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."

14. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 390-423

Chapter LXXXVIII: Schools and Schoolmasters; Chapter LXXXIX: Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish; Chapter XC: Heads or Tails; Chapter XCI: The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud; Chapter XCII: Ambergris; Chapter XCIII: The Castaway; Chapter XCIV:  A Squeeze of the Hand; Chapter XCV: The Cassock; Chapter XCVI: The Try-Works; Chapter XCVII: The Lamp

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Whalers, Ishmael tell us, refer to a bull sperm whale and his "harem" of females as a school, and to the male as their schoolmaster, which spurs him to what was probably a rather racy joke in 1851: "the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils." This is a reference to a passage in the memoirs of Eugène François Vidocq, the celebrated criminal-turned-detective who was, among other things, the model for Balzac's Vautrin:

I had in my classes some pretty peasant girls, who were very teachable. All went on well for some time, but at length a distrust of me was evinced; I was watched, and it was discovered that I pushed my instructions occasionally rather too far and complaint was made to father Lambert, who told me of the charges against me, which I stoutly denied. The complainants were silenced, but redoubled their vigilance; and one night, when, impelled by classic zeal, I was about to give a lesson in a hay-loft to a female scholar about sixteen years of age, I was seized by four brewers' men, dragged into a hop-ground, stripped of my clothes, and scourged, till the blood flowed copiously, with rods of nettles and thistles.

Ishmael observes that whales are found in smaller groups and that "Almost universally, a lone whale -- as a solitary Leviathan is called -- proves an ancient one." And he notes that if you kill a male sperm whale, "all his comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey."


Then he turns to the legal question: If one ship strikes a whale but it escapes, and then another ship captures it, to which ship does the whale belong?  It turns out to be more a matter of custom and law, but the rule of thumb is that if a whale is "fast," secured to a ship or a boat "by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants, -- a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb," then it belongs to that ship or boat. But if it is "loose," it's "fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it."

But this of course inspires Ishmael to a disquisition on "Fast-Fish" and "Loose-Fish." By this definition, in which "possession is the whole of the law," then Fast-Fish include "the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves," the "widow's last mite" in the hands of a "rapacious landlord," the "villain's marble mansion," Ireland to England, and so on. And Loose-Fish include all the territories being claimed by imperial powers:  America was a Loose-Fish when Columbus claimed her for the king and queen of Spain. In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, Ishmael observes that Texas has become a Fast-Fish for the United States, but suggests that Mexico remains a Loose-Fish in the eyes of the United States.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

(Melville, a notorious snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, certainly included himself among the "ostentatious smuggling verbalists" borrowing from the thoughts of others.) In a separate chapter, Ishmael notes that for English whalers, whose numbers had grown fewer, the law of possession had another consequence: He asserts that by English law, the head of a whale belonged to the king, and the tail to the queen. This spurs him to several paragraphs of whimsy, easily skimmable.


Fortunately, we now go back to sea, where the Pequod encounters a foul-smelling French whaler ironically named the Bouton de rose, or Rosebud. The odor comes from two whales lashed alongside the ship. One of them is "what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse." The other, "even more of a nosegay than the first," is so dried-up that it's clear it will yield no oil, but Stubb reconizes that "it may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris." So the Pequod pulls up next to the Rose-Bud, "fairly entrapped in the smell," while Stubb pulls a con on the French captain.


The chief mate of the Rose-Bud turns out to be from Guernsey, so he's able to act as interpreter with the captain. The mate knows that there won't be any oil in the dried-up whale, but he says, "the Captain here won't believe it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before." Realizing that "the Guernsey-man had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris," Stubb gets the captain to turn over the whale to the Pequod: "the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter's office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in him during the interview."


So Stubb proceeds to insult the captain in various ways -- e.g., "tell him from me he's a baboon" -- while the mate tells the captain that the Pequod had met a ship whose captain and chief mate had "died of a fever caught from a blasted whale," and that the dried-up whale is even more dangerous. The frightened captain orders both whales cut loose, and Stubb generously offers to tow away the dried-up one.


When the French ship has sailed away, Stubb take "his sharp boat-spade" and "commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin ... when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague there stole a faint stream of perfume.... Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savoury withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist."

Ambergris is produced in the whale's intestines and is usually expelled with the feces, or when too large to pass that way, in the whale's vomitus. Fresh ambergris has a fecal smell, but when it ages it begins to smell like isopropyl alcohol.

Ishmael enumerates the uses of ambergris for perfumes, candles, hair-powder, and other cosmetics. "The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it." So he's quick to emphasize the irony that a substance so prized by "fine ladies and gentlemen" is "found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!" He also notes that "there were found in this ambergris, certain hard, round, bony plates." Stubb thought they were buttons from sailors' trousers, but they turned out to be squid bones. Some still theorize that ambergris is produced by the whale to ease the passage of indigestible bits from its intestines.


A few days later, a whale sighting occurs, but one of Stubb's oarsmen had suffered an injury. The only hand available to take his place is the cabin-boy Pip, who has never taken part in a whale-hunt before. And so, Ishmael foreshadows, the Pequod is presented with "a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own."


Pip is, of course, black, and Ishmael can't resist stumbling over that fact with attitudes carried over from the minstrel-show era: "Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three  hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days." As condescendingly racist as this is, there is also a veiled envy in it. He goes on to add, "Nor smile so, while I write that this little black boy was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets." Overcoming his own racism is a struggle for Ishmael, but at least he's struggling.


Cheerful and bright as Pip is, a whale-boat is no place for him, and when the whale is harpooned and bumps into the boat, the terrified boy not only leaps out of the boat but becomes entangled in the whale-line. Tashtego, "full of the fire of the hunt," is furiously angry at Pip, and looks to Stubb for directions as to whether he should cut the line. "'Damn him, cut!' roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved." The crew angrily curses Pip, after which "Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice."

"Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord I won't pick you up if you jump, mind that. We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

But it happens again, and Pip jumps again, and Stubb does leave him adrift in the sea. Stubb, Ishmael says, assumed that the other two boats would pick Pip up, but they don't see him before they turn aside to pursue other whales. And so Pip is alone at sea.

By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot.... The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insets, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.



Ishmael is working with the spermaceti, which has crystallized and needs to be broken down again. So he and others gather around a tub and work the substance with their hands, breaking up the congealed lumps. It seems to be an emollient not only for the hands but for the soul: "I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatever." It does more than that: It also awakens something latent when he finds himself "unwittingly squeezing" his co-workers' hands "and looking up into their eyes sentimentally." We are reminded that these guys have been at sea for months together: "Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness." Let the homophobic write off this scene as "male bonding," but I don't buy it. I have a pretty clear idea what's being squeezed here to produce all that milk and sperm, and it's not just hands.


Coming down from that scene, Ishmael works through several chapters of the processing of whale-flesh, defining such terms as "white-horse," "plum-pudding," "slobgollion,""gurry," and "nippers," and indulging in a little macabre humor: "This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless.... Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men." He describes the "cassock" that a mincer makes out of whale skin. And he tells about the great brick and masonry try-works on the deck between the foremast and mainmast, whose fire is started with wood but maintained by burning scraps of whale. It is, of course, a hellish scene that "smells like the left wing of the day of judgment."


Standing at the helm, he beholds "the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, an laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness." It becomes a correlative for its mad captain: "the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul." Standing at the tiller, guiding "the way of this fire-ship on the sea," he falls asleep for a moment and comes to with a start, fearing that he has gone mad: "Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I." And then he realizes that he has turned around in his sleep and is facing the stern. "In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her." Naturally, this provokes a sermon: "Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm!" He takes his text from Ecclesiastes: "All is vanity." And his lesson, from staring into the fire of the try-works is, "Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness."  

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

_____

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

_____

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."

10. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 262-301

Chapter LV: Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales; Chapter LVI: Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes; Chapter LVII: Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Mountains; in Stars; Chapter LVIII: Brit; Chapter LIX: Squid; Chapter LX: The Line; Chapter LXI: Stubb Kills a Whale; Chapter LXII: The Dart; Chapter LXIII: The Crotch; Chapter LXIV: Stubb's Supper; Chapter LXV: The Whale as a Dish

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The three chapters on whale iconography are among the greatest stumbling-blocks in Moby-Dick  for the contemporary casual reader, unless he or she has a particular interest in the topic. As I think I suggested before, they serve a purpose in the novel to suggest that just as Ahab is obsessed with the White Whale, Ishmael is obsessed with the entire topic of whaling, and that Melville's novel is a study in obsessions. In this case, Ishmael is mostly obsessed with how artists got it wrong, starting with the "most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's," which he identifies as a sculpture found in the Elephanta caves in India: "the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar." It's hard to tell what sculpture of Vishnu in the Matsya (Sanskrit for fish) avatar he has in mind, but he insists that the tail is all wrong.

Incarnation of Vishnu as a fish

Western artists don't fare much better: He denounces Guido Reni's painting of Perseus rescuing Andromeda -- a picture now so badly in need of cleaning that it's hard to see the sea-monster anyway -- and the monster in Hogarth's version of the Perseus story is equally improbable. Not to mention "Jonah's whale in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. He also takes in the "book-binder's whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor." The well-known colophon is "universally denominated a dolphin," but Ishmael insists that it was intended to represent a whale.

Hogarth, Perseus and Andromeda

Jonah and the whale

Publisher's dolphin colophon

Even more recent images of whales by trained naturalists such as Lacépède and Cuvier fall short: "Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash." He blames the misrepresentations on the fact that the naturalists are working from whales that have been beached: "The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations." 

J. Ross Browne (1821–1875). Etchings of a Whaling Cruise

In discussing "less erroneous pictures of whales," he cites with approval J. Ross Browne and William Scoresby. But his chief praises are for "two large French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery." He means Ambroise Louis Garneray:

Ambroise Louis Garneray (1783–1857), "Peche de la Baleine,” colored aquatint engraved by Frederic Martens, 1835.

Ambroise Louis Garneray, "Peche du Cachalot,” colored aquatint engraved by Frederic Martens, 1834. 

"The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings they have of their whaling scenes."

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e., what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him. Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry.

This is a preamble to his discussion of carvings and other handcrafted images of whales, but it's also a reminder that when Ishmael refers to someone as a savage, he doesn't necessarily mean it as a pejorative.

The Pequod now comes upon "vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds." Ishmael doesn't seem to know precisely what this "substance" is, but the dictionary will tell you that brit, or britt, is (are?) the spawn of herring or similar fish. The Right Whale is, of course, the wrong whale for the Pequod, so she cruises along through the grazing whales as "these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea." The experience provokes Ishmael to meditation on "the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure." And of course he draws a moral: "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!" This didactic flourish is not unearned, of course: Ishmael pushed off from his own isle when he signed up for a voyage with Ahab.

Speaking of whom, he is about to return to the scene when Daggoo, on watch on the main mast-head, spots "a great white mass" rising from the sea. Naturally, he thinks it's Moby Dick. Ahab rushes to see, and orders the boats lowered. It's not the whale, however. "A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to catch at any hapless object within reach." The giant squid gives Starbuck a serious case of the creeps:

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed -- "Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!"

Not only does Starbuck make it perfectly clear that fighting Moby Dick is the last thing he wants to do, he also reveals his sense of being doomed when he adds that "few whale-ships [have] ever beheld [the giant squid] and returned to their ports to tell of it." As for Ahab, he says nothing and everyone returns in silence to the ship. Ishmael notes that some think that the giant squid is the only food the sperm whale eats, which ought to have given Ahab, at least, some encouragement. He also notes that "the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid" -- Erik Pontoppidan was a bishop in Norway who wrote a "Natural History of Norway" describing the kraken as a vast sea monster capable of dragging down an entire ship. Naturalists, Ishmael notes, include the giant squid "among the class of cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe." Anak in the Bible is the progenitor of a race of giants.

Ishmael now turns to the topic of rope: "the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line." It is made of either hemp or "Manilla" (a fiber derived from abacá, a species of banana). Ishmael, "since there is an aesthetics in all things," prefers the latter: "Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold." The rope is surprisingly thin: "only two thirds of an inch." But it "will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons." Coiled in its tub aboard the whale-boat, "the common sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms" -- about twelve hundred feet. It has to be very carefully coiled without a kink or a tangle because such a flaw can, "in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off."  

The tub in which the whale-line is stored is about three feet in diameter and depth, which "makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks are but one half inch in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated one." Both ends of the line are kept free. The lower one has a loop in it so it can be fastened to another line from another boat to keep a whale from going under with the entire line. If the line were fastened to the boat, "the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea."

The leading end of the line is drawn out in a complex manner, folding "the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction." It rests "crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing." So an oarsman seated "amid those hempen intricacies" is aware "that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings ... the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say." And once again, Ishmael yields to moralizing:

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, everpresent perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

All of this textbook lore about whale-lines is to the point, of course, because Stubb is about to kill a whale. Ishmael is on watch when he -- and the other watch as well as many on deck -- spots, "close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale ... rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate." The chase is quickly on, though quietly at first, as Ahab has ordered "that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers." But when "the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up," the chase is on.

Stubb's boat is nearest to the whale, and he has lighted his pipe. Tashtego is ready with the harpoon and hurls it. "The oarsmen backed water; the same moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was the magical line." (See why you shouldn't skip that chapter?)  The smoke coming off the whizzing line mingles with the smoke from Stubb's pipe. He has, however, dropped "the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas" that are used to handle the rope, so "it blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb's hands.... It was like holding an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch." Stubb calls out for the line to be wet.

The whale begins to pull the boat, and the men in the boat hold on to their seats while Tashtego crouched "almost double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity." Stubb throws dart after dart into the whale, which begins bleeding copiously. "The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill.... The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men." I'm not certain that detail is literally plausible, but it's a marvelous one, if only for symbolic purposes. Finally, "the monster horribly wallowed in his blood," endangering the boat in his death throes. And when it is over, Stubb scatters the "dead ashes" from his pipe "over the water; and for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made."

Given the elegiac quality of that last sentence, that awareness that a living thing is now dead, I think it's appropriate that Melville postpones Stubb's triumph for a couple of chapters. Ishmael explains about the difficulties of harpooning a whale and the fact that a floundering whale with several razor-sharp harpoons flailing about him is a danger to the whalers themselves. He points out that a harpooner has to row as well as to fling "the heavy implement ... to the distance of twenty or thirty feet" and is "expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations."

No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no one that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern.

Three boats now laboriously haul the whale back to the ship, toiling "hour upon hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse." Ahab is morose: "now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain." But Stubb is ebullient and orders a steak be cut from the whale for his dinner. "Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands upon thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness." Ishmael is struck by the horror of the feasting sharks: "If you have never seen that sight, then suspend our decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil."

Then follows a scene that may have been regarded as raucous comedy by Melville's contemporaries, but can't help but make us squirm: Stubb's taunting of Fleece, the ancient black ship's cook, who speaks in a distressing variety of minstrelese. Interestingly, however, after all of Stubb's humor at Fleece's expense, it is the black man who gets the last word:

"Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan massa Shark hisself," muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.

There is something sour and unsatisfactory after all about the triumphant taking of the Pequod's first whale. Today, when people reverence whales and argue for their protection, that reaction is natural. But I think Melville senses it, too. Now Ishmael turns Stubb's dinner into something queasy-making: "That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say," seems "outlandish." He observes that whale meat would be considered "a noble dish" by whale hunters, "were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite." Moreover, the whale is "too fat to be delicately good," though while the blubber is being rendered, "it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made."

But he returns to the uncanny quality of eating whale meat by whale light. And he calls the whale "a newly murdered thing of the sea" -- a striking change from "leviathan" or "monster" and other epithets for the whale as prey. He even advances an argument for vegetarianism:

Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.

As with his earlier rethinking of the word "savage," Ishmael now reconsiders the word "cannibal." It's a strange coda to the supposedly exhilarating and triumphant whale-hunt.