ahab as luddite

[Terrance]

>From M-D, CHAPTER 33,   The Specksynder


And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the
least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only
homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience;
though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere
stepping upon the quarter-deck; and though there were times when,
owing to peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to
be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of
condescension or in terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab
was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the
sea.
  Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind
those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself;
incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than
they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of
his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested;
through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an
irresistible dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual superiority
what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy
over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and
entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base.
This it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire
from the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air
can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite
inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than
through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.
Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political
superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to
idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the
case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire
encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased
before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist
who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and
direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his
art, as the one now alluded to.
  But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket
grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and
Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical
trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in
thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the
deep, and featured in the unbodied air!

And what are some of Ahab's "external arts"? 
The power of (Milton) Satan's rhetoric. 

To Chapter 36

The Quater-Deck speech....

And only one man can resist it. Oh Adam, forsake me not....