Throughout Moby-Dick, there has been a kind of attention to the number 3. There are 3 mates for the ships, 3 mast heads to the ship, and the 3 peaks featured on the doubloon, but there are also supernatural connections to 3 sprinkled through out the novel, such as the blood of 3 harpooners to temper Ahab’s barb, the 3 fires alight the top of the mast heads, as well as 3 people prophesizing Ahab’s demise: the prophet, Gabriel from the Jeroboam, and the Parsee.
This is a number present in the Bible – the holy trinity – and even Pythagoras, a great philosopher of Greek History that has been mentioned at least once in the novel, believed that the number three was special. One such reason was that it is the only number where the numbers that come before it add perfectly to it. Another reason, and one that I link more to this section of the novel than his other reasons, was that it seems to reflect our world on a conceptual level – beginning, middle, end; birth, life, death.
In the chapter, The Candles, this number is repeated and emphasized as the spectral lights cast brilliant shadows onto the ship below.
“All the yard arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightening-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.” (549)
This all comes two chapters out from Parsee’s prediction of Ahab’s death by hemp rope, after Ahab calls it a strange sight the idea of a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean. For reference, hearse plumes were ostrich feathers that would adorn hearse carriages at the time, signaling the departed’s wealth and status. Having 5-6 plumes meant you were wealthy, more meant that you were truly rich. In reference to this, the flames are described as pallid and tapering. What are the flames but Ahab’s own funeral plumes, floating atop the ocean he so desperately searches for his monomaniacal need for revenge?
