aware of an account, that after a continued lack of intervention, leads to the doom of a perceived nation-state, forces Americans to recognize their current state of affairs. In this case murder justifies murder. If the war on slavery was going to be ignored, this ship we call America was doomed to capsize.