Ahab defeats Whale?

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Thus ends the body of Moby-Dick. The sea is indifferent to the carnage that just occurred, as the Pequod sank and everyone (save the narrator) drowned. Save the strange quirk of fate that led the Rachel by the vortex where Ishmael was floating. The ending is a dark one, especially because the whale's victory is total. When the White Whale finally snaps the line and frees itself from the ship, Ahab feels it directly, asking "What breaks in me?"

It wasn't always this way, however. According to Steve Olsen-Smith and Melville's Marginalia Online,

The recovered notation shows that at some early point in the composition of Moby-Dick Melville considered a narrative plot in which the crew of the Pequod (or some ship of an earlier name) would get their whale—an especially dangerous whale even at this early stage, since it manages to sink their ship before it is slain.

The fascinating web site publishes the marginal notes that Melville wrote in an important source, Thomas Beale's The Natural History of the Sperm Whale. It's hard to imagine that so bleak an ending was once much more ambivalent.

The site is worth a look. It's a rare chance to read over Melville's shoulder and see what he thought about as he thought about what would be come the greatest novel of the 19th century. Unfortunately, it's the closest thing we have to his early drafts, making it all the more worthwhile.