Chapter 44 of Moby-Dick is the cartographic center of the novel: this is where Melville explains how Ahab plans to find "one solitary whale" in "the broad boundless ocean" (Melville 201)-Melville's maritime version of the needle in a haystack. The captain of the Pequod is nearly certain that he will encounter Moby Dick during "the Season-onthe-Line" (200), a spatial and temporal phrase that refers to the Equatorial hunting ground, in the Pacific Ocean, during the month of January. Since the

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... od left Nantucket at the beginning of the Season, Ahab plans to spend the 365 days before the beginning of the next one sailing from one hunting ground to the next, in the hope of encountering Moby Dick "in any other waters haunted by his race" (201). This "devious zig-zag world circle" (201) is not entirely random, though. Ahab plots previous sightings of sperm whales onto his nautical charts, then uses charts of winds and currents to locate the "veins" along which whales are thought to migrate (199). As the width of a vein "never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's mast-heads" (199), Ahab's careful plotting aims at positioning the Pequod in the middle of these channels, in which "migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for" (200). 2 Melville's main inspiration for this chapter comes from the Narrative of the US Expedition (1845), volume V, chapter 12, entitled "Currents and Whaling," in which Lieutenant Charles Wilkes develops the idea that a careful compilation of data from whaling voyages and observations of winds, currents, and temperatures, would allow whalemen to obtain a better picture of the distribution of whales around the globe, and to identify their migratory patterns . Wilkes showed that the hunt could be systematized and rationalized, and thus provided Melville with an answer to the