"superstitious" (p.565)
Note 4: No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborowed from anything that visibly appears. so that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.
Source: Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. W. W. Norton &Company. New York, New York: 1967. (p.156)