That captain was Ahab.
"His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the
eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at
the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch
blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab.
And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath
him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the
field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with
more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since
that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness
against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last
came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his
intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the
monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel
eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a
lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose
dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the
ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not
fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the
abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All
that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth
with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the
subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the
whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole
race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his
hot heart's shell upon it."
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Project Gutenberg
onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=2701
and Penguin book p.200
That captain was Ahab.
"His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the
eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at
the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch
blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab.
And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath
him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the
field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with
more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since
that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness
against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last
came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his
intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the
monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel
eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a
lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose
dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the
ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not
fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the
abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All
that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth
with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the
subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the
whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole
race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his
hot heart's shell upon it."
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Project Gutenberg
onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=2701
and Penguin book p.200