But I mean, who picks an arbitrary point in the middle of a protreacted conflict and decides thats where the score starts being kept from right?
One of the fun things about the book is it does comprehensively explicate the context, from the perspective of an explicitly unreliable narrator; covering economics, labor relations, division of labor in general, biology, taxonomy, racial/cultural relations, slavery, leadership, technical details of shipping, use of language, obsession and other psychiatric matters, history, law, and lots more
> if you start from the point where he lost his leg, ahab is a hero hell bent on revenge against an evil agressor.
iirc the revenge is explicitly written as doomed from the beginning, the loss of a leg is explicitly treated as a natural consequence of whaling, and there is a bunch of text discussing whether revenge against a whale is even possible (involving the degree to which whales are sentient/moral creatures etc). (also there is some discussion of whether the revenge constitutes a breach of fiduciary responsibility to the vessel owners that would justify a mutiny against the captain, plus discussion even more moral grey areas). Like it is presented as total insanity from a multitude of perspectives
at one of the final meetings between ships towards the end, Ahab encounters a ship sailing in the opposite direction, away from the white whale, and finds out the white whale ate the other captain's arm (iirc). Ahab asks him why he's not chasing down the whale for revenge and the other captain is like "he already got one of my limbs, no need to give him a second".
(A different captain earlier also says i.e. "the risk/reward ratio of chasing 1 tough whale vs many easy whales is not in our favor and our goal is to make money/oil")
There's an entire chapter on "The Whiteness of the Whale." It was the hardest for me to get through, but it kind of beats you into understanding what the author is getting at.