18. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 524-566

Chapter CXXIX: The Cabin; Chapter CXXX: The Hat; Chapter CXXXI: The Pequod Meets the Delight; Chapter CXXXII: The Symphony; Chapter CXXXIII: The Chase -- First Day; Chapter CXXXIV: The Chase -- Second Day; Chapter CXXXV: The Chase -- Third Day; Epilogue

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Ahab starts to leave his cabin, and when Pip follows, warns him not to do so. "There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health." In short, Ahab needs to be mad to proceed, and his affection for Pip weakens him. So Pip remains behind, in the captain's chair, and hears the ivory leg above on deck. "I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But there I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me."

Ahab's determination infects the crew: "Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab's iron soul." But "even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable Parsee's glance awed his." Fedallah's mysterious hold over Ahab undermines one's sense of Ahab's indomitability, and though it doesn't quite make Ahab a sympathetic character, it humanizes him. Fedallah's "gift" of prophecy seems supernatural -- his predictions "come true," but as we'll see, they come true only because of Ahab's willingness to interpret events as fulfillments of them.

Three or four days pass with no sighting after the meeting with the Rachel, and Ahab becomes more impatient, determined that "Ahab must have the doubloon" for the first sighting of the white whale. He creates a "nest of basketed bowlines" and has himself hauled aloft for a better view, putting Starbuck -- "almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to deecision" -- in charge of the rope that suspends him, "freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's hands."

Suspended there, Ahab is swooped down upon by a seahawk who carries off his hat. Ishmael recalls the legend that an eagle removed the cap worn by Tarquin the Elder, flew around him three times, and replaced the cap, an omen that Tarquin's wife, Tanaquil, took to be a prophecy that Tarquin would be king of Rome. "Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow; and at last disappeared, while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea."

The Pequod encounters another ship, "misnamed the Delight." On deck is a splintered whale-boat. Ahab asks his usual question: "Hast seen the White Whale?" and the captain of the Delight points to the wrecked boat. When Ahab asks if they killed him, the captain replied, "The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that," and looks at a group of sailors who are sewing a dead comrade into his hammock. In fact, the Delight is a kind of hearse, but Ahab doesn't choose to interpret as a fulfillment of Fedallah's prophecy. He defiantly brandishes his blood- and lightning-tempered harpoon, but the other captain is unmoved: "I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb." And before Ahab's order to sail away can be accomplished, the corpse is committed to the sea, "not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled [the Pequod's] hull with their ghostly baptism." And as they sail away a voice from the Delight calls out, "In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!" -- Queequeg's coffin-turned-life-buoy that hangs from the ship.

"It was a clear steel-blue day," Ishmael begins, observing that both the "feminine air" and the "masculine sea" share the hue, the birds being the "gentle thoughts" of the former, and the "mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks ... the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea." Caught between the two is Ahab, who "From beneath his slouched hat ... dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop." Starbuck carefully approaches the captain, who, it turns out, is lost in memories of the first time he went to sea forty years ago, when he was "a boy-harpooneer of eighteen." He was "past fifty" when he married "and sailed for Cape Horn the next day.... I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck." He now recognizes his own madness: "more a demon than a man! -- aye, aye! what a forty years' fool -- fool -- old fool, has Ahab been!"

He looks Starbuck in the eye -- "a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God." And he tells Starbuck not to join him in the boats when he pursues Moby Dick:  "I see my wife and my child in thine eye.... That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!" Deeply moved, Starbuck once again tries to persuade Ahab to give up the chase; he tells him that his wife, Mary, takes their son to the top of the hill every day to watch for the returning Pequod. "Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket!" But Ahab is convinced that he is in the grip of an immutable destiny: "By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike." He addresses Starbuck again.

But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.

Starbuck, the better angel of Ahab's nature, loses to the fatal angel.  

The next morning "a long sleek on the sea" reveals the underwater presence of the whale. Ahab is hoisted in his basket, and two-thirds of the way through his ascent "he raised a gull-like cry in the air. 'There she blows! -- there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill. It is Moby Dick!" Only thirty pages before the novel's end, we get our first sight of the promised quarry.

Ahab claims the doubloon for himself, and orders three boats lowered. Starbuck is ordered to stay on board to "keep the ship." The sailors see that "the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back."

A gentle joyousness -- a might mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away from ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horn; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam. 

Here Melville has adopted an epic device, the rhetorical trick of elaborate negative comparison, found perhaps most famously in Milton's Paradise Lost:

                                Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs
Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Dis
Was gather'd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and th' inspir'd
Castalian Spring might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive.... 

Just as Milton exalts the biblical Garden of Eden by asserting that it excels the gardens of classical myth, so Melville bestows divinity on Moby Dick by comparing the whale to the transformed Jupiter, who took the form of a white bull in the rape of Europa.

Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1562

The whale even presents an aspect of peacefulness. "No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes."

Now "the grand god revealed himself, sounded and went out of sight." The three boats wait for an hour for the whale to reappear. Then suddenly Tashtego cries out, "The birds! -- the birds!" as the seabirds that had been hovering around the whale earlier begin flying toward Ahab's boat. "Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea." But then he glimpses a white spot "with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom."

Ahab tries to maneuver the boat out of harm's way, but "the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high p into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock." The whale's mouth is within six inches of Ahab, who grabs the jaw in his hands. "As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain." Ahab falls "flat-faced" into the water. Moby Dick swims around through the runs of the boat which "seemed to madden him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book of Maccabees." (1 Maccabees 6:34, "And to the end they might provoke the elephants to fight, they shewed them the blood of grapes and mulberries.") Ahab is unable to swim, but he keeps afloat. From what's left of the boat's stern, "Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him." The other boats don't dare approach the scene, but the Pequod sails in and drives off the whale so they can rescue the castaways. 

The exhausted Ahab is pulled into Stubb's boat. When he finally regains his strength, he asks first about his harpoon, which Stubb shows him, and then about the men in his boat, all of whom have survived. Once the crew from the boats and the parts of the wrecked boat are on board, the Pequod sails on after the whale. Ahab is hoisted back into his perch for a while, and then descends to pace the deck, where he scolds Stubb for making light of the wrecked boat and Starbuck for calling it an ill omen. "If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint." A curious position for a man to take who puts his faith in Fedallah's prophesies. 

When it is too dark for a sighting, Ahab points to the doubloon on the mast: 

"Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man's; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye!"

On the second day, the sighting of the whale is greeted with a universal enthusiasm: "The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison." This is Melville's curiously American version of an epic simile.

They were one man, not thirty.... all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.

In a marvelously simple sentence, a sharp counterpoint to Melville's usual biblical/Miltonic/Shakespearean diction, he writes: "The rigging lived." That is, the crew has taken to the rigging to sight the whale. "Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!"

The first cry of "There she blows!" is a false alarm -- "in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout" -- but when the real whale is sighted, "The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard." He is less than a mile away, and now he treats them to the "wondrous phenomenon of breaching."

Sperm whale breaching

Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk  into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles or more.

Moby Dick breaching, by Rockwell Kent

The boats are lowered, and once again Starbuck is left on the ship. The whale attacks the boats furiously, seeming "only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made." In the crossing and recrossing, he becomes entangled in the lines, and soon presents "a sight more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks!" The tangled line is full of "loose harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points." Ahab takes the boat-knife and reaches into the mass of sharp steel, cutting it loose so it sinks. But Moby Dick, fastened to the lines from the boats of Stubb and Flask, dashes the two boats together and then dives.

"Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for someone to ladle him up." Then Moby Dick surfaces underneath Ahab's boat, carrying it into the air. It falls gunwale downward and Ahab and his men struggle out from beneath it. The whale again seems to want to demolish what's left of the boats: "whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea."

The Pequod again comes to the rescue, bringing the men aboard. "Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and plans; all these were there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one." But Ahab's "ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter." Ahab proclaims himself "untouched.... Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being."

But suddenly Ahab realizes that Fedallah is not among the rescued. Stubb says that he was "caught among the tangles of your line -- I thought I saw him dragging under." The news that Fedallah was caught in Ahab's line leads him to the realization that his blood-forged harpoon is missing, too, still suck in the whale. Ahab orders everyone to work repairing the boats and the irons. "I'll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I'll slay him yet!"

"Great God! but for one single instant show thyself," cried Starbuck; "never, never wilt thou capture him, old man -- In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone -- all good angels mobbing thee with warnings -- what more wouldst thou have? ... Oh, oh, -- Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!" 

Ahab is unmoved. "Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders." And he invokes the old legend that drowning things rise three times before they drown. "So with Moby Dick -- two days he's floated -- to-morrow will be the third." Then he reflects on Fedallah's disappearance. In the prophecy, he "was to be seen again ere I could perish." How can that be? he wonders.

The carpenter makes Ahab a leg from the wood of his ruined boat, and he is there at dawn the next day looking for the whale. By noon it is still unsighted, and then Ahab realizes that the whale has been tangled in lines and has slowed down: the ship has passed him in the night. So he has the ship turned around and sails back to where he things he will see the whale. "'Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,' murmured Starbuck to himself." And he worries that he disobeys God by obeying Ahab.

The whale is sighted at last, and before Ahab gets in the boat he bids the ship goodbye: "Good bye, mast-head -- keep a good eye upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail." But he is less certain about his return when he speaks to Starbuck: "Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood; -- and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old; -- shake hands with me, man." Starbuck's eyes are full of tears as he shakes Ahab's hand. And as Ahab's boat pulls past the stern, Pip cries out from the cabin: "The sharks! the sharks! ... O master, my master, come back!" But Ahab, who is giving orders to his crew, doesn't hear.

The sharks, in fact, are following only Ahab's boat and not the others. Ishmael speculates that it was because "Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks" -- though as we learn later, Ishmael himself is part of that crew.

Ahab's thoughts are on Fedallah's prophecies still: "no coffin and no hearse can be mine; -- and hemp only can kill me!" The whale surfaces, and "maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven." He smashes in the sides of Stubb's and Flask's boats, but not Ahab's. And then everyone sees the whale's flank.

Lashed round and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds, his distended eyes turned full upon Ahab. 

Ahab realizes that the reappearance of Fedallah, with the whale as his hearse, fulfills those parts of the prophecy. "But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse?" He orders the other boats to return to the ship for repairs and then rejoin him, and threatens to harpoon any of the men in his boat if they try to leave.

Moby Dick now seems to be swimming away, passing the ship. As Ahab's boat draws closer to the Pequod, he sees Starbuck leaning over the rail and Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo climbing to the mast-heads. Stubb and Flask are on the deck, sorting through new harpoons and lances. Ahab also notices that the flag is gone from the main-mast-head, and shouts to Tashtego to descend for another flag and nail it to the mast. Sharks are biting at the oars of Ahab's boat, but he orders the crew to keep rowing even though the blades are getting smaller.

Ahab's boat gets near enough to Moby Dick that Ahab "darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale." The whale swamps the boat, tossing three of the men out of it, but two of them manage to get back in, "the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming." The line snaps, and Ahab cries, "What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!" The whale turns and sees the ship now, "seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it -- it may be -- a larger and noble foe." And so Moby Dick attacks the Pequod.

Ahab is blinded by the spray for a moment, and is horrified to see that the ship is being attacked. Tashtego, aloft, is nailing the flag to the mast-head, "and the red flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own forward flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he." Starbuck cries out, "Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo thy work." Stubb says, "I grin at thee, thou grinning whale," and tells the other mate, "Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!" Flask replies, "Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow," and hopes that his mother has drawn his part-pay already, because "the voyage is up."

As "the white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled," the water pours into the Pequod, and Ahab realizes that another prophecy has come true: "The ship! The hearse! -- the second hearse! ... its wood could only be American!" He realizes that he has been deprived of "the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains," the honor of going down with his ship. And so he turns his anger on the whale: "Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." He throws the harpoon, but the line "caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone." The final prophecy, death by hemp, is fulfilled.

The crew of the boat watches in horror as the ship sinks, "only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea." The sinking ship creates a great vortex into which everything is drawn and swallowed up. But Tashtego's arm rises above the water, still in the act of nailing the flag to the mast-head. A sky-hawk has flown around the sinking ship and now has its wing caught between the hammer and the wood:

the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Ishmael was the man who failed to get back into Ahab's boat, and as he is drawn toward the vortex, "the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side." Two days later, he is rescued by the Rachel, which, "in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."

15. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 425-455

Chapter XCVIII: Stowing Down and Cleaning Up; Chapter XCIX: The Doubloon; Chapter C: Leg and Arm, The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London; Chapter CI: The Decanter; Chapter CII: A Bower in the Arsacides; Chapter CIII: Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton; Chapter CIV: The Fossil Whale

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The nearer to the end of his story that Ishmael gets, the slower he seems to go, as if reluctant to face cataclysm. Now he devotes a chapter to cleaning the ship after the slaughter of a whale: "One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks like about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening." And then a day or two later, the ship has been scrubbed down. Even the ashes of the whale have been used to make lye to scrub the decks and sides. But then another whale is captured and the process is repeated, which naturally inspires Ishmael to moralize:

Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from the world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when -- There she blows! -- the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again. 

The doctrine Ishmael is examining here is that of reincarnation: He imagines himself teaching the proponent of metempsychosis, Pythagoras, now reincarnated as "a green simple boy, how to splice a rope."

Then he contemplates the doubloon that Ahab nailed to the mainmast, the reward for sighting Moby Dick, which has remained unmolested despite the "ruthless crew" because "the mariners revered it as the white whale's talisman." And he gives us a series of Shakespearean soliloquies, as members of the crew pause bfore the doubloon and contemplates the images on the Ecuadorean coin: three peaks of the Andes, on one a flame, on another a tower, and on the third a rooster crowing; above them are signs of the zodiac, with the sun entering Libra.

Ahab pauses before the doubloon and identifies the figures on the mountaintops as himself: "The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab." Starbuck, on the other hand, sees what lies behind the mountains: "A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope."

Stubb's meditation is on the zodiac, and he runs through all of the signs whimsically, concluding, "There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly Stubb." But for Flask, a doubloon is only a doubloon, and a good cigar is a smoke: "So, what's all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true;  and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars." An old Manxman, Queequeg, and Fedallah all pause by the doubloon.

Finally Pip arrives, and in his madness speaks prophecy: "How did it get there? And so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious gold! -- the green miser'll hoard ye soon!" And like the Shakespearean fools on which he is modeled, Pip goes away singing.

The captain of the Samuel Enderby, by Rockwell Kent

The Samuel Enderby, an English whale ship, comes alongside, and when Ahab asks if he's seen the White Whale, the captain replies: "'See you this?' and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet." Ahab eagerly tries to go on board to meet with the captain, but he has forgotten that other ships don't have the "ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod" that allows the peg-legged Ahab easy access to his ship. So he is hauled aboard the Samuel Enderby on a blubber-hook.

Once Ahab is aboard, the other captain extends his ivory arm in greeting, and Ahab puts forth his ivory leg: "Aye, aye, heart! let us shake bones together!" All Ahab wants to know, of course, is when and where he saw the whale. It was last season on the equator, he tells Ahab, and he had never heard of the white whale. They lowered their boats when they spotted a pod of four or five whales and harpooned one of them. "Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles." There were harpoons sticking in the whale's starboard fin, he tells the excited Ahab. "'Aye, aye -- they were mine -- my irons,' cried Ahab, exultingly."

The white whale began snapping at the line that was fast in the other whale, as if to sever it, but the line seemed to get snared in the white whale's teeth, "so that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! ... Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was -- the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life -- I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in." The captain harpooned the white whale.

"But Lord, look you, sir -- hearts and souls alive, man -- the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat -- both eyes out -- all befogged and bedeadened with black foam -- the whale's tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple."

The whale's tail cut the boat in two. And the barb of another harpoon that had been lost in the destruction of the boat caught the captain just below the shoulder; as the whale dived, "the barb ript its way along the flesh -- clear along the whole length of my arm -- come out nigh my wrist, and up I floated." The ship's surgeon amputated the arm, but he insists that the decision to make the prosthesis from whalebone was the captain's idea.

Ahab impatiently listens to the joshing conversation between the captain and the surgeon, and finally cries out, "What became of the White Whale?" He is astonished to hear that they sighted him again but didn't pursue him. "Didn't want to try to; ain't one limb enough?... No more White Whales for me; I've lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me.... he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?" But Ahab is so agitated by the story that the surgeon thinks he's feverish and apoplectic and pulls out a lancet to ease Ahab's blood pressure.

"'Avast!' roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks -- 'Man the boat! Which way heading?'" The English captain asks Fedallah, "Is your Captain crazy?" but Fedallah only puts his finger to his lips and goes to help Ahab get back to the Pequod. "In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod."

Ishmael gives us a coda to the story that explains that the Samuel Enderby was named for the founder of "the famous whaling house of Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest." And he tells us that he once boarded the Samuel Enderby off Patagonia. "It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps -- every soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death." He follows this up with a few observations about Dutch whalers and the great amount of alcohol they packed for their relatively brief voyages.

Then he turns to whale anatomy again, and a story about finding a whale skeleton in the Arsacides -- which are the Solomon Islands -- and measuring it. Because of his "wild wanderings at that period," he preserved the measurements by having them tattooed on his right arm. He calculates that "a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants." (Contemporary sperm whale measurements are more modest, topping out at about 67 feet in length, and about 63 tons.)

Basilosaurus

He then ventures into whale ancestry as demonstrated in the fossil record, citing as "by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics" the Basilosaurus found in 1842 on the plantation of Judge John Creagh of Alabama. "The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels." And he records his awe at such fossils: "Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy."

But maybe Ishmael is getting a little self-conscious about the pacing of his story and these extended cetological interruptions:

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan. Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand.... Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

13. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 360-389

Chapter LXXXII: The Honor and Glory of Whaling; Chapter LXXXIII: Jonah Historically Regarded; Chapter LXXXIV: Pitchpoling; Chapter LXXXV: The Fountain; Chapter LXXXVI: The Tail; Chapter LXXXVII: The Grand Armada

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Tongue in cheek, Ishmael compiles a historical and mythical roster of famous whalers: Perseus, St. George ("which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other"), Hercules (who in one legend was swallowed by a whale), Jonah, and Vishnu.

St. George and the Dragon, by Paolo Uccello: Very like a whale?

Jonah is perhaps the only one of those ur-whalers who doesn't really need much explanation, but Ishmael continues with an investigation into the biblical story that is in part a satire on the Higher Criticism. His authority here is an "old Sag-Harbor whaleman" who questioned the accuracy of the biblical story because of an image in an old Bible that showed the whale with two spouts in his head, a characteristic only of the right whale, whose throat is too small to swallow a man. On the other hand, Ishmael observes, Bishop Jebb suggests that Jonah wasn't swallowed but just held in the whale's mouth: "For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players."

Altarpiece in Klosterneuburg, Austria by Nicholas of Verdun

The Sag Harbor whaleman also objects that the whale's digestive juices would have killed Jonah, so Ishmael resorts to "a German exegetist" who thinks Jonah "must have taken refuge in the floating body of dead whale, -- even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them." (Or Luke Skywalker in his dead Tauntaun.)

And then there's the problem of Jonah's being spat up somewhere on the Mediterranean and making his way to Nineveh, more than the biblical three days' journey from anywhere on the shores of the Mediterranean. The only way he could get that close to Nineveh would be if the whale swam all the way around Africa, through the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and up the Tigris, which is "too shallow for any whale to swim in." Besides, that would mean going around the Cape of Good Hope before it was discovered by Bartholomew Diaz, "and so make modern history a liar." Ishmael concludes that "all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish pride of reason ... and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy." And we know how much Ishmael reveres the clergy.

After that excursion into facetiousness, Ishmael returns to matters at hand. Queequeg spends a morning rubbing oil into the bottom of his boat "as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's bald keel." He does so just in time for another whale chase in which this time Stubb's boat takes the lead, and Stubb demonstrates his skill at pitchpoling: "Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a lighter material -- pine. It is furnished with a small rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to the hand after darting." Stubb succeeds in landing the weapon in the spout of the whale: "Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood." Stubb exults in his conquest. "The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the monster die." Once again, you sense that Ishmael sympathizes more with the monster than with the man.

But the scene gives him an opportunity to discuss the whale's spout, and to examine a question that he says is unresolved "down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851)." (If true, today marks the 159th anniversary of the writing of that sentence. Quite a coincidence.) The unresolved question is "whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor." As Ishmael points out, the whale's mouth is unconnected with his lungs -- he breathes only through the blowhole. Ishmael is right in suggesting that the sperm whale has no sense of smell -- the brain lacks olfactory receptors -- but scientists have recently discovered that bowhead whales do have that sense. Ishmael points out the absence of things that a whale might want to smell: "No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea." But scientists suspect that the bowhead whales use the sense to locate their food: krill.

But back to the unresolved question, "in other words, whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in through the mouth" which, although it doesn't connect with the lungs, does connect with the spouting canal. Ishmael is of the opinion "that the spout is nothing but mist." The consensus today is that he's right. Ishmael also says that whalemen think the spout is poisonous, which isn't true. But he can't resist a final whimsy:

He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous and profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the action of thinking deep thoughts.... The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition. 

From the spout to the tail, which Ishmael admires more than anything else about the whale. "In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes.... in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it." It's the combination of grace and strength that Ishmael most admires: "Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic." He cites the muscularity of statues of Hercules and the "robustness" of Michelangelo's God. But he contrasts this with images of Jesus:

And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.

It's a strangely ambivalent observation: He admires strength, but the most successful pictures of Jesus reveal him as "feminine" and submissive, which "is conceded" to be the essence of Jesus's teaching. Are we to read this as a rejection of Jesus, or of the interpretation of his teachings? Heterodoxy abounds in Moby-Dick.

Back to the whale and his tail, which, "in his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses." He speculates that "in the whale the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the elephant's trunk." But the phenomenon, except  for "the sublime breach -- somewhere else to be described --" that most excites him is the whale's dive: "this peaking of the whale's flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature."

Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the masthead of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers.

Nature, then, is prey to the whims of the human mood. Ishmael is the aesthetic consciousness, interpreting the whales as sun-worshippers. Ahab's consciousness would doubtless find in the same scene only the massed presence of his sworn enemy. But in another mood, Ishmael himself might see the scene as hellish, and the flukes as claws reaching from the flaming sea. The task is to transcend subjectivity and to see what is really there.

But what is really there when one contemplates the whale? Or, "how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face." Whaleness, like divinity, remains inscrutable.

Now the Pequod reaches the Malay archipelago and the Sunda Strait. It doesn't seek port: "while other ships may have gone from China to New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves." Here they sight "a continuous chain of whale-jets ... up-playing and sparkling in the noonday air." In this region whales are "frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection."

But as the Pequod is eagerly headed toward the "vast fleet of whales" it has spotted, Tashtego spots something else: Malay pirates. So they set full sail to evade them. "Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him." They elude the pirates, and the whales try to elude them: "In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic." Ishmael likens the scene to buffalo fleeing from a single horseman, or people trampling one another in a crowded theater at the rumor of fire, "for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men."

With so many whales available, the whalers resort to blocks of wood called "druggs" that can be attached to a harpoon: "if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is, that at times like these the drugg comes into requisition." But one of the druggs in Ishmael's boat caught under a seat, and when the whale tears it away, the seat goes with it, tearing holes in either side of the boat. The leaks are temporarily stopped by being stuffed with the sailors' drawers and shirts.

The whale that is towing their boat pulls them into the very center of the circling whales. They "glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake.... Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion." And here they are "occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host."

Like household dogs they came snuffing round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.

The two most humane members of the Pequod's crew, Queequeg and Starbuck, share in this privileged moment. Queequeg spots what he thinks is a whale line connecting a big whale with a little one, but when Starbuck goes to look, he "saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond."

But enchantment fades into horror:

A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in [his tail-tendon], but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon line; ... he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade had worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades. 

And now the calm that has surrounded Starbuck's boat ends, as "the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre; as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain." They manage to work their way out of the melee, with only the loss of Queequeg's hat, which was "taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by."

Despite -- or because of -- the abundance of whales, the Pequod had little success. Only Flask was able to kill a whale. "The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying in the Fishery, -- the more whales the less fish. Of all the drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod."

12. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 328-360

Chapter LXXIV: The Sperm Whale's Head -- Contrasted View; Chapter LXXV: The Right Whale's Head -- Contrasted View; Chapter LXXVI: The Battering-Ram; Chapter LXXVII: The Great Heidelburgh Tun; Chapter LXXVIII: Cistern and Buckets; Chapter LXXIX: The Prairie; Chapter LXXX: The Nut; Chapter LXXXI: The Virgin

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More whale physiology from Ishmael, this time a bit of comparative anatomy: the sperm whale's head and the right whale's head. As far as Ishmael is concerned, the comparison is all to the benefit of the sperm whale, in whose head he finds "more character."

Sperm whale

Right whale

Both whales, Ishmael observes, have eyes placed where people have ears: on either side of the head. "The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him.... This peculiarity of the whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes." The phenomenon fascinates Ishmael:

True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then it is as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid.

Again and again, Ishmael makes an imaginative, empathic leap into the whale's existence. It's a reminder that the book is called Moby-Dick and not Ahab or Ishmael. The whale is the novel's true protagonist, and though Ishmael dubs him "monster" or "murderer," his sympathy for the whale runs as an ironic countercurrent throughout the book.

Unfortunately, he doesn't have much sympathy for the right whale, apparently because it's not as handsome as the sperm whale. But he finds something to admire in both: the way they face death. The sperm whale's "broad brow" seems to him "to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death." The right whale's head, with its full lower lip, demonstrates "an enormous practical resolution in facing death." So they are philosophical archetypes: "The Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years."

He is awed by the sperm whale's forehead: "a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever," it has "a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it." But "there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life." Of course this is where the goodies are, "the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state." (Most sources say that spermaceti is odorless, which is one reason why it was prized for use in candles.) A single whale, according to Ishmael, contains about five hundred gallons, though much of was lost in the process of harvesting it.  Ishmael likens the reservoir of spermaceti to the Great Heidelberg Tun, an enormous wine vat that also attracted Mark Twain's attention:

Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen hundred thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in, when you can get a better quality, outside, any day, free of expense.
- A Tramp Abroad

It is Tashtego's job to break into the "tun" and begin the process of retrieving its contents. He lowers a bucket into it with a pole, and by the end of his efforts, the pole is descending some twenty feet:

but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up -- my God! poor Tashtego -- like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!

Daggoo attempts to rescue Tashtego, but as he's making his attempt, "to the unspeakable horror of all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg." Daggoo thrusts the pole with the bucket into the head, hoping that Tashtego can grab onto it, but the rigging gives way and the head plunges into the sea, taking Tashtego with it. Daggoo is hanging by the tackles when Queequeg -- Ishmael refers to him as "my brave Queequeg" -- dives in for the rescue attempt.

They see "an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a strange sight to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave." And then "Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian." The head had sunk slowly, and Queequeg had been able to slash an opening in it and grab onto Tashtego. On his first contact he had seized Tashtego by the leg, but with "a dexterous heave and toss he had wrought a somerset upon the Indian, and brought him out headfirst.

And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather delivery of Tashtego was successfully accomplished.... Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.

Tashtego survives, but his experience reminds Ishmael of the story of a man who fell into a large store of honey in a hollow tree and "died embalmed." And of course Ishmael has to make a lesson out of it: "How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?" As usual, Ishmael is skeptical of any philosophical system, including Platonism.

He's also a little wary of phrenology, which he lampoons by observing how difficult it would be to read the bumps on the sperm whale's wrinkled head. He lauds the "high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow" of the whale, in which "you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature." And he observes that the "horizontal, semi-crescentic depression" in the whale's forehead "in a man, is [the physiologist Johann Kaspar] Lavater's mark of genius."

But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence.

(Recall once again Stubb's dream in which Ahab turned into a pyramid.) The whale's brain, Ishmael notes, is "at least twenty feet" away from his forehead. "The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world. And anyway, Ishmael doesn't believe that the brain alone is the locus of  intelligence: "For I believe that much of man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul." And the sperm whale has quite a spine:

"His cranial cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being eight in height.... For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord."

Now the Pequod encounters yet another whaler, the Jungfrau, and her captain, Derick De Deer. The captain comes aboard the Pequod bearing a container for whale oil, hoping to borrow some because he has yet to kill any whales: "his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin." But as the captain is leaving with his borrowed oil, both ships cite a pod of whales, and both launch boats for the chase.

Most of the whales leave in a hurry, but an elderly whale is slower than the others: "His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble." The old whale's gastric distress amuses Stubb, who jokes about the whale's "having half an acre of stomach-ache" and observing, "It's the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern."

They also observe that the whale is missing his "starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say." Derick, the Jungrau's captain, gets a start on the Pequod boats, and "with a deriding gesture shook his lamp-feeder" -- the oil container -- at them, spurring Starbuck to give chase. Stubb humorously chides his rowers for not pulling fast enough: "Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard -- we don't budge an inch -- we're becalmed.. Halloo, here's grass growing in the boat's bottom -- and by the Lord, the mast there's budding."

The Pequod's three boats overtake the German, causing his boat to overturn, and the three harpooners each land a hit on the whale. "Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded" and "the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them." The boats are in danger of being pulled under.

Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said -- "Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear?" 

The quotation is a conflation of several verses about Leviathan in Job 41. But this is an old, wounded, and possibly ill Leviathan, for he soon surfaces, and they can see that he is blind as well as crippled.

But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

Yes, Ishmael/Melville lays it on here with a trowel. But that makes it a key passage, underscoring the disproportionate effort of the whaling pursuit and the inhumane character of the hunt. And another key moment follows, as they discover an old sore spot low on the whale's flank.

"A nice spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."

"Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"

But humane Starbuck was too late. 

Flask, the mediocrity, prevails over the humane but ineffectual Starbuck. The old whale dies in agony as the spear enters the wound, but at least he capsizes Flask's boat. "It was most piteous, that last expiring spout." But the irony deepens when the whale begins to sink, "with all its treasures unrifled." Before the whale sinks, they find a stone lance-head in him. "It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was discovered." Highly doubtful, since the sperm whale's life span is about 70 years, but Ishmael probably didn't know that.

They have succeeded in tying the whale to the ship, but the body's tendency to sink threatens to overturn the Pequod, and finally Queequeg succeeds in cutting the fluke-chains. "With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank." And soon after the body sinks, the watch on the masthead reports that the Jungfrau is lowering her boat to chase a finback whale, which belongs "to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming.... Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend."

11. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 301-327

Chapter LXVI: The Shark Massacre; Chapter LXVII: Cutting In;  Chapter LXVIII: The Blanket; Chapter LXIX: The Funeral; Chapter LXX: The Sphynx; Chapter LXXI: The Jeroboam's Story; Chapter LXXII: The Monkey-Rope; Chapter LXXIII: Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him

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In some ways, sharks have taken over from whales as "monsters of the deep" in the popular imagination. So the grisly feeding frenzy of the sharks around the whale carcass has a special chill for us. But so it does for the crew of the Pequod, who commence to kill as many of the sharks as they can. The murderousness (to anthropomorphize as Ishmael does) of the sharks is persistent:

A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw. 

Butchery is everywhere on the ship: "The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shambles." Ishmael lingers on the peculiar features of whale anatomy as the animal is carved up, observing that "the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it... the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the 'scarf.'" In a vivid sentence, Ishmael sums up the action:

And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general friction.

Ishmael is particularly fascinated by the sperm whale's skin, which is covered with "an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle." He also notes the wrinkles of the skin, comparing them to hieroglyphics, though "the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable." Ishmael prefers to think of the blubber as being part of its skin, and to see the whale as "wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity."

Stripped of the blubber, the "colossal" carcass is cast away and pursued by sharks and seabirds. It represents for Ishmael a "great mass of death." But even in death, Ishmael claims that "a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare." He tells of ships that, spotting the whale carcass at a distance, have mistaken it for land: "straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log -- shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabout: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place.... Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to the world."

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, c. 1530

The drifting body is headless, however. As Ishmael notes, "the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck," so it takes an expert to judge where head ends and body begins. Moreover, "the sperm whale's head embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk." That head is "hoisted against the ship's side" where "that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith."

The head is enough to provoke Ahab to a fantasia about what the whale has seen in the depths of the sea "where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot." He continues with his moral musings when the watch cries out that a ship is approaching and bringing the wind with her. Ahab says, "Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind."

Unfortunately, the encounter with the Jeroboam is not one that will cheer Ahab or anyone else on board, even though, like the Pequod, she hails from Nantucket. The Jeroboam's captain, Mayhew, informs them that "a malignant epidemic" has broken out on board, and that he has forbidden contact with other ships. So they attempt to make conversation from a boat that the Jeroboam has lowered, which tries to keep alongside the Pequod as best it can. There is, in fact, more than just an epidemic on the Jeroboam. In the boat is "a man of singular appearance" with a "deep, settled, fanatic delirium in his eyes." Stubb has heard about the man from the Town-Ho's crew. He grew up in what Ishmael refers to as "the crazy society of Neskyeuna [actually Niskayuna] Shakers," which he left for Nantucket, where he joined the Jeroboam's crew. But once they were as sea, "his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard." He failed at that attempt, but managed to gain a following in the crew, who prevented all efforts by Captain Mayhew to get rid of him. The epidemic on board only solidified his credibility with the crew.

Ahab, of course, is only interested in whether they have seen the White Whale. Mayhew had heard about Moby Dick in an encounter with another whale-ship, but when Gabriel heard about him, "in his gibbering insanity, [pronounced] the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated." A year or two later, Moby Dick was sighted, and the chief mate, Macey, decided to go after him. "Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity." Macey was standing up in the boat when the whale surfaced. "Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman's head; but the mate for ever sank."

Macey's death only enhanced Gabriel's reputation among the crew as a prophet. And when Mayhew asks if Ahab plans to hunt Moby Dick and Ahab answers "Aye," "Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed finger -- 'Think, think of the blasphemer -- dead, and down there! -- beware of the blasphemer's end." Ahab, of course ignores the warning, and changes the subject: He has remembered that he has a letter for one of the Jeroboam's officers that had been passed on to him. Ishmael explains that whale-ships routinely collect letters "from various ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two or three years or more."

Starbuck splits the end of a pole so the letter can be stuck in it and handed down to the Jeroboam's boat. Meanwhile, Ahab reads the letter and realizes that it is addressed to Macey, the mate killed by Moby Dick, and that it's from Macey's wife. Mayhew asks for it to be passed over to him. "'Nay, keep it thyself,' cried Gabriel to Ahab; 'thou art soon going that way.'"  Ahab curses Gabriel and sticks the letter in the slit in the pole, but as he hands it over, the boat drifts so that the letter is in Gabriel's reach. He grabs it, impales it on a knife, and throws it back on board the Pequod, where it lands at Ahab's feet.

Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.

As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair.

Ishmael now recalls that when work on the whale began, Queequeg's job was to attach the blubber-hook to the whale and to remain on its back through "the whole flensing and stripping operation." Because the body revolves as it is worked on, it's necessary to secure the person on the whale with a rope. And Ishmael had the job of being on the other end of the rope, on deck. The "monkey-rope," as it's called, was tied "fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one." And if Queequeg were to lose his footing and fall, "both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake." Thus, Ishmael comments, "my free will had received a mortal wound." And typically, Ishmael draws a moral lesson from it:

I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connection with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die.

Adding to Queequeg's -- and by extension Ishmael's -- peril are the sharks, in whose midst he is hanging. And though Tashtego and Daggoo kill as many sharks as they can with their whale-spades, those sharp instruments also add to the danger because "both he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water," so "those indiscreet spades of their would come nearer amputating a leg than a tail." And again Ishmael moralizes about Queequeg's plight: "Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad." Of course, in Ishmael's allegory, your friends, the spades, are almost as dangerous as your foes, the sharks.

Though the quarry of the Pequod is the  sperm whale, when right whales are sighted, Ahab gives the go-ahead to the capture. Stubb and Flask lead the pursuit and between them manage to take one. It tows both boats back toward the ship, and when the whale sounds it carries the line beneath the Pequod: "a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and quivering." The whale tows the boats around and around the Pequod, and the sharks, attracted by the blood, follow. Finally, "with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse."

Ishmael is apparently a witness to the conversation between Stubb and Flask as they get the whale ready to be towed to the ship. Stubb wonders what Ahab wants with "this lump of foul lard," and Flask repeats a story that a ship that has had "a Sperm Whale's head  hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale's one the larboard, ... can never afterwards capsize." He admits that the source of the story is "that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah" but "he seems to know all about ships' charms." (Notice that, in the end, Gabriel turns out to be a better prophet than Fedallah.) 

And so the talk between Stubb and Flask turns to Fedallah, whom Stubb takes "to be the devil in disguise" who doesn't sleep in a hammock but in a coil of rigging in which he hides his tail. Stubb further posts that "the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he'll surrender Moby Dick." And he tells Flask a story about how the devil once asked God ("the old governor") for John. "'Take him,' says the governor -- and by the Lord, Flask, if the devil didn't give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful." Stubb seems to have conflated the story of Faust (whose name was John) with the Book of Job, which explains Flask's confusion: "I think I remember some such story as you were telling ... but I can't remember where."

Stubb continues to suggest that God is afraid of the devil:

"Damn the devil, Flask; so you suppose I'm afraid of the devil? Who's afraid of him except the old governor who daresn't catch him him and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him that all the people the devil kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's a governor!" 

Stubb's justification of the ways of God to man, then, is that God so fears the devil that he gives him free rein to snare human beings, and then punishes the tempted human beings with hellfire instead of punishing the devil who tempted them. And if Fedallah is the devil, Stubb asserts, it's Ahab who's his next victim.

Flask is right about the whale heads: the right whale's head is hoisted as a counterbalance to the sperm whale's, and Ishmael draws a lesson from the Pequod's regaining an even keel, "though sorely strained, you may well believe":

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

Thus speaks the American pragmatist.

As for Fedallah and Ahab, it's not so clear which one is the devil:  "Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with and lengthen Ahab's."

9. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 216-262

Chapter XLVIII: The First Lowering; Chapter XLIX: The Hyena; Chapter L: Ahab's Boat and Crew; Fedallah; Chapter LI: The Spirit-Spout; Chapter LII: The Albatross; Chapter LIII: The Gam; Chapter LIV: The Town-Ho's Story (As told at the Golden Inn)

_____

A confession: I tend to skim action scenes in novels, often because that's what the writer wants you to do -- race eagerly ahead to see who makes it out alive. And when the scene is all at sea, so am I. Sea action is so multidimensional -- horizontal, vertical, forward, backward, lateral, not to mention temporal -- that even when it's well written it's hard to make sense of. So for me much of the pursuit of the whale in Chapter XLVIII is a blur.

First of all, however, Melville has to introduce the mysterious figures who appeared at the end of the last chapter. Their leader, whose name, we learn, is Fedallah, is "tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from [his] steel-like lips." He wears black -- a "Chinese jacket" and "wide black trowsers.... But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head." The other four men are "of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas; -- a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty." There's very little mitigation of Ishmael's racial stereotyping of these South Asian figures -- "the Manillas" presumably refers to the Philippines. Fedallah remains a sinister figure who "half-hissed" his reply when Ahab asks if he's ready. The crew is so stunned by the appearance of "the swart Fedallah and his crew" that they are slow to respond to commands to launch their boats.

Ishmael now realizes the identity of "the mysterious shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn," and he also recalls "the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah." Ishmael is in Starbuck's boat, so he overhears an exchange between Starbuck and Stubb when their boats are alongside each other: Stubb asks, "What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!" and Starbuck replies, "Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed.... A sad business, Mr. Stubb!" But Starbuck keeps his attention on the business at hand, with Ishmael noting, "he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general.... He would say the most terrible things to his crew, in a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing." He commands the loyalty of his crew in ways unavailable to the obsessed and terrifying Ahab.

The whales have "settled bodily down into the blue," so everyone is intent on spotting them. Flask, the shortest of the mates, climbs onto the shoulders of Daggoo to get a better view. "The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest." But it is Tashtego, Stubb's harpooner, who sights the whales again. "The air suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming."

Starbuck commands his rowers to pull "in the lowest possible but intensest concentrated whisper ...; while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses." Flask, by contrast, begins shouting "and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat's stern like a crazed colt from the prairie." Stubb takes note of Flask's "fit," and urges his men to keep rowing. "But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his -- those were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land."

It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its otehr side; -- all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the Ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood; -- all this was thrilling.

But Starbuck's boat gets separated from the others in the thickening mist as a squall comes up. Starbuck sights a whale, and Queequeg throws his harpoon. But whale and weather overwhelm the boat, whose "sail collapsed and exploded" as "something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped." Fortunately, the boat is almost undamaged and the crew recovers the oars and manages to get back aboard. But the storm is on them. Starbuck manages to light a lantern and hand to Queequeg "as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope."

Dawn comes as the crew waits, "drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat," but suddenly the Pequod is approaching so fast that they have to dive from the boat and swim away. The ship passes over the boat, but when it bobs up again they "swam for it, were dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on board." The other boats had returned before the squall came up. "The ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing, -- an oar or a lance pole."

The brush with death puts Ishmael in the mood "when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own." He asks Queequeg, "does that sort of thing often happen?" and is assured that it does. He asks Stubb if "going plump on a flying whale with our sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?" and is told that Stubb has "lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn." And he asks Flask if it's the practice "for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death's jaws?" and gets the reply, "I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!" So Ishmael decides it's time he made his will, and asks Queequeg to be "lawyer, executor, and legatee." Having done that, "I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault."

Stubb expresses amazement at Ahab's courage in going out in a whaleboat with a wooden leg. Flask replies that it might be different if Ahab had lost his whole leg, "but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you know." Stubb isn't so sure about that: "I never yet saw him kneel."

But the question remains whether the captain of a ship has any business putting his own life in danger by participating in the chase, especially one so handicapped as Ahab. That, it seems, is the reason for Ahab's hiring a secret crew: The owners of the Pequod would never have approved of his getting into a whaleboat during the hunt. "Therefore he had not solicited a boat's crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head." He had gone ahead and done it himself without their knowing of it. He had also made sure that the boat he planned to use had been reinforced in the bottom to "better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb." And he had spent time personally working on the fittings of the boat to make it better suited to his prosthesis. The crew had suspected from this that he was planning to "hunt that mortal monster in person," but it had no idea that there was a secret crew waiting to aid him.

The other members of that crew, "the subordinate phantoms," became a part of the regular crew, but the "hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last."

He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent -- those insulated, immemorial countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.

There's an irony here that Ishmael, named for the biblical outcast often identified as the progenitor of the Arab peoples, should indulge in his own kind of Orientalism, akin to the prejudice that gave rise to the fear of the "yellow peril." Fedallah becomes indistinguishable from such sinister Asians as Dr. Fu Manchu.

"Days, weeks passed" until one night, in the waters south of St. Helena, Fedallah spots the spout of a whale: "Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea." Fedallah had been taking the watch on the main-mast at night, when the regular crew usually doesn't take that observation because hunting whales at night is uncommon. So when "his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew." Ahab orders full sail toward the sighting, and the description of the onrushing ship is magnificent:

The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her-- one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. 

But "the silvery jet was no more seen that night." It returned again several nights later and again "night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it." Naturally, some of the sailors begin to speculate that "that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us one and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas."

The seas grow rougher as they round the Cape of Good Hope, and the sailors secure themselves to the rail as they're buffeted by the sleety winds. "Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves." Ahab stays on deck most of the time, but one night Starbuck goes into the cabin to check the barometer and finds the captain asleep in his chair, his head back as if he's looking at the compass needle in the ceiling. "Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose."

Southeast of the Cape, the Pequod encounters a whaleship called the Goney (a name for the albatross) that is heading home after four years at sea. Ahab calls out, "Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?" But when the other captain goes to reply, he drops his speaking-trumpet into the sea. The crew of the Pequod regard it as a bad omen. The winds make it too dangerous to lower a boat so they can exchange visits. Ahab calls out and tells them that the ship is the Pequod. "Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to ---" But he breaks off when he notices that the schools of fish that have been following the Pequod have "darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, ye, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings. 'Swim away from me, do ye?' murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water."

Ishmael asserts that even if the weather hadn't prevented his going on board the Goney, he wouldn't have do so after getting a negative answer to his question about Moby Dick. Whaleships meeting at sea routinely exchange visits when they encounter each other, to exchange letters to and from home and to share new. Such a meeting is called a "gam." "It was not very long after speaking [to] the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, was encountered." I've written about "The Town-Ho's Story" before, in an entry for the Great Short Works of Herman Melville, so I won't repeat what I said there. It was originally published separately, and it lifts out of the context of Moby-Dick easily. But in context it gives us a closer glimpse of Moby Dick himself. It also has a fascinating "layered" quality to it: It's a story within a novel, but a story told to a man (Tashtego) who is not supposed to tell it to others but is forced to do so when he tells it in his sleep, and then in the context of the novel, Ishmael retells it at a remove: telling how he told it to another group of listeners, who are not characters in the novel. Why this intricate narrative device? Perhaps because it's a story in which key details are veiled -- the enigmatic relationship between Steelkilt and the captain, which hinges on whispered things that are never revealed to the reader. Melville is telling us that narrative is all about the things that people want to keep hidden, just as the original narrator of "The Town-Ho's Story" tried to make Tashtego not pass the story on. Secrets will out, but sometimes the meaning of them remains hidden, just as what Steelkilt whispered to the captain remains hidden.