Title: Moby Dick; or The Whale Author: Herman Melville January, 2001
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FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END* MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE by
Herman Melville CHAPTER 1 Loomings Call me Ishmael.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale
himself.

Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the
undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the
attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped
to sway me to my wish.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the
great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild
conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into
my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of
them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the
business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is
now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original-- the Tyre
of this Carthage;--the place where the first dead American whale was
stranded.

Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-
Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan?

And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little
sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones--so goes the
story-- to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were
nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?

The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-
foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone
visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the
craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-
heads.

With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did
Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset.

And that harpoon--so like a corkscrew now--was flung in Javan seas,
and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of
Blanco.

Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking
den--the bar--a rude attempt at a right whale's head.

Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale's
jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it.

No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale's
mouth-- the bar--when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there
officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round.

I then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre
table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude
shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man
striking a whale.

I remembered a story of a white man--a whaleman too-- who, falling
among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them.

It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other
shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this
Christian country.

They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and
third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths,
and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with
bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for
morning gowns.

Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest
bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas--entire
strangers to them-- and duelled them dead without winking; and yet,
here they sat at a social breakfast table--all of the same calling,
all of kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly at each other as
though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the
Green Mountains.

A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!

They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled
forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance.

Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a
distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you
should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport.

Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day
perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador.

In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their
daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.

CHAPTER 7 The Chapel In this same New Bedford there stands a
Whaleman's Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for
the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the
spot.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN,
WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats'
crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the
Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the
bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,
August 3d, 1833.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky
light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who
had gone before me.

Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among
whom he was a very great favorite.

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a
bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog-- in such tones he
commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards
the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and
joy-- The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal
gloom, While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening
down to doom.

In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him
mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints-- No more the whale did me
confine.

Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-
line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour,
when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.

He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers,
and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale,
which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him.

He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that
he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning
jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like
so many white bolts, upon his prison.

And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the
eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.

As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him
down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along
'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten
thousand fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,'
and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.

Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet--'out of the belly of
hell'--when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, even
then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.

Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and
blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and
pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and 'vomited out
Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the Lord came a second
time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears, like two sea-shells,
still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean-- Jonah did the
Almighty's bidding.

When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a
grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong
desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or
two.

They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him.

the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians
could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his
father's heathens.

Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him
of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising
port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from.

To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true
enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because
it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and
deeply intimate with the hearts of whales.

Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her
wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent
and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of
carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to
melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start;
that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second;
and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for
aye.

him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e;
Queequeg kill-e big whale!

Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done; those on
deck rushed toward the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were
the lower jaw of an exasperated whale.

With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked
to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of
sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under
his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port;
tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel, and here a gallows!

said I; "every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon-- but why not?

I had not a little relied on Queequeg's sagacity to point out the
whaler best fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely.

All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one
continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted
there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.

It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long,
huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part
of the jaws of the right-whale.

Was the other one lost by a whale?

"Lost by a whale!"

I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at
the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as
I could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I
know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though
indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the
accident.

Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat,
and then jump after it?

For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors
and whale-hunters.

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.

They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story,
that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving
home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted
and worn out.

Has he ever whaled it any?

Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.

But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the
Captain with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though,
indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and
receive all her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible
by arriving to take command; for sometimes these voyages are so
prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that
if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of that
sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but
leaves her to the owners till all is ready for sea.

Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in
colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders
than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than
whales.

I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that
accursed whale, he's been a kind of moody-- desperate moody, and
savage sometimes; but that will all pass off.

I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand in the
head of a whale-boat?

Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon
the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats
hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his
harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:-- "Cap'ain, you see him
small drop tar on water dere?

well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!

Now," said Queequeg, quietly, hauling in the line, "spos-ee him
whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead.

He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and
sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got
stove and went to Davy Jones.

"They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that
he's a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew."

And though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any
means to the same extent as with whalemen.

Every once in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den,
roaring at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at
the mast-head, and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.

CHAPTER 22 Merry Christmas At length, towards noon, upon the final
dismissal of the ship's riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled
out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off
in a whale-boat, with her last gift-- a nightcap for Stubb, the second
mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward--after all
this, the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and
turning to the chief mate, Peleg said: "Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you
sure everything is right?

As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in
port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike
the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.

Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days, men; but don't miss a fair
chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good gifts.

CHAPTER 24 The Advocate As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in
this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow
come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and
disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye
landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales.

(Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be
deemed preeminently presuming and ridiculous.

Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us
whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a
butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein,
we are surrounded by all manner of defilements.

And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye
shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally
unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm
whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth.

But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered
slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable
carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to
drink in all ladies' plaudits?

And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the
soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has
freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition
of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his
head.

But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
adoration!

But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of
scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.

Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in
bounties upwards of 1,000,000 pounds?

And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all
the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards
of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly
consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of
sailing, 20,000,000 dollars; and every year importing into our harbors
a well reaped harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars.

For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting
out the remotest and least known parts of the earth.

If American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage
harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-
ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
between them and the savages.

Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe
and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific
coast.

It was the whalemen who first broke through the jealous policy of the
Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it
might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated
the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain,
and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was
given to the enlightened world by the whaleman.

After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships,
long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-
ship touched there.

The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony.

Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the
emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent
biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.

The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do
commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the
missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive
missionaries to their first destinations.

If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is
the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she
is on the threshold.

The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you
will say.

The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler?

Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own
royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter
of those times!

True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have
no good blood in their veins.

By old English statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish.

The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way.

The whale never figured in any grand imposing way?

In one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his
entering the world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the
way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the
cymballed procession.

I know a man that, in his lifetime has taken three hundred and fifty
whales.

in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the
glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a
whale.

But we shall ere long see what that word "careful" precisely means
when used by a man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.

Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor
for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting
him.

For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales
for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that
hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew.

And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible
in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the
conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary
irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more
terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you
from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.

Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whaleboat as if
the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited
guests.

When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he
handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling
tinker his hammer.

A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,
who somehow seemed to think that the great Leviathans had personally
and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point
of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered.

So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels
of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like
an apprehension of any possible danger from encountering them; that in
his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified
mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention
and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and
boil.

This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little
waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of
it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke
that lasted that length of time.

They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he
could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name
in Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side
timbers inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy
concussions of those battering seas.

In that grand order of battle in which Captain Ahab would probably
marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these three headsmen were
as captains of companies.

But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the
woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the
sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible
arrow of the sires.

In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
lying in a lonely bay on his native coast.

And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket,
and the pagan harbors most frequented by the whalemen; and having now
led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners
uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained
all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the
decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks.

As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at the
present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast
employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though
pretty nearly all the officers are.

Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the
American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering
forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and
Railroads.

No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where
the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their
crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores.

In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London,
put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of
their crew.

How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best
whalemen.

It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been
fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw.

In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were
fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale.

Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring-- aye, and
ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with
such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were
the strongest and fullest of trouble.

a whale-bone cane.

Yes,' thinks I, 'it was only a playful cudgelling--in fact, only a
whaleboning that he gave me-- not a base kick.

There are whales hereabouts!

A white whale--did ye mark that, man?

It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,
that I would now fain put before you.

It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry
as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and
families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this
animal" (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.

Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and
Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy.

Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books
there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the
science of whales.

Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen,
who have at large or in little, written of the whale.

Of the names in this list of whale authors only those following Owen
ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional
harpooneer and whaleman.

On the separate subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the
best existing authority.

But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale,
compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning.

And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the
throne of the seas.

He is not even by any means the largest of the whales.

Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the profound
ignorance which till some seventy years back, invested the then
fabulous and utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to this
present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats and
whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete.

Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets
of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one
rival, was to them the monarch of the seas.

good people all,--the Greenland whale is deposed,-- the great sperm
whale now reigneth!

There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the
living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest
degree succeed in the attempt.

Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in their time surgeons to
the English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men.

The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their
volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of
excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description.

As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not
complete in any literature.

Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.

Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular
comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the
present, hereafter to be filled in all-outward its departments by
subsequent laborers.

But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have
had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I
will try.

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology
is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters
it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish.

In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby
separate the whales from the fish.

The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales
from the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their warm
bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow
ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex lege
naturae jure meritoque.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned
ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.

This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal
respect does the whale differ from other fish.

Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
conspicuously to label him for all time to come.

To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.

A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish,
because he is amphibious.

By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude
from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified
with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other
hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as
alien.

Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire whale host.

*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins
and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are
included by many naturalists among the whales.

But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in
the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they
do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented
them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.

First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary
BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them
all, both small and large.

THE FOLIO WHALE; II.

the OCTAVO WHALE; III.

the DUODECIMO WHALE.

As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the OCTAVO, the
Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.

The Sperm Whale; II.

the Right Whale; III.

the Fin Back Whale; IV.

the Humpbacked Whale; V. the Razor Back Whale; VI.

the Sulphur Bottom Whale.

(Sperm Whale).--This whale, among the English of old vaguely known as
the Trumpa whale and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale,
is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the
Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words.

He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most
formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect;
and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being the only
creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained.

Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in
his own proper individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally
obtained from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would
seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a creature identical
with the one then known in England as the Greenland or Right Whale.

It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening
humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word
literally expresses.

And so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the
whale from which this spermaceti was really derived.

(Right Whale).--In one respect this is the most venerable of the
leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man.

It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and the
oil specially known as "whale oil," an inferior article in commerce.

Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the
following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the
Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale.

What then is the whale, which I include in the second species of my
Folios?

It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland
Whale of the English Whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the French
whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes.

It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has been hunted
by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the
American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the
Brazil Banks, on the Nor' West Coast, and various other parts of the
world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.

Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the
English and the right whale of the Americans.

The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with
reference to elucidating the sperm whale.

(Fin-Back).--Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the various
names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in
every sea and is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often
descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic, in the New York packet-
tracks.

In the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles
the right whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter color,
approaching to olive.

He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters.

From having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes
included with the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated
Whalebone whales, that is, whales with baleen.

Of these so-called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several
varieties, most of which, however, are little known.

Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched
whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fisherman's
names for a few sorts.

In connexion with this appellative of "Whalebone whales," it is of
great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be
convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is
in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded
upon either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding
that those marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted
to afford the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other
detached bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents.

The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose
peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of
whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their
structure in other and more essential particulars.

Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but
there the similitude ceases.

Then this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these
has baleen; but there again the similitude ceases.

In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular combinations; or,
in the case of any one of them detached, such an irregular isolation;
as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a basis.

On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has split.

But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the
whale, in his anatomy--there, at least, we shall be able to hit the
right classification.

Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland whale's
anatomy more striking than his baleen?

Yet we have seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to
classify the Greenland whale.

nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal
volume, and boldly sort them that way.

(Hump Back).--This whale is often seen on the northern American coast.

He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might call him the
Elephant and Castle whale.

At any rate, the popular name for him does not sufficiently
distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump though a
smaller one.

He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making
more gay foam and white water generally than any other of them.

(Folio), CHAPTER V. ( Razor Back).--Of this whale little is known but
his name.

* These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which at
present may be numbered:--I., the Grampus; II., the Black Fish; III.,
the Narwhale; IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer.

*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.

Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of
the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them
in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its dimensioned form
does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume
does.

(Grampus).--Though this fish, whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather
blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a
denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales.

By some fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory of the
advance of the great sperm whale.

I do so now touching the Black Fish, so called because blackness is
the rule among almost all whales.

So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please.

This whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length.

When not more profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes
capture the Hyena whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for
domestic employment-- as some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of
company, and quite alone by themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead
of odorous wax.

Though their blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you
upwards of thirty gallons of oil.

(Narwhale), that is, Nostril whale.-- Another instance of a curiously
named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar horn being
originally mistaken for a peaked nose.

It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-
fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for a
rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food.

Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale,
rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with
ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through.

My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may really be used
by the Narwhale--however that may be--it would certainly be very
convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.

The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale,
and the Unicorn whale.

Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from
that voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to
him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down
the Thames; "when Sir Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black
Letter, "on bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious
long horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the
castle at Windsor.

The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
milk-white ground color, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.

(Killer).--Of this whale little is precisely known to the Nantucketer,
and nothing at all to the professed naturalists.

He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs there
like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death.

Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the
ground of its indistinctness.

He mounts the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his
passage by flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world
by a similar process.

DUODECIMOES.--These include the smaller whales.

To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may
possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five
feet should be marshalled among WHALES--a word, which, in the popular
sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness.

But the creatures set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales,
by the terms of my definition of what a whale is--i.e.

But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and you will then see
the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.

The only English name, by which he has hitherto been designated, is
that of the fisher--Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance that
he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio.

Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the
Porpoise is the smallest of the whales.

But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales,
which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not
personally.

If any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked,
then he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his
Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:-- The Bottle-Nose Whale; the
Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading
Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the
Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; &c.
From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be
quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of
uncouth names.

CHAPTER 33 The Specksynder Concerning the officers of the whale-craft,
this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic
peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the
harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other
marine than the whale-fleet.

The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is evinced
by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries
and more ago, the command of a whale-ship was not wholly lodged in the
person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an
officer called the Specksynder.

In those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the
navigation and general management of the vessel; while over the whale-
hunting department and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief
Harpooneer reigned supreme.

Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the mates have their
quarters with the captain; and so, too, in most of the American
whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the after part of the ship.

Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the
longest of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils
of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a company, all
of whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages,
but upon their common luck, together with their common vigilance,
intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do in some cases
tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen
generally; yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family
these whalemen may, in some primitive instances, live together; for
all that, the punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are
seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away.

But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket
grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and
Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical
trappings and housings are denied me.

In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale
captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights
the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone
that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there.

In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost
simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may
have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper
cruising ground.

and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port,
does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.

And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an
assertion based upon the general belief among archaeologists, that the
first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes: a theory
singularly supported by the peculiar stairlike formation of all four
sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of
their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and
sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing
out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight.

The worthy Obed tells us, that in the early times of the whale
fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the
people of that island erected lofty spars along the seacoast, to which
the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls
go upstairs in a hen-house.

A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New
Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned
boats nigh the beach.

But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one
proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea.

In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years'
voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at
the mast-head would amount to several entire months.

Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t' gallant-mast,
where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to
whalemen) called the t' gallant crosstrees.

Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of
a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents
or pulpits, called crow's-nests, in which the look-outs of a Greenland
whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas.

In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled "A Voyage among
the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for
the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;" in
this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a
charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
crow's-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good
craft.

When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow's-nest
of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in
the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of
popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting
those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from the deck
owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a
very different thing.

But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as
Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is
greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those
seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float.

With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I--being
left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude--how
could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whaleships'
standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.

Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can
be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes
round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer.

For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic,
melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the corking
care of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber.

Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of
some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase
ejaculates:-- "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded
young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling
sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so
hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret
souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise.

Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been
cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale
yet.

Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here.

Vehemently pausing, he cried:-- "What do ye do when ye see a whale,
men?

"A dead whale or a stove boat!"

But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly,
almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:-- "All ye mast-
headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale.

Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-
mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with
the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: "Whosoever of ye
raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes
punctured in his starboard fluke--look ye, whosoever of ye raises me
that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!

It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the
topmaul: "a white whale.

Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same that
some call Moby Dick.

Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?

it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging
lubber of me for ever and a day!

to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of
earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.

shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old
man: "A sharp eye for the White Whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!

But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the
white whale!

"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain
Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I
came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance."

To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.

That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale
agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon
him.

Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale?

drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow-- Death
to Moby Dick!

The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and
maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously
quaffed down with a hiss.

The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small
gold-fish has its glassy globe.

The white whale is their demigorgon.

(Sings, and all follow) Our captain stood upon the deck, A spy-glass
in his hand, A viewing of those gallant whales That blew at every
strand.

Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys, And by your braces stand, And
we'll have one of those fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand!

While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!

this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm-- give us a whiff,
Tash.

We are the lads to hunt him up his whale!

white whale, shirr!

Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale--shirr!

For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen.

For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way
they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them
adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as
seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to
encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate
length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of
sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and
indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide
whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby
Dick.

It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have
encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a
Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after
doing great mischief to his assailants, has completely escaped them;
to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale
in question must have been no other than Moby Dick.

Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and
not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the
monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident
ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the
most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more,
as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to
the individual cause.

In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the
whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one
of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any
other whale of that species.

But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults-- not
restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring
amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated
disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon
Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many
brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually
come.

And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery
surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and
fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there.

For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and
superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they
are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever
is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye
its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them.

Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand
miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any
chiselled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the
sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as
he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his
fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.

No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over
the wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did
in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and
half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which
eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from
anything that visibly appears.

So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who
by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those
hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.

Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm
Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the
leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body.

There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and
courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale,
would perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency,
or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate,
there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations
not sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely
encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan
is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;
seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish
fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern
whaling.

Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere
more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem
him.

And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary
times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists--
Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a
consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so
incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.

For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms that at sight of
the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are "struck with the most
lively terrors," and "often in the precipitancy of their flight dash
themselves against the rocks with such violence as to cause
instantaneous death.

So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few
of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days
of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long
practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and
daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans
might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lances at such an
apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man.

One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be
linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously
inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous;
that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and
the same instant of time.

For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been
divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the
Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part,
unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated
the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them,
especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a
great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the
most widely distant points.

It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and
as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by
Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the
Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted
in the Greenland seas.

Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the
Nor' West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to
the whale.

So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the
prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain in
Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the
wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more
wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters
were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground
passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the
realities of the whalemen.

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and
knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had
escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen
should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick
not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in
time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks,
he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made
to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception;
for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his
unsullied jet would once more be seen.

For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished
him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a
peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white
hump.

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with
the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive
appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by
his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue
sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden
gleamings.

Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural
terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to
specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults.

But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by
no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed
the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every
dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as
having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of
his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of
chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of
the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene,
exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in
the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow,
had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly
seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the
whale.

Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost
fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the
whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last
came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his
intellectual and spiritual exasperations.

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all
those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till
they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.

That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose
dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds;
which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue
devil;-- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but
deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he
pitted himself, all mutilated, against it.

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage
and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his
chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for
another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the
calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the
conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified
and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the
bloody hunt of whales.

But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of
his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely
sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing
object of hunting the White Whale.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses
a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly
made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals--morally
enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-
mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and
recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask.

How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire--by
what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate
seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe
as his; how all this came to be--what the White Whale was to them, or
how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim,
unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the
seas of life,-- all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than
Ishmael can go.

For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the
place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see
naught in that brute but the deadliest ill. CHAPTER 42 The Whiteness
of The Whale What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what,
at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.

At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him,
wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various
former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or
seen.

But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and
currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's
food; and, also calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for
hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable
surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest
day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.

So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the
sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe
that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;
were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully
collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to
correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the
flights of swallows.

On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory
charts of the sperm whale.

This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees of
latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of
which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and
horizontally through each of which districts are three lines; one to
show the number of days that have been spent in each month in every
district, and the two others to show the number of days in which
whales, sperm or right, have been seen.

Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the
sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct--say, rather, secret
intelligence from the Deity--mostly swim in veins, as they are called;
continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating
exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with
one tithe of such marvellous precision.

Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale be
straight as a surveyor's parallel, and though the line of advance be
strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the
arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to swim, generally
embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the vein is
presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep
from the whale-ship's mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along
this magic zone.

The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along
that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for.

Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for
particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds
which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say,
will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found
there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and
unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true.

In general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to
the solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales.

There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white
whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds;
there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found
the awful motive to his vengeance.

Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights
was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring
ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White
Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his periodical
feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian
Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters
haunted by his race.

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it
not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one
solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of
individual recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti
in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople?

And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as
after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would throw
himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape?

For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast
hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was
not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again.

CHAPTER 45 The Affidavit So far as what there may be of a narrative in
this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very
interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the
foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as important a one as will
be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be
still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be
adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which
a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds,
as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair.

I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be
content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of
items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from
these citations, I take it-- the conclusion aimed at will naturally
follow of itself.

First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after
receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an
interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by
the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same
private cypher, have been taken from the body.

Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on its travels;
no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its
flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.

This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished
the other.

I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this; that is
in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack,
saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards
taken from the dead fish.

In the three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both
times, first and last, and the last time distinctly recognized a
peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed
there three years previous.

Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however
ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several
memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean
has been at distant times and places popularly cognisable.

Why such a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally
owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales;
for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be, they
soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him
down into a peculiarly valuable oil.

No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences of the
fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a
whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most
fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their
tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea,
without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance.

But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
celebrity--nay, you may call it an oceanwide renown; not only was he
famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death,
but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions
of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar.

thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic
hieroglyphics upon the back!

In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of
Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.

I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make
mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in
printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the
whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe.

Do you suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps
caught by the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried
down to the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan-- do you
suppose that that poor fellow's name will appear in the newspaper
obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast?

Yet I will tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to
the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every
one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one,
and three that had each lost a boat's crew.

Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale
is an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that
when narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold
enormousness, they have significantly complimented me upon my
facetiousness; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of
being facetious than Moses, when he wrote the history of the plagues
of Egypt.

That point is this: The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently
powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct
aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and
what is more, the Sperm Whale has done it.

One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal
of sperm whales.

Ere long, several of the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very
large whale escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore
directly down upon the ship.

* *The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: "Every fact
seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance
which directed his operations; he made two several attacks upon the
ship, at a short interval between them, both of this catastrophe I
have never chanced to their direction, were calculated to do us the
whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it.

Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be
sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the
professional gentlemen present.

He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could so smite his
stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful.

But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a
few moments' confidential business with him.

I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore's interview with
that whale as providential.

I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.

An uncommonly large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship
itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived
by any one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full
sail, was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its
striking against him.

But I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of
the morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale
vertically bumping the hull from beneath.

I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known
to me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale.

The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for
his strength, let me say, that there have been examples where the
lines attached to a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been
transferred to the ship, and secured there!

the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a horse walks
off with a cart.

Again, it is very often observed that, if the sperm whale, once
struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so often with
blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to his
pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his
character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth,
and retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes.

But as he destroyed ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have
been a whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a sperm whale.

For a long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown
in the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it.

But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern
times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm
whale in the Mediterranean.

I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore
Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale.

Now, as a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence
a sperm whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean
into the Propontis.

In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar
substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale.

But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale--
squid or cuttle-fish--lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large
creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found
at its surface.

If, then, you properly put these statements together, and reason upon
them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all human
reasoning, Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the
ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm
whale.

CHAPTER 46 Surmises Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose,
Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate
capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal
interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he
was by nature and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery
whaleman's ways, altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of
the voyage.

It would be refining too much, perhaps, even considering his
monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the White Whale
might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all sperm
whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he
multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would
prove to be the hated one he hunted.

It might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale was
seen.

Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my
savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain
generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it
they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more
common, daily appetites.

To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all
over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs perched as high
in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry
have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian's.

The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and
reliable uniformity.

And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his
genus.

was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.

Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward,
we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our
bows.

For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when,
sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
concealed beneath the surface, mills around, and swiftly swims off in
the opposite quarter--this deceitfulness of his could not now be in
action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by
Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our
vicinity.

But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took
every eye from the whale.

The White Whale's at the bottom of it.

It ain't the White Whale to-day!

Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone;
like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of
strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a
horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer.

As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had
thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the
whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against the
alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at the other end
of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer's, thrown half backward
into the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; Ahab was
seen steadily managing his steering oar as in a thousand boat
lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him.

The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the blue, thus
giving no distantly discernible token of the movement, though from his
closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.

It is used for catching turns with the whale line.

At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what
wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an
erect posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most
riotously perverse and cross-running seas.

The whales might have made one of their regular soundings, not a
temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case, Stubb, as
his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the
languishing interval with his pipe.

To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and
suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
rolling billows.

Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a
thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming.

The repeated specific allusions of Flask to "that whale," as he called
the fictitious monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing
his boat's bow with its tail--these allusions of his were at times so
vivid and life-like, that they would cause some one or two of his men
to snatch a fearful look over his shoulder.

Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the
fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering
the first unknown phantom in the other world;-- neither of these can
feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the
first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of
the hunted sperm whale.

The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted everywhere to right
and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.

The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three
whales running dead to leeward.

Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale,
merely grazed by the iron, escaped.

There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and
easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded
this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.

Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; "Mr. Stubb, I
think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our
chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent.

I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set
in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?

I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.

I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale face
foremost.

the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!

Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and
consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common occurrence in
this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively critical
instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands
of him who steered the boat-- oftentimes a fellow who at that very
moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft
with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular
disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to
Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall,
and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his
great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this
uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a
devil's chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all
things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a
rough draft of my will.

Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it
is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active
perils of the chase.

Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all
times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is always
under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every individual
moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these circumstances is
it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt?

Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen
it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of port,
all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and
then found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with
his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and
even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the
line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all
this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an
extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it
better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the
anxiety he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy
cleat, as it is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's
bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale;
when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat with his
solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and
with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and straightened
it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest
and curiosity at the time.

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane.

Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange
nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to
man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often
pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea
on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese
junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side
and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would
not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.

And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman
in a hundred would venture a lowering for them.

Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance
with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things
invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore
that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in
however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was
cast by one selfsame whale; and that whale, Moby Dick.

CHAPTER 52 The Albatross South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant
Crozetts, a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed
ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name.

As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I
had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean
fisheries-- a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.

Have ye seen the White Whale?

While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing
their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere mention of
the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it
almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board the
stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade.

CHAPTER 53 The Gam The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board
of the whaler we had spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened
storms.

Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such
meetings do not very often occur, and when they do occur there.

Besides, the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan
superiority over the American whalers; regarding the long, lean
Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-
peasant.

But where this superiority in the English whaleman does really
consist, it would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day,
collectively, kill more whales than all the English, collectively, in
ten years.

But this is a harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters,
which the Nantucketer does not take much to heart; probably, because
he knows that he has a few foibles himself.

So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the
whalers have most reason to be sociable--and they are so.

-- the same way that whalers hail--"How many barrels?

But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
free-and-easy whaler!

What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of
decent weather?

Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and Man-of-
War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling
towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer.

Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a
whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.

NOUN--A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a
cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by
boats' crews, the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of
one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.

All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has
the whale fishery.

But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever,
and no tiller at all.

And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such
effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew must
leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the
number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the
captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all
standing like a pine tree.

It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-
bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered.

To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly
heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed
obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted
visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times
are said to overtake some men.

*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.

Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward
from the eaves of this good Golden Inn.

Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will understand this; and
all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended when
the mate uttered his command.

Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower
jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting
blood like a whale.

We have seen many whaleships in our harbors, but never heard of your
Canallers.

In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is
emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so
many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of
mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling
captains.

Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted
turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain
danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to
manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him along to the
quarter-deck.

But in order to insure the speediest end to the voyage, they all
agreed to another thing--namely, not to sing out for whales, in case
any should be discovered.

For, spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho
still maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing
to lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck
the cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change
his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death
the vital jaw of the whale.

Jesu, what a whale!

Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings?

"No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.--Now, gentlemen, so
suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship--
forgetful of the compact among the crew--in the excitement of the
moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted
his voice for the monster, though for some little time past it had
been plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads."

The White Whale--the White Whale!

And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's topmost
back.

That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat
righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed
over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale.

But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer
between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong
again, and went down.

He cut it; and the whale was free.

All four boats gave chase again; but the whale eluded them, and
finally wholly disappeared.

After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the ship as far
off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon from the
bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning the Islanders not
to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with him, and
setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight before the
wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a
reinforcement to his crew.

Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived,
and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea.

Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to
give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
destroyed him.

CHAPTER 55 Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales I shall ere long paint
to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form
of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in
his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whaleship so
that he can be fairly stepped upon there.

It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such
pictures of the whale all wrong.

For ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the
marble panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on
shields, medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales
of chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St. George's;
ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed,
not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
presentations of him.

Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting
to be the whale's, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of
Elephants, in India.

The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the
wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan,
learnedly known as the Matse Avatar.

But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to
give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all
wrong.

It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad
palms of the true whale's majestic flukes.

It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-
monster or whale.

Then, there are the Prodromus whales of the old Scotch Sibbald, and
Jonah's whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of
old primers.

As for the book-binder's whale winding like a vine-stalk round the
stock of a descending anchor-- as stamped and gilded on the backs and
titlepages of many books both old and new--that is a very picturesque
but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like
figures on antique vases.

Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this
book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended
when the device was first introduced.

In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you
will at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all
manner of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and
Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain.

In the title-page of the original edition of the "Advancement of
Learning" you will find some curious whales.

In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some plates of whales
extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled "A Whaling
Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson
of Friesland, master.

In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are
represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their
living backs.

In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the
whale with perpendicular flukes.

Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain
Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round
Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the
Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.

In this book is an outline purporting to be a "Picture of a Physeter
or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of
Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.

To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which
applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm
whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet
long.

In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged
"whale" and a "narwhale.

I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much
like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is
enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff
could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys.

Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great
naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan.

All these are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or
Greenland whale (that is to say the Right whale), even Scoresby, a
long experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have
its counterpart in nature.

In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives
what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale.

In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a
squash.

As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the
shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them?

whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on three
or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their
deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.

But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
surprising after all.

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.

And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour
between a young suckling whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan;
yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to
a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered,
varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself
could not catch.

But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded
whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form.

In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale
bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the
insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it.

However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us," said humorous
Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said to handle us without
mittens.

So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale
really looks like.

CHAPTER 56 Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales and the True
Pictures of Whaling Scenes In connexion with the monstrous pictures of
whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still more
monstrous stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both
ancient and modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris,
Cuvier, &c. But I pass that matter by.

I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;
Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's.

All Beale's drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle
figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping
his second chapter.

His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt
calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is
admirably correct and life-like in its general effect.

Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct
in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved.

Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but
they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression.

He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad
deficiency, because it is by such pictures only, when at all well
done, that you can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living
whale as seen by his living hunters.

But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details
not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be
anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and
taken from paintings by one Garnery.

Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale.

In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty
of might, just risen beneath the boat from the profundities of the
ocean, and bearing high in the.

The prow of the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just
balancing upon the monster's spine; and standing in that prow, for
that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman,
half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the
act of leaping, as if from a precipice.

The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden poles
of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming
crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions of
affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down
upon the scene.

Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this
whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw
so good a one.

In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside
the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his
black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the
Patagonian cliffs.

Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea
candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his
pestilent back.

Thus, the fore-ground is all raging commotion; but behind, in
admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed,
the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert
mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture
lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.

But my life for it he was either practically conversant with his
subject, or else marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman.

With not one tenth of England's experience in the fishery, and not the
thousandth part of that of the Americans, they have nevertheless
furnished both nations with the only finished sketches at all capable
of conveying the real spirit of the whale hunt.

For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen seem
entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things,
such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as
picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to
sketching the profile of a pyramid.

Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving us a
stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate
miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of
classical engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and
with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the
inspection of a shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified
Arctic snow crystals.

It is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French
whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board;
the loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in
the background, both drooping together in the breezeless air.

The other engraving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon
the open sea, and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a
Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over
to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from
this scene of activity, is about giving chase to whales in the
distance.

From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going
up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black
cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken
the activity of the excited seamen.

CHAPTER 57 Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in
Stone; in Mountains; in Stars On Tower-hill, as you go down to the
London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the
sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the
tragic scene in which he lost his leg.

There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed
to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being
crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale.

His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping,
at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will
find in the western clearings.

But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does
the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully
contemplating his own amputation.

Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and
Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and
whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-
teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other
like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little
ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough
material, in their hours of ocean leisure.

Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois.

Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of
the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the
forecastles of American whalers.

At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung
by the tail for knockers to the road-side door.

When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best.

But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays.

On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron
whales placed there for weathercocks; but they are so elevated, and
besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with "Hands
off!

Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is
continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from
some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the
profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges.

But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only
that, but if you wish to return to such a sight again, you must be
sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your
first stand-point, else so chance-like are such observations of the
hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would require a
laborious re-discovery; like the Solomon islands, which still remain
incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera
chronicled them.

Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out
great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as
when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies
locked in battle among the clouds.

With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons
for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies,
to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents
really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

CHAPTER 58 Brit Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in
with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which
the Right Whale largely feeds.

On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from
the attack of a Sperm-Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws
sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing
fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that
manner separated from the water that escaped at the lips.

* *That part of the sea known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks"
does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of
there being shallows and soundings there, but because of this
remarkable meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit
continually floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is
often chased.

Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own
cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks,
and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships.

It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick?

The White Whale, the White Whale!

Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had
gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the
ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular
whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed
him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly
perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave
orders for lowering.

The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld,
and returned to their ports to tell of it.

Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected
with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it
being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it
with portentousness.

So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to
be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have
any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form;
notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his
only food.

For though other species of whales find their food above water, and
may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains
his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by
inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food
consists.

They fancy that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily
clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale,
unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and
tear it.

CHAPTER 60 The Line With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be
described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar
scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical,
sometimes horrible whale-line.

The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly
vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary
ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable
to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to
the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary
quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to
which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn,
tar in general by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength,
however much it may give it compactness and gloss.

Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost
entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though
not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic;
and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much
more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp.

The whale-line is only two thirds of an inch in thickness.

In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two
hundred fathoms.

There is some advantage in this; because these twin-tubs being so
small they fit more readily into the boat, and do not strain it so
much; whereas, the American tub, nearly three feet in diameter and of
proportionate depth, 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.

When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the american line-tub, the
boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-
cake to present to the whales.

First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional
line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound
so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally
attached to the harpoon.

In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale,
as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat
always hovers at hand to assist its consort.

Second: This arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake;
for were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat,
and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a
single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there,
for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into
the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever
find her again.

Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,
twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction.

what cannot habit accomplish?--Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better
jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany,
than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whaleboat,
when thus hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of
Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into
the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines.

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.

CHAPTER 61 Stubb Kills a Whale If to Starbuck the apparition of the
Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different
object.

When you see him 'quid," said the savage, honing his harpoon in the
bow of his hoisted boat, "then you quick see him 'parm whale.

For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging
is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer
glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious
denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata,
or the in-shore ground off Peru.

close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay
rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad,
glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a
mirror.

But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon
tranquilly spouting his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly
burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon.

But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last.

The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and
ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the
leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few
ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be
alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man
must speak but in whispers.

After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose
again, and being now in advance of the smoker's boat, and much nearer
to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honor of the
capture.

It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of his
pursuers.

* *It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance
the entire interior of the sperm whale's enormous head consists.

Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way,
till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight.

and, facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat
up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on.

Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the
clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word
of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the
whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another fling.

And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot
from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the
mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his
crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it
again and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again
and again sent it into the whale.

he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath.

When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp
lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and
churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that
the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking
ere he could hook it out.

And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into
view!

According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat
pushes off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as
temporary steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the
foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar.

He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his centre half
way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength
may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale.

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 wonder
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; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you
take the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it there
when most wanted!

Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,
that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer
likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of
themselves and every one else.

I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the
chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more than one nation
has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures in the fishery,
it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the
before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.

But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with
the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one
instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the
coming drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold.

But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent,
convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it
becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his
movements, to pitch the second iron into him.

Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown
overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,
skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines,
or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions.

Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is
fairly captured and a corpse.

Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging
one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these
qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of
such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
simultaneously dangling about him.

CHAPTER 64 Stubb's Supper Stubb's whale had been killed some distance
from the ship.

Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual
orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to
a seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again
until morning.

Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet 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; and though a thousand
other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot
advance his grand, monomaniac object.

Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale
now lies with its black hull close to the vessel's, and seen through
the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft,
the two--ship and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks,
whereof one reclines while the other remains standing.

The strongest and most reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale
when moored alongside, is by the flukes or tail; and as from its
greater density that part is relatively heavier than any other
(excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, causes it to
sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at
it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it.

By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other
side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is
readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at
last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of
junction with its broad flukes or lobes.

Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the
whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.

Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a
general thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the
enemy defray the current expenses of the war (at least before
realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then you find some
of these Nantucketers who have a genuine relish for that particular
part of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering
extremity of the body.

Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night.

Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you heard
them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their
backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the
bigness of a human head.

The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the
hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight,
sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like
hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to
bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while
the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving
each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled,
the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely
carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to
turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the
same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for
all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of
all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting
alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or
a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like
instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and
occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most
hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when
you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more
jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a
whaleship at sea.

Don't I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough?

Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping
yourselbs from dat whale.

Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale?

And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong
to some one else.

And have you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years,
cook, and don't know yet how to cook a whale-steak?

You must go home and be born over again; you don't know how to cook a
whale-steak yet.

Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad,
that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that,
don't you?

Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private
table here, the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to spoil
it by overdoing.

Whale-balls for breakfast--don't forget.

whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale.

CHAPTER 65 The Whale as a Dish 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; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must
needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.

It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right
Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large
prices there.

Also, that in Henry VIIIth's time, a certain cook of the court
obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be
eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of
whale.

The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all
hands be considered a noble dish, 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.

Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of
cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious.

We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of
prime old train oil.

And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who long ago were
accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel-- that these men
actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of whales which
had been left ashore after trying out the blubber.

Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called "fritters"; which,
indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling
something like old Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when
fresh.

But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his
exceeding richness.

Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some
other substance, and then partaking of it.

In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine
dish.

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively
unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with
abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the
consideration before mentioned: i.e.

But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he?

CHAPTER 66 The Shark Massacre When in the Southern Fishery a captured
Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at
night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at
once to the business of cutting him in.

Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen.

The end of the hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies, was
then conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the
tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the great blubber
hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached.

More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave
of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till
at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship
rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle
rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of
the first strip of blubber.

Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an
orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is
sometimes stripped by spiralizing it.

For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps
the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in
one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the "scarf,"
simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and
just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act
itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till
its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease
heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass
sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present
must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his
ears and pitch him headlong overboard.

The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is
peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is
slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main
hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-
room.

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.

CHAPTER 68 The Blanket I have given no small attention to that not
unvexed subject, the skin of the whale.

I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat,
and learned naturalists ashore.

The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale.

Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any
creature's skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness,
yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a
presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer
from the whale's body but that same blubber; and the outermost
enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be
but the skin?

True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off
with your hand 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.

I have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-
books.

At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own
spectacles, as you may say.

That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit,
invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as
the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it
were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous
whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child.

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this
skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk
of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in
quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only
three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may
hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of
whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that.

Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight
of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale's skin.

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among
the many marvels he presents.

By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in
particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian
characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks
of the Upper Mississippi.

Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains
undecipherable.

Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale
presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his
flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by
reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random
aspect.

I should say that those New England rocks on the seacoast, which
Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact with
vast floating icebergs--I should say, that those rocks must not a
little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular.

It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made
by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in
the large, full-grown bulls of the species.

A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of
the whale.

For the whale is indeed 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.

It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is
enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas,
times, and tides.

What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy
seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout?

True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean
waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless
fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm
themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would
bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and
warm blood.

But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment,
that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro
in summer.

admire and model thyself after the whale!

Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain,
O man!

of creatures, how few vast as the whale!

The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble
sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything
in bulk.

Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with
rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many
insulting poniards in the whale.The vast white headless phantom floats
further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats,
what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the
murderous din.

In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if
peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral
they most piously do pounce.

from which not the mightiest whale is free.

Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from
afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless
still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray
heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse,
with trembling fingers is set down in the log--shoals, rocks, and
breakers hereabouts: beware!

Thus, while in the 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 a world.

Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat,
upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and
not without reason.

Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a
neck; on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in
that very place, is the thickest part of him.

Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he demanded but ten
minutes to behead a sperm whale?

That done, if it belong to a small whale it is hoisted on deck to be
deliberately disposed of.

But, with a full grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm
whale's head embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk, and
completely to suspend such a burden as that, even by the immense
tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing
a Dutch barn in jewellers' scales.

The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head
was hoisted against the ship's side--about half way out of the sea, so
that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element.

Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the
side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took Stubb's long
spade still remaining there after the whale's decapitation and
striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its
other end crutchwise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with
eyes attentively fixed on this head.

By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned mast-
heads proved her a whale-ship.

Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships
of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which
signals being collected in a book with the names of the respective
vessels attached, every captain is provided with it.

Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon
the ocean, even at considerable distance, and with no small facility.

Hast thou seen the White Whale?

Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk!

Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale's head jogged about very violently,
and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than
his archangel nature seemed to warrant.

It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking
a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of
Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made.

Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the
captain against attacking the White Whale, in case the monster should
be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be
no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving
the Bible.

Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat's bow, and
with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild
exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his
poised lance, lo!

It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the
Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any.

Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting
of the whale.

Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him,
that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he
intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer.

Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for 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.

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.

CHAPTER 72 The Monkey-Rope In the tumultuous business of cutting-in
and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards
among the crew.

It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale's back,
the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the
spades of the mates.

But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer
shall remain on the whale till the whole tensing or stripping
operation is concluded.

The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting
the immediate parts operated upon.

So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor
harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water,
as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him.

Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar
in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to
attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead
whale's back.

And yet still further pondering--while I jerked him now and then from
between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him--still
further pondering, I say, 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 connexion with a plurality of
other mortals.

* *The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the
Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together.

I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the
whale and the ship--where he would occasionally fall, from the
incessant rolling and swaying of both.

A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey
as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will
seldom touch a man.

Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo
continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-spades,
wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach.

Then watching the mate's countenance, he added, "The steward, Mr.
Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg,
there, this instant off the whale.

It is the captain's orders-- grog for the harpooneer on a whale.

"Enough," replied Starbuck, "only don't hit him again, but-" "Oh, I
never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that
sort; and this fellow's a weazel."

CHAPTER 73 Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk
Over Him It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm
Whale's prodigious head hanging to the Pequod's side.

Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually
drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit,
gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the
Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
anywhere near.

And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those inferior
creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for
them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the
Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been
brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the
announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day,
if opportunity offered.

An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of
being dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale.

But having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding
very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time
pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of the ship.

And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when instantly, 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; and so flinging off its drippings, that the
drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale
beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free to fly.

But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his
course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after
him, so that they performed a complete circuit.

Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close
flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance;
and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the
multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale's
body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking
at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting
fountains that poured from the smitten rock.

said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat's bow, "did you never
hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale's head hoisted on
her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale's on the
larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never
afterwards capsize?

"Why, do ye see, 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."

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.

Well, then, pull ahead, and let's get the whale alongside.

"Am I the same man that helped kill this whale?"

The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side,
where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for
securing him.

said Flask; "yes, you'll soon see this right whale's head hoisted up
opposite that parmacety's.

As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale's
head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even
keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe.

In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the
ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the
case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut
off whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately
removed and hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone
attached to what is called the crown-piece.

The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden
ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening
panniers.

Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever
and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own
hand.

CHAPTER 74 The Sperm Whale's Head - Contrasted View Here, now, are two
great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay
together our own.

Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right
Whale are by far the most noteworthy.

They are the only whales regularly hunted by man.

To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known
varieties of the whale.

Both are massive enough in all conscience; but, there is a certain
mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's
sadly lacks.

There is more character in the Sperm Whale's head.

In short, he is what the fishermen technically call a "grey-headed
whale.

Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of
either whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a
lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out
of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.

Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is
plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more
than he can one exactly astern.

In a word, the position of the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a
man's ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with
you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears.

Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the
eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so
as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar
position of the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many
cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great
mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly
separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts.

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.

But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making
two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view.

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.

How is it, then, with the whale?

It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when
beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer
frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly
proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their
divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.

But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye.

With respect to their ears, this important difference is to be
observed between the sperm whale and the right.

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the
world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear
which is smaller than a hare's?

Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand,
cant over the sperm whale's head, so, that it may lie bottom up; then,
ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and
were it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with a
lantern we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his
stomach.

But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea,
you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with his
prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at
right-angles with his body; for all the world like a ship's jibboom.

This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps;
hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed,
leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all
his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him.

In most cases this lower jaw--being easily unhinged by a practised
artist-- is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of
extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white
whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious
articles including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-
whips.

There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn
down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion.

CHAPTER 75 The Right Whale's Head - Contrasted View Crossing the deck,
let us now have a good long look at the the Right Whale's head.

As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a
Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly
rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather
inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe.

Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange, crested, comblike
incrustation on the top of the mass--this green, barnacled thing,
which the Greenlanders call the "crown," and the Southern fishers the
"bonnet" of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this, you
would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird's nest
in its crotch.

But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to
grace a diadem.

A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.

The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle,
as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed,
arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical,
scimitar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which
depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those
Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned.

The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which
the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains
the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in
feeding time.

In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order,
there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby
some whalemen calculate the creature's age, as the age of an oak by
its circular rings.

At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the
Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.

One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous "whiskers" inside of
the whale's mouth;* another, "hogs' bristles"; a third old gentleman
in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language: "There are about two
hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop, which
arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.

*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or
rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the
upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw.

And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of
the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like
thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for
protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone.

But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and,
standing in the Right Whale's mouth, look around you afresh.

Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started
with-- that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
different heads.

To sum up, then: in the Right Whale's there is no great well of sperm;
no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like
the Sperm Whale's.

Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of bone; no huge
lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue.

Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale
only one.

Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there?

This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a
Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.

CHAPTER 76 The Battering-Ram Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm
Whale's head, I would have you, as a sensible physiologist, simply--
particularly remark its front aspect, in all its compacted
collectedness.

You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale,
the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the
water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes
considerably backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the
long socket which receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that
the mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as
though your own mouth were entirely under your chin.

Moreover you observe that the whale has no external nose; and that
what nose he has--his spout hole-- is on the top of his head; you
observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head; nearly
one third of his entire length from the front.

Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm
Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender
prominence of any sort whatsoever.

In some previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps
the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange.

It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with
horses' hoofs.

But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that
as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them,
capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm
Whale, as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering,
too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his
head altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high
elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of
its envelope; considering the unique interior of his head; it has
hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled
honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and
unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to
atmospheric distension and contraction.

So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and
concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive
monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable
braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant
incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm
Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the
Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-
brow.

For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and
sentimentalist in Truth.

Regarding the Sperm Whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an
inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower
is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an
unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming
the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale.

The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great
Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale.

And as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the
whale's vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for
the emblematical adornment of his wondrous tun.

Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the most
excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale
contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely,
the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and
odoriferous state.

A large whale's case generally yields about five hundred gallons of
sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is
spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in
the ticklish business of securing what you can.

I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was
coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not
possibly have compared with the silken pearl-colored membrane, like
the lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm
Whale's case.

It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale
embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since--
as has been elsewhere set forth--the head embraces one third of the
whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty
feet for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for
the depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down
against a ship's side.

As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought
close to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the
spermaceti magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest
a careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly
let out its invaluable contents.

Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and--
in this particular instance--almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm
Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.

I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure to
seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have
either seen or heard of some one's falling into a cistern ashore; an
accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than
the Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of
the Sperm Whale's well.

We thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the
lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in
an element of a far greater specific gravity than itself.

Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber
and sanctum sanctorum of the whale.

Therefore, though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the
application of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my
endeavor.

Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature.

And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the
features; and since it perhaps most modifies and finally controls
their combined expression; hence it would seem that its entire
absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect the
countenance of the whale.

A nose to the whale would have been impertinent.

In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to
be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head.

But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity
inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in
that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more
forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.

Genius in the Sperm Whale?

Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech?

And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the
young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian
thoughts.

They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is
tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so
exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion.

If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to
their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly
enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted
hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high seat, the great Sperm Whale
shall lord it.

If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not
read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle
meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of
the Sperm Whale's brow?

CHAPTER 80 The Nut If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to
the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is
impossible to square.

So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have known some
whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any other
brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the cubic-yards of
his sperm magazine.

The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the
common world.

But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale's proper brain,
you deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another
idea for you.

Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale.

Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and
map out the whale's spine phrenologically?

But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I
would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to
the Sperm Whale's hump.

From its relative situation then, I should call this high hump the
organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale.

However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the
whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old
proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing
really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did
indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.

As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all
heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German
soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately
turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some
remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in
profound darkness--his last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a
single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding
by hinting that 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.

His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his
ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the
mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick,
that without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he
slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.

There were eight whales, an average pod.

Whether this whale belonged to the pod in advance, seemed
questionable; for it is not customary for such venerable leviathans to
be at all social.

It's the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look,
did ever whale yaw so before?

As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck
load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her
way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then
partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his
devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin.

Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that wounded
arm," cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.

With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one
fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were
going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit
for the time.

An instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's
immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the
foaming swell that he made.

The whale was now going head out, and sending his spout before him in
a continual tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an
agony of fright.

But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all
three tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang to
their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed
their barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their
three Nantucket irons entered the whale.

The three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush,
bumped the German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his
baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three
flying keels.

this whale carries the everlasting mail!

And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in
that attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the position was
a little ticklish.

Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted
whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable to
presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the
more he is exhausted.

Because, owing to the enormous surface of him-- in a full grown sperm
whale something less than 2000 square feet-- the pressure of the water
is immense.

We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand
up under; even here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the
burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms
of ocean!

One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle
ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.

Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such
huge phantoms flitting over his head!

Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
oarsman felt them in his seat.

The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth
could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all
dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two
ship's length of the hunters.

Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is, to have an
entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that when
pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at
once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened
by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the
surface, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams.

Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew
over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they
were followed by steady jets from the new made wound, which kept
continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only
at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the
air.

As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest
oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had
once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.

At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound,
and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now
spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft,
bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of
gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows.

As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some
mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-
column lowers and lowers to the ground-- so the last long dying spout
of the whale.

Immediately, by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at
different points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken
whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords.

By very heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was
transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there by the
stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially
upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom.

But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies
of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and
no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must
needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to
account for the ulceration alluded to.

In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable
fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low had
the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all
approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added
to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.

Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm
Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
accounted for it.

Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side
or belly considerably elevated above the surface.

If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted
creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and
rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is
caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking,
consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him.

For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with noble
aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life,
with all their panting lard about them!

Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
accident than any other species.

Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do.

This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in no small
degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his
Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this
incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free.

But there are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or
several days, the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than in life.

In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand,
when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him,
with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know
where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.

It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard
from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again
lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-
Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its
incredible power of swimming.

Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's,
that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it.

The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to
the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale
attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent.

Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the
lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the
sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off,
Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the
monster, and delivered and married the maid.

And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now
Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood
for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city's legends
and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the
monster that Perseus slew.

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some
supposed to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St.
George and the Dragon; 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.

Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea," said
Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of
the Bible use that word itself.

Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin,
have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the
creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted
on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great
ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown
to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's
whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and
considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only
a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not
appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the
ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no
other than the great Leviathan himself.

Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the
tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of
Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George.

And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of
whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their
great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since
even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better
entitled to St. George's decoration than they.

Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that
antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doer of rejoicing good
deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether
that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted.

Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any
rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale.

But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of
Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more
ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly
they are very similar.

That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster,
which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the
godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our
Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has
for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.

When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to
recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave
birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical
books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo
before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained
something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these
Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became
incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost
depths, rescued the sacred volumes.

Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then?

What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?

CHAPTER 83 Jonah Historically Regarded Reference was made to the
historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter.

Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah
and the whale.

But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing
out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story
of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their
doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the
less facts, for all that.

One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
story was this:--He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which
represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head--a peculiarity
only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale,
and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have
this saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very
small.

It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as
tombed in the whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of
his mouth.

For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of
whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players.

Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth;
but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.

Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his
want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely
in reference to his incarcerated body and the whale's gastric juices.

But this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German
exegetist supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating
body of a dead whale-- even as the French soldiers in the Russian
campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them.

Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that
when Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway
effected his escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a
whale for a figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called "The
Whale," as some craft are nowadays christened the "Shark," the "Gull,"
the "Eagle.

Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that
the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver
--an inflated bag of wind--which the endangered prophet swam to, and
so was saved from a watery doom.

It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in
the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days' he was vomited up
somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris,
very much more than three days' journey across from the nearest point
of the Mediterranean coast.

But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within
that short distance of Nineveh?

But not to speak of the passage through the whole length of the
Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea,
such a supposition would involve the complete circumnavigation of all
Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site
of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to swim in.

CHAPTER 84 Pitchpoling To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles
of carriages are anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers
perform an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the
bottom.

Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down
to them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered
flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.

By great exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron;
but the stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his
horizontal flight, with added fleetness.

It became imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose
him.

Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and
countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often
forced, none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance called
pitchpoling.

It is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand
fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is
accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under
extreme headway.

As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale,
before any pitchpoling comes into play.

Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the flying boat;
wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.

Then holding the lance full before his waistband's middle, he levels
it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he steadily depresses the
butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the point till the weapon
stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in the air.

Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the
bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot
of the whale.

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.

CHAPTER 85 The Fountain That for six thousand years--and no one knows
how many millions of ages before--the great whales should have been
spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens
of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that
for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close
by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and
spoutings-- that all this should be, and yet, that 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), it should still remain a
problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or
nothing but vapor--this is surely a noteworthy thing.

But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular
lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the
disengaged air in the open atmosphere.

But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for, in his
ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale's mouth is buried at least eight
feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no
connexion with his mouth.

Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the case with the whale,
who systematically lives, by intervals, his full hour and more (when
at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or so much as in any
way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has no gills.

If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the Sperm Whale will
continue there for a period of time exactly uniform with all his other
unmolested risings.

Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his spoutings out,
unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere descending for
good?

How obvious it is it, too, that this necessity for the whale's rising
exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase.

But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his
time.

It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole;
if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water,
then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of
smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at
all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so
clogged with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power
of smelling.

Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper
olfactories.

Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his
spouting canal, and as that long canal--like the grand Erie Canal-- is
furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward
retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale
has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so
strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose.

But then again, what has the whale to say?

Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is
for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along,
horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little
to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down
in a city on one side of a street.

But the question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe;
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 at the mouth, and discharged through the spiracle.

But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath the surface, and there he
cannot spout even if he would.

And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be
undecided as to what it is precisely.

The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist
enveloping it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls
from it, when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a
close view of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water
cascading all around him.

And if at such times you should think that you really perceived drops
of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are not merely
condensed from its vapor; or how do you know that they are not those
identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which
is countersunk into the summit of the whale's head?

For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm,
with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the desert; even
then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as
under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled
up with rain.

Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching
the precise nature of the whale spout.

Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to
evade it.

And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by
considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of
the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as
it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near
shores; all other whales sometimes are.

Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point
of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises
upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet.

At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will
considerably exceed twenty feet across.

But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough,
the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of
muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins
and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and
largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent
measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.

To the whale his tail is the sole means of propulsion.

Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only
fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his
conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail.

Your only salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways
through the opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of
the whale-boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or
a dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the
most serious result.

Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, 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.

This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of sweeping, when in
maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft slowness moves his
immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the sea; and if
he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and all.

On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not
possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet
another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his
trunk and extracted the dart.

Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of
the middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast
corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as
if it were a hearth.

Excepting the sublime breach-- somewhere else to be described--this
peaking of the whale's flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen
in all animated nature.

Standing at the mast-head 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 Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then
testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings.

The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the
elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk
of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two
opposite organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they
respectively belong.

The most direful blow from the elephant's trunk were as the playful
tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash of the
sperm whale's ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have one
after the other hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews into
the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.

* *Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale
and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the
elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does
to the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of
curious similitude; among these is the spout.

In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic
gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to
Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods
intelligently conversed with the world.

Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general body,
full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced
assailant.

But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his
head?

This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for the convenience of
ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of Sunda and
Malacca.

With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these
straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Java sea, and
thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here
and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands,
and gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season
there.

By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the
known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to
descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere
else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby
Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when
he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.

Mark this, too, in the whaler.

While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred
to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo
but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants.

Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from 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.

Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of
Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of
the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as
an excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more
and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and
admonished to keep wide awake.

But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with
which of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm
Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached
companies, as in former times, are now 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.

To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may
be imputed the circumstance that even in the best cruising grounds,
you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months together, without
being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what
sometimes seems thousands on thousands.

Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and
forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a
continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
noon-day air.

Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which,
dividing at top, falls over in two branches, like the cleft drooping
boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the Sperm
Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually rising
and falling away to leeward.

As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,
accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage
in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the
plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward
through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their
semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic
centre.

It seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising and falling
something like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so
completely come and go; for they constantly hovered, without finally
disappearing.

But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and
when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the
Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra
side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the
harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been
gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so
victoriously gained upon the Malays.

But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at length they seemed
abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them; and the wind now
dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats.

But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of the
Sperm Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after
them,-- though as yet a mile in their rear,--than they rallied again,
and forming in close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all
looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with
redoubled velocity.

Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and
after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to renounce the
chase, when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave
animating tokens that they were now at last under the influence of
that strange perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the
fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he is gallied*.

Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied
whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth
which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

When the polite landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he
is apt to set it down as one of the whaleman's self-derived
savageries.

Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,
yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
retreated, but collectively remained in one place.

As is customary in those cases, the boats at once separated, each
making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal.

Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under such
circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost
always more or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the more
perilous vicissitudes of the fishery.

As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of
speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we
thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was
like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer
through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what
moment it may be locked in and crushed.

But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off
from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging
away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while
all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking
out of our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for
there was no time to make long ones.

All whale-boats carry certain curious contrivances, originally
invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs.

It is chiefly among gallied whales that this drugg is used.

For then, more whales are close round you than you can possibly chase
at one time.

But sperm whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then,
you must kill all you can.

The first and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales
staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance
of the towing drugg.

It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it
not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's way greatly
diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from
the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning.

So that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing
whale sideways vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting
momentum, we 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.

Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales,
were heard but not felt.

In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like
surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by
the whale in his more quiet moods.

And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the
outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or
ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of
horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic
circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so
have gone round on their backs.

Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately
surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape
was at present afforded us.

I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had
been purposely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide
extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the
precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young,
unsophisticated, and every way innocent and inexperienced; however it
may have been, these smaller whales-- now and then visiting our
becalmed boat from the margin of the lake-- evinced a wondrous
fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it
was impossible not to marvel at.

For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the
nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth
seemed shortly to become mothers.

The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly
transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and
fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives
at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still
spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--even so did
the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us,
as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.

He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet
recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the
maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final
spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow.

Who struck?--Two whale; one big, one little!

As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds
of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and
shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling
towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord
of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to
its dam.

* *The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but
unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a
gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but
one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an
Esau and Jacob:--a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats,
curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts
themselves extend upwards from that.

When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the
hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and blood rivallingly
discolor the sea for rods.

When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum.

Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic
spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats,
still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or
possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance
of room and some convenient retreats were afforded them.

But the sight of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly
darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met
our eyes.

It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly
powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering
or maiming his gigantic tail-tendon.

A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not
effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying
along with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary
agony of the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles
like the lone mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga,
carrying dismay wherever he went.

But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling
spectacle enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he
seemed to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at
first the intervening distance obscured from us.

But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable accidents
of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line
that he towed; 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 itself had worked loose from his flesh.

First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a
little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent
billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and
swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more
and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles
began to swim in thickening clusters.

A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous
masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring,
the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if
to pile themselves up in one common mountain.

Shove him off, you Queequeg--the whale there!--prick him!--hit him!

After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided
into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by
random whales, all violently making for one centre.

This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's
hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had
his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden
tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.

Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still lingered in their
wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped astern, and
likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waited.

The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by
every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted
upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place
on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should the boats of
any other ship draw near.

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.

CHAPTER 88 Schools and Schoolmasters The previous chapter gave account
of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there was also then
given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations.

When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange
suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his
interesting family.

As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their
rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly
battle, and all for love.

Granting other whales to be in sight, the fisherman will seldom give
chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too
lavish of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small.

For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named,
my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the
bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies
all over the world; every baby an exotic.

Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is
the lord and master of that school technically known as the
schoolmaster.

His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the
name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that 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.

The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale
betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm
Whales.

Almost universally, a lone whale-- as a solitary Leviathan is called--
proves an ancient one.

For while those female whales are characteristically timid, the young
males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most
pugnacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to
encounter; excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales,
sometimes met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated
by a penal gout.

CHAPTER 89 Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish The allusion to the waifs and
waif-poles in the last chapter but one, necessitates some account of
the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may
be deemed the grand symbol and badge.

It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company,
a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally
killed and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly
comprised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand
feature.

For example,--after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale,
the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and
drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a
calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line.

These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the
whalemen themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder
knocks-- the Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist.

True, among the more upright and honorable whalemen allowances are
always made for peculiar cases, where it would be an outrageous moral
injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale previously
chased or killed by another party.

Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover
litigated in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a
hard chase of a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the
plaintiffs) had succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last,
through peril of their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines,
but their boat itself.

Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up with the
whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the
very eyes of the plaintiffs.

And when those defendants were remonstrated with, their captain
snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs' teeth, and assured them that by
way of doxology to the deed he had done, he would now retain their
line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to the whale at
the time of the seizure.

Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of
their whale, line, harpoons, and boat.

Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the
whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.

These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very
learned Judge in set terms decided, to wit,-- That as for the boat, he
awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to
save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale,
harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale,
because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the
harpoons and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the
fish) acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who
afterwards took the fish had a right to them.

Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with
the context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the
coast of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have
the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail.

A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there
is no intermediate remainder.

It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one
of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and
beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from
the shore.

Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their
fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good 150 pounds from the
precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their
wives, and good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their
respective shares; up steps a very learned and most Christian and
charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and
laying it upon the whale's head, he says--"Hands off!

Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation--so
truly English-- knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching
their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to
the stranger.

"I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of
this whale."

In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
Wellington received the money.

It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the
Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign.

Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and Queen,
"because of its superior excellence.

In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pin-money, an old King's
Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye tail is ye
Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.

Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the
Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices.

There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers-- the
whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations,
and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown's ordinary
revenue.

I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by
inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same
way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head
peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be
humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality.

I will bet something now," said Stubb, "that somewhere hereabouts are
some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day.

Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must
be alongside.

As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak;
and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and
hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside
must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that
has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated
corpse.

Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the
Frenchman had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed
even more of a nosegay than the first.

In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that
seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or
indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of
anything like oil.

Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing
fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however
much he may shun blasted whales in general.

The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he
recognized his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were
knotted round the tail of one of these whales.

I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in
the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking
them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their
port with their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of
snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they will get won't be enough to
dip the Captain's wick into; aye, we all know these things; but look
ye, here's a Crappo that is content with our leavings, the drugged
whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with scraping the dry
bones of that other precious fish he has there.

For what oil he'll get from that drugged whale there, wouldn't be fit
to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell.

And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get more oil by
chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he'll get
from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may
contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris.

Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he
had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close
to the blasted whale; and so talk over it.

Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?

"What whale?"

"The White Whale--a Sperm Whale--Moby Dick, have ye seen him?"

Never heard of such a whale.

White Whale--no.

why don't you pack those whales in ice while you're working at 'em?

But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it's all
nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales?

The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the heavy
tackles in readiness for the whales.

"He says, Monsieur," said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his
captain, "that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain
and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from
a blasted whale they had brought alongside."

Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no more fit to command a whale-
ship than a St. Jago monkey.

"He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one,
is far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he
conjures us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish."

Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his
crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast
loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.

"He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his drinking;
but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur
had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these
whales, for it's so calm they won't drift."

By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat,
hailed the Guernsey-man to this effect,--that having a long tow-line
in his boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out
the lighter whale of the two from the ship's side.

While the Frenchman's boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship one
way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the other way,
ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.

Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the
whale; hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance,
while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's whale.

Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should
regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a
sick whale!

By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the
effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale.

I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but
cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against
whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds,
might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said
of the Frenchman's two whales.

They hint that all whales always smell bad.

Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil
at sea as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the
fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large
casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season
in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are
exposed, forbidding any other course.

The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading
one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is given
forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old city
graveyard, for the foundations of a Lying-in Hospital.

I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be
likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former
times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which
latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his
great work on Smells, a text-book on that subject.

As its name imports (smeer, fat; berg, to put up), this village was
founded in order to afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale
fleet to be tried out, without being taken home to Holland for that
purpose.

But all this is quite different from a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which
in a voyage of four years perhaps, after completely filling her hold
with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of
boiling out; and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly
scentless.

The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as
a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be
recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew
in the company, by the nose.

Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as
a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of
exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open
air.

I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water dispenses
a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm
parlor.

What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering
his magnitude?

Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats.

Some few hands are reserved called shipkeepers, whose province it is
to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale.

The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;
but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb
observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his
courageousness to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.

Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as
the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which
happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat.

The involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle
in hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack
whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with
him, so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the
water.

That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line
swiftly straightened; and presto!

roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved.

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.

It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but
this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale
started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried
traveller's trunk.

Stubb's inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged.

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly
spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and
Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent
upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him
miserably.

CHAPTER 94 A Squeeze of the Hand That whale of Stubb's, so dearly
purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all those
cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly
gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.

Now, while discoursing of sperm it behooves to speak of other things
akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-
works.

After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into
portable oblongs ere going to the mincer.

Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of
the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber,
and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness.

It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen,
and even so is the nature of the substance.

Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen.

It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the
back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers the
decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.

Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary.

But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so.

A whaleman's nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from
the tapering part of Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in
thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a
hoe.

This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the
blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale.

CHAPTER 95 The Cassock Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a
certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you
strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would
have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical
object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the
lee scuppers.

Not the wondrous cistern in the whale's huge head; not the prodigy of
his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none
of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that
unaccountable cone,--longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in
diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of
Queequeg.

CHAPTER 96 The Try-Works Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler
is outwardly distinguished by her try-works.

Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once
ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.

Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers,
always the whale-ship's stokers.

But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light.

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps--
often but old bottles and vials, though--to the copper cooler at the
tryworks, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat.

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 lie 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.

Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent
lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of
the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates
it.

But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent
on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again
soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot
somewhere.

and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole
weary thing again.

For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and
however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered
it as the white whale's talisman.

"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever
raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him."

"If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when
the sun stands in some one of these signs."

the White Whale; he'll nail ye!

Hast seen the White Whale?

Hast seen the White Whale!

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.

Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody-- except those who are
almost hourly used to it, like whalemen-- to clamber up a ship's side
from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat
high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half
way down to the kelson.

As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or
two previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive
curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end.

Where did'st thou see the White Whale?--how long ago?

"The White Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards
the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a
telescope; There I saw him, on the Line, last season.

I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.

Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat
fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went
milling and milling round so that my boat's crew could only trim dish,
by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale.

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.

instead of the other whale's; that went off to windward, all fluking.

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.

And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth it was
tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat's crew for a pull
on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my first
mate's boat--Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way, Captain--Mounttop;
Mounttop--the captain);-- as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's
boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and
snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it.

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.

It was a shocking bad wound," began the whale-surgeon; "and, taking my
advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy-" "Samuel Enderby is
the name of my ship," interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing
Ahab; "go on, boy.

"What became of the White Whale?"

Well; after he sounded, we didn't see him again for some time; in
fact, as I before hinted, I didn't then know what whale it was that
had served me such a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming
back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick--as some call him--and then
I knew it was he.

Do you know, gentlemen"--very gravely and mathematically bowing to
each Captain in succession--"Do you know, gentlemen, that the
digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine
Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest
even a man's arm?

So that what you take for the White Whale's malice is only his
awkwardness.

Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind
to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial
to the other, why, in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale
have another chance at you shortly, that's all.

No more White Whales for me; I've lowered for him once, and that has
satisfied me.

CHAPTER 101 The Decanter Ere the English ship fades from sight be it
set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after the
late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous
whaling house of enderby and 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.

How long, prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this great whaling house
was in existence, my numerous fish-documents do not make plain; but in
that year (1775) it fitted out the first English ships that ever
regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years
previous (ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket
and the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued the Leviathan, but only
in the North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere.

Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were the first
among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm Whale;
and that for half a century they were the only people of the whole
globe who so harpooned him.

In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape
Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any
sort in the great South Sea.

The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her berth
with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was
soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast
Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open.

In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their
own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan.

But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
English whalers I know of--not all though--were such famous,
hospitable ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the
can, and the joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking,
and laughing?

The abounding good cheer of these English whalers is matter for
historical research.

Nor have I been at all sparing of historical whale research, when it
has seemed needed.

The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant
in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching
plenty to eat and drink.

For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew;
but not so the English whaler.

During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew
must be about whalers.

The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I concluded that this must be
the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as
every whale ship must carry its cooper.

In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of the
commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very
interesting account of its whale fishery.

And in this chapter it was, headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a
long detailed list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180
sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by Dr.
Snodhead, I transcribe the following: 0084400,000 lbs.

At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all
this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, &c., consumed by
every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen
whale fishery.

Now, as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short
summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch
whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea,
did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of
their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all;
therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a
twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550
ankers of gin.

Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might
fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a
boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem
somewhat improbable.

But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers
of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English
whalers have not neglected so excellent an example.

CHAPTER 102 A Bower in the Arsacides Hitherto, in descriptively
treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of
his outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior
structural features.

How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know
aught about the subterranean parts of the whale?

Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a
cook dishes a roast-pig?

I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed
with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature.

In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily
hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs
of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances.

Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings
seemed his verdant jet.

Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw
the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the
real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel
as an object of vertu.

There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of
the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens
of fin-backs and other whales.

Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New
Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call "the only perfect
specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in the United States.

Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name,
a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of
a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown
magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.

In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons
belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar
grounds.

Sir Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a
great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony
cavities--spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan-- and swing all day
upon his lower jaw.

But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body
to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing-- at least,
what untattooed parts might remain--I did not trouble myself with the
odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial
admeasurement of the whale.

CHAPTER 103 Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton In the first place, I
wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the
living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to
exhibit.

According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly
base upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest
sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
calculation, I say, 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.

In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
feet: so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have
been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one
fifth in length compared with the living body.

In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of
the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form.

Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular whale
must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib
measured but little more than eight feet.

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to
try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over
his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.

Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of
his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully
invested whale be truly and livingly found out.

CHAPTER 104 The Fossil Whale From his mighty bulk the whale affords a
most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally
expatiate.

And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult
one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a
huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose;
because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted
him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.

For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they
weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness
of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all
the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and
to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and
throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my
credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I
have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals
and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.

Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that
while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of
monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics
discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the
connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between the
antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to
have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong
to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the superficial
formations.

Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their
bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various
intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France,
in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi,
and Alabama.

But some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the
English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a
whale, though of a departed species.

A significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in
this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to
the shape of his fully invested body.

Then the whole world was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left
his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs.

I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the
unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time,
must needs exist after all humane ages are over.

Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity
of the whale, in his own osseous postdiluvian reality, as set down by
the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.

Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams
of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore.

The Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon
the Temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death.

But the truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the Temple,
there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea, and wound the
Whales when they light upon 'em.

They keep a Whale's Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which
lying upon the Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch,
the Head of which cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back.

Their Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet,
came from this Temple, and some do not stand to assert, that the
Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple.

In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.

CHAPTER 105 Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?

But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are
found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period
prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those
belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier
ones.

Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than
seventy feet in length in the skeleton.

Whereas, we have already seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two
feet for the skeleton of a large sized modern whale.

And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that Sperm Whales have been
captured near a hundred feet long at the time of capture.

But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods;
may it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?

For Pliny tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and
Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length--
Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!

And even in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists, we
find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain
Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and
twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet.

And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of
whales, in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the
Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight
feet.

But will any whaleman believe these stories?

The whale of to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time.

And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was),
will make bold to tell him so.

Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies
that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not
measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks;
and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest
Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which
they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed,
prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in
magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh's fat kine; in the face of all this,
I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should have
degenerated.

Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of
the whaleships, now penetrating even through Behring's straits, and
into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the
thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the
moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and
so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated
from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last
pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the
prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and
scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous
river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar
an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem
furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy
extinction.

Though so short a period ago--not a good lifetime--the census of the
buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and
though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all
that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was
the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt
peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan.

Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months
think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they
carry home the oil of forty fish.

Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favor of the
gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former
years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in
small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in
consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much
more remunerative.

Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by
some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that
to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and
schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely
separated, unfrequent armies.

And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called
whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years
abounding with them, hence that species also is declining.

And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss have
retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and glades
of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their
Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and
walls there, come up among icy fields and floes!

But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.

But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than
13,000, have been annually slain on the nor'west coast by the
Americans alone; yet there are considerations which render even this
circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in this
matter.

And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have
now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by
Hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East-- if they
still survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale
outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is
precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and
Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea combined.

Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity
of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more,
therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult
generations must be contemporary.

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
species, however perishable in his individuality.

In Noah's flood he despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be
again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the
eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest
of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.

And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without
delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him
supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale)
which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a
careful selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be
secured.

At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was
securely lashed athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.

A lost landbird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a
captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams
of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for
it.

has a stick of whale's jaw-bone for a wife!

* *In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board,
it is a regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and
drench the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying
intervals, is removed by the ship's pumps.

So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, must not only face all the
rage of the living whale, but--as we have elsewhere seen--mount his
dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the
hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement,
resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see to their stowage.

To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the holders, so
called.

He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was just
breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had
chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-
wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all
whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes,
and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was
not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead
warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated
away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that
the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their
own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so
form the white breakers of the milky way.

No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial
to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes
were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and
much lee-way adown the dim ages.

Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat!

Let'em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat.

In a word, it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind
to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a
gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that
sort.

But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain, as standing, like an
iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one
nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles
(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other
consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in
which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming.

the White Whale spouts thick blood!

I, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand yoke of fiends could
not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale like his own
fin-bone.

Is not this harpoon for the White Whale?

Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale's
barbs were then tempered.

Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and
twenty hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily
pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude
of sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though
with but small success for their pains.

These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he
regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing
only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high
rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as
when the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while
their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.

The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red
bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended,
bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long
lower jaw of the last whale they had slain.

On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were dancing with the
olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles;
while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured aloft between
the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering
fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig.

Hast seen the White Whale?

CHAPTER 116 The Dying Whale Not seldom in this life, when, on the
right side, fortune's favorites sail close by us, we, though all
adroop before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel
our bagging sails fill out.

For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and
four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.

It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the
crimson fight were done; and floating in the lovely sunset sea and
sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness
and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that
rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green
convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze,
wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper
hymns.

Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned
off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the
now tranquil boat.

For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying--the
turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring-- that strange
spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a
wondrousness unknown before.

Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone
round again, without a lesson to me.

In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening
sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again.

CHAPTER 117 The Whale Watch The four whales slain that evening had
died wide apart; one, far to windward; one less distant, to leeward;
one ahead; one astern.

The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spout-hole; and
the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare
upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves,
which gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf upon a
beach.

Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who
crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played
round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails.

The grey dawn came on, and the slumbering crew arose from the boat's
bottom, and ere noon the dead whale was brought to the ship.

jolly is the gale, And a joker is the whale, A' flourishin' his
tail,-- Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the
Ocean, oh!

Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the
White Whale!

Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed
in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-
boat's bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose
leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now
came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire.

Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart
that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:--
"All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and
heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound.

Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the
vessel's place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when
cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time,
and frequently more for form's sake than anything else, regularly
putting down upon the customary slate the course steered by the ship,
as well as the presumed average rate of progression every hour.

Pip jumped from the whaleboat.

And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out
for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own peculiar ground; that
man was swallowed up in the deep.

Hast seen the White Whale?

Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?

It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous,
while three of the stranger's boats were engaged with a shoal of
whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and
while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and
head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the blue water, not
very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat-- a reserved
one--had been instantly lowered in chase.

In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift
gleam of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it
was concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away
with his pursuers, as often happens.

Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing
whale-boat in the height of the whaling season?

Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's
the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of
the Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew; but
among the number of the other boats' crews, at the same time, but on
the other hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes
of the chase, there had been still another son; as that for a time,
the wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest
perplexity; which was only solved for him by his chief mate's
instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whaleship in such
emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided
boats, always to pick up the majority first.

Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a
son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four
years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first
knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance
display of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue
apprehensiveness and concern.

Jumped from a whale-boat once;--seen him?

CHAPTER 130 The Hat And now that at the proper time and place, after
so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab,--all other whaling waters
swept-- seemed to have chased his foe into an oceanfold, to slay him
the more securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the very
latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted;
now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had
actually encountered Moby Dick;-- and now that all his successive
meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the
demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters,
whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a
something in the old man's eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for
feeble souls to see.

I will have the first sight of the whale myself,"-- he said.

Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his
head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings.

Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and
some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but
you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the
peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.

Hast seen the White Whale?

Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I
swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where
the White Whale most feels his accursed life!

On such a day--very much such a sweetness as this--I struck my first
whale--a boy-harpooneer of eighteen!

He declared that a whale must be near.

Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by
the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any
mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the
dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as
nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be
slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.

Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
whale they had so long been pursuing.

From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at
every roll of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly
jetting his silent spout into the air.

I only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first.

he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the
gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets.

But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowls
softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and
like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the
tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white
whale's back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls
hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish,
silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers
streaming like pennons.

A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness,
invested the gliding whale.

did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.

On each soft side--coincident with the parted swell, that but once
leaving him then flowed so wide away--on each bright side, the whale
shed off enticings.

Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale!

An hour," said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern; and he gazed
beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing
vacancies to leeward.

Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis,
its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale's head while yet
under water.

Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for
an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a
biting shark slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his
mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up
into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock.

In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as a
mildly cruel cat her mouse.

And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his
body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from
the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and
while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis
impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious
with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive
and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he
seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench
it from its gripe.

At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the
first to perceive the whale's intent, by the crafty upraising of his
head, a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his
hand had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite.

But only slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over
sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw;
spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-
faced upon the sea.

*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale.

It receives its designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to
that preliminary up-and-down poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise
called pitchpoling, previously described.

By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view
whatever objects may be encircling him.

Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent
tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,--though he could still keep
afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's
head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might
burst.

For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect, and so
planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed
horizontally swooping upon them.

But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering
crest, he shouted,--"Sail on the whale!--Drive him off!

The Pequod's prows were pointed-, and breaking up the charmed circle,
she effectually parted the white whale from his victim.

But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the
whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming
with a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these
circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely
prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so
long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a
thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude.

At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout
was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would
be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then
pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of
the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.--"Whose is the
doubloon now?

--Then advancing towards the doubloon in the main-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!

Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular
whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day,
is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery.

For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and
invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among
the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale
when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances,
pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will
continue to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his
probable rate of progression during that period.

And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a
coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires
shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this
pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape
at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the
remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the
fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and
diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night
obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness is
almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the
pilot's coast is to him.

And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so
familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands,
men time his rate as doctors that of a baby's pulse; and lightly say
of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot,
at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when
these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to
the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours
hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about
reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude.

But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind
and the sea must be the whaleman's allies; for of what present avail
to the becalmed or wind-bound mariner is the skill that assures him he
is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port?

Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters
touching the chase of whales.

cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't escape--blow on and split your
spout, O whale!

It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some
other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for
hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its
pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made
the air vibrate as with the combined discharge of rifles.

For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush
of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal
his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of 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 and more.

was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed
himself salmon-like to Heaven.

Ahab's boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them he would
take the whale head-and-head,-- that is, pull straight up to his
forehead,--a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such
a course excludes the coming onset from the whale's sidelong vision.

But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three boats
were plain as the ship's three masts to his eye; the White Whale
churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were,
rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered
appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at
him from every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate
plank of which those boats were made.

But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed
and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three
lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves,
warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now
for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more
tremendous charge.

That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining
tangles of the other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more
involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them
together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then,
diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in
which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round
and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.

While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out
after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture,
while aslope little 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 some one to ladle him up; and while
the old man's line--now parting--admitted of his pulling into the
creamy pool to rescue whom he could;-- in that wild simultaneousness
of a thousand concreted perils,-- Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed
drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting
perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad
forehead against its bottom, and sent it turning over and over, into
the air; till it fell again-- gunwale downwards--and Ahab and his men
struggled out from under it, like seals from a sea-side cave.

The first uprising momentum of the whale--modifying its direction as
he struck the surface--involuntarily launched him along it, to a
little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and
with his back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his
flukes from side to side; and 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.

Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in
his own proper and inaccessible being.

The harpoon, too!--toss over the litter there,-- d'ye see it?--the
forged iron, men, the white whale's--no, no, no,-- blistered fool;
this hand did dart it!--'tis in the fish!--Aloft there!

But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the
palm of this hand--a lipless, unfeatured blank.

When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.

cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.

the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then; the better if
the bitterer quarter.

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.

It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those
swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the
same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching
regiments in the east.

But these were the first sharks that had been observed by the Pequod
since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it was that
Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their
flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks-- a matter sometimes well
known to affect them,--however it was, they seemed to follow that one
boat without molesting the others.

See ye my boy's hand on the hill?--Crazed; aloft there!-- keep thy
keenest eye upon the boats:--mark well the whale!-- Ho!

The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-
heads-- a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded;
but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a
little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the
profoundest silence, as the head-bent waves hammered and hammered
against the opposing bow.

Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like
heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving
the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of
the whale.

While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as
the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank
as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up.

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 old Ahab.

Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--
Where's the whale?

Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the resistance to
his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some
latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White
Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly
nearing him once more; though indeed the whale's last start had not
been so long a one as before.

pull on!--But who can tell"-- he muttered--"whether these sharks swim
to feast on the whale or on Ahab?--But pull on!

At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along
with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its
advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab was fairly within the
smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled
round his great Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when,
with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the
poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the
hated whale.

Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering
sea.

Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale
wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that
evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship;
seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking
it--it may be--a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon
its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.

"The whale!"

But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge-
hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst
through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay
nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying
hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.

The whale, the whale!

I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!

I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!

thou grinning whale, but there'll be plenty of gulping soon!

From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive;
hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in
their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments;
all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to
side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of
overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed.

Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its
keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far
off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a
time, he lay quiescent.

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.

and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale!

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul.

While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what
name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through
ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification
of the word, you deliver that which is not true.

--HACKLUYT "WHALE.

--WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY "WHALE.

WHALE, Icelandic.

WHALE, English.

EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian) It will be seen that this
mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub
appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of
the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could
anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.

therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-
piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for
veritable gospel cetology.

And God created great whales.

The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are:
among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much
in length as four acres or arpens of land.

Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared.

"He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,
which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he
brought some to the king."

The best whales were catched in his own country, of which some were
forty-eight, some fifty yards long.

And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter
into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are
immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in
great security, and there sleeps.

This whale's liver was two cartloads.

Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
nothing certain.

They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible quantity of oil
will be extracted out of one whale.

Very like a whale.

Which to secure, no skill of leach's art Mote him availle, but to
returne againe To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart, Dinting
his breast, had bred his restless paine, Like as the wounded whale to
shore flies thro' the maine.

Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful
calm trouble the ocean til it boil.

OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI WHALE.

Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat
in the mouth of a whale.

The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil
swimming in them.

While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his
head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it
will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water.

In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which
nature has placed on their shoulders.

Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to
proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their
ship upon them.

We set sail from the Elbe, wind N. E. in the ship called The Jonas-in-
the-Whale.

Some say the whale can't open his mouth, but that is a fable.

They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a
whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains.

I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of
herrings in his belly.

... One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in
Spitzbergen that was white all over.

Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was
informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of
baleen.

Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this Sperma-
ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was killed
by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness.

Whales in the sea God's voice obey.

We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the
northward of us.

... and the breath of the whale is frequendy attended with such an
insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.

Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail, Tho' stuffed with
hoops and armed with ribs of whale.

The whale is doubtless the largest animal in creation.

In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was
found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were
then towing ashore.

They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the whale, in
order to avoid being seen by us.

The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack.

The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.

--THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778.

--EDMUND BURKE'S REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET WHALE-
FISHERY.

Spain--a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.

"A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on
the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates
and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and
sturgeon."

So fire with water to compare, The ocean serves on high, Up-spouted by
a whale in air, To express unwieldy joy.

--JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE DISSECTION OF A WHALE.

"The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
gushing from the whale's heart."

The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.

In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any
till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them.

--COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMACETI WHALE
FISHERY.

In the free element beneath me swam, Floundered and dived, in play, in
chace, in battle, Fishes of every color, form, and kind; Which
language cannot paint, and mariner Had never seen; from dread
Leviathan To insect millions peopling every wave: Gather'd in shoals
immense, like floating islands, Led by mysterious instincts through
that waste And trackless region, though on every side Assaulted by
voracious enemies, Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or
jaw, With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs.

Not a mightier whale than this In the vast Atlantic is; Not a fatter
fish than he, Flounders round the Polar Sea.

--CHARLES LAMB'S TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE.

In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales
spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed: there--
pointing to the sea--is a green pasture where our children's grand-
children will go for bread.

I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form
of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones.

She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed
by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago.

No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he
threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to
look at.

The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
whales had been introduced on the stage there.

I answered, "we have been stove by a whale.

--"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF NANTUCKET,
WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE
PACIFIC OCEAN.

A mariner sat in the shrouds one night, The wind was piping free; Now
bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale, And the phospher gleamed
in the wake of the whale, As it floundered in the sea.

The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture
of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six
English miles.

... "Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.

Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous
head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he
rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with
vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.

It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the
habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so
important an animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely
neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity among the
numerous, and many of them competent observers, that of late years,
must have possessed the most abundant and the most convenient
opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.

--THOMAS BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839.

The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the True
Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable weapon
at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a
disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once
so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as
the most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale
tribe.

Do you see that whale now?

A shoal of Sperm Whales!

The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid
transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of
Nantucket.

Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length
rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by
leaping into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable.

The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment.

--"THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN'S ADVENTURES AND THE
WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE COMMODORE
PREBLE.

ANOTHER VERSION OF THE WHALE-SHIP GLOBE NARRATIVE.

The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order,
if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they
failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale.

These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward
again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen
seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-
West Passage.

It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being
struck by her near appearance.

Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to
form arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may
perhaps have been told that these were the ribs of whales.

--TALES OF A WHALE VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.

It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,
that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages
enrolled among the crew.

--NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND RETAKING OF THE WHALE-SHIP
HOBOMACK.

--CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.

--MIRIAM COFFIN OR THE WHALE FISHERMAN.

The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope
tied to the root of his tail.

On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and
female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a
stone's throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which the beech
tree extended its branches.

exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the distended
jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat, threatening
it with instant destruction;--'Stern all, for your lives!

--WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.

So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold
harpooneer is striking the whale!

Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale In his ocean home will be A
giant in might, where might is right, And King of the boundless sea.

--WHALE SONG.