Moby Dick

In spite of his passion, Ahab understands that he must still operate the Pequod as an ordinary whaleship, if for no other reason than to keep his crew pacified and focused. In this regard, the pragmatic Starbuck is of the first concern. It is also necessary to pay the men, and to do that, he must collect more whales than just the one. Finally, a charge of usurpation of the ship’s mission could lead to mutiny, which would not serve Ahab’s purpose at all. Ishmael surmises that, though solely focused on the pursuit of the white whale, Ahab understands his limits.

Queequeg and Ishmael weave mats to use as additional lashing for the boats. The two work in perfect harmony and become dreamy. The boat is calm, and Ishmael’s mind wanders, meditatively comparing the warp and woof of a mat’s fibers to the intertwining of fate and free will.

Suddenly, Tashtego sees a school of whales, and the ship springs into action. The three mates and their harpooners prepare their individual boats. Just as they are ready to lower, Ahab appears, to everyone’s amazement, with five as-yet-before unseen crewmates.

The “Phantoms,” as Ishmael calls them, prepare the spare boats. They seem to possess unusual skill and quickness. By their complexion and clothing, Ishmael thinks they come from the Philippines, though the most noticeable member of the new crew, a man whom Ahab calls Fedallah, has clothing indicative of South Asian origin. Ishmael’s first impression of them is that they are satanic; “a race [...] supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil” (236). The four boats lower.

Each mate has a different style of leadership. Stubb bellows to the men to row and stay focused, imploring them not to fall asleep, his tone a mixture of “fun and fury”(238). By contrast, Starbuck calmly coaxes his men, while Flask rants and raves. As they row their crafts side by side, Stubb and Starbuck conclude that there is nothing to do about having been blindsided by the stowaway crew; they need to stay focused. Among the crew, shock quickly leads to acceptance of the stowaways, especially as hints and rumors had already laid the groundwork for their appearance.

The whales descend and the boats keep watch. Impatiently, small Flask stands on the tall Dagoo’s shoulders with the unconscious dexterity Ishmael claims that all good whalemen possess. Stubb, ever patient, lights a pipe in waiting.

Tashtego sees the whales when they surface and the boats rejoin the pursuit. Ahab’s leadership style, Ishmael says, is unprintable. The whales appear as dark shapes beneath the impressive rolling ocean. Queequeg tries for the nearest whale, but with a violent break the whale gets free and the boat is swamped and stranded. Starbuck lights a lantern, and for many hours the men await interception by the Pequod.

The first lowering has been a failure.

After Ishmael is pulled up to the deck, he asks Queequeg if this sort of thing happens often, and the harpooneer indicates that it does. Stubb and Flask confirm that whaling is both extremely dangerous and often futile. Even careful Starbuck thinks nothing of going “plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall” (248).

Ishmael then carefully chooses Queequeg as the executor of his will, which he writes up immediately. This calms him.

It is not common that the captain of a whaleboat would lower in a boat for a whale, risking his executive powers for a chance at adventure. With Ahab, it’s especially unusual, as he has a peg-leg, and has snuck aboard five extra crew for himself. His boat has been especially rigged with a special peg-hold and thigh board for him to stand upright. As for the phantom crew, Ishmael says, the crew of a whaleship is accustomed to wonders, and tends not to dwell upon them.

Nevertheless, Fedallah remains a frightening mystery. His demeanor is primordial, unsettling, and devilish.

One midnight soon after the failed lowering, as the moon’s hypnotizing light plays against the calm ocean, Fedallah witnesses a silvery spout and calls the crew to action with an impressive call. Though it’s unusual to lower for whales at night, the Pequod does so but then loses sight of them. A few days later, the spout appears at the same hour and again disappears. This makes the sailors superstitious.

Around the Cape of Good Hope, the weather becomes treacherous. Checking his equipment during a storm, Starbuck marvels to catch a sight of Ahab asleep upright in a bolted chair surrounded by his charts.

To the southeast of the Cape, the Pequod passes a whaler named The Goney (another word for albatross). The ship has been at sea a long time. It is bleached white from weather, and its crew is wild-looking and bearded.

Ahab calls to the ship, wanting a sign of Moby Dick, yet as the Goney’s captain gestures to return the hail, his speaking trumpet falls from his hand and drops into the waters below. Quickly, Ahab, sensing that the Goney was on route back to Nantucket, calls for all the Pequod’s mail to the Pacific ocean. The wind interrupts the message, and then Ahab looks to see small fish swimming away from his hull. The sight makes him depressed. The weather is too inclement for the ships to risk a docking, and so they miss one another.

Ishmael surmises that, though all humankind dreams of seeing great and meaningful wonders, it often finds itself wandering through bleak and confusing landscapes to get there. Many never reach their goal.

In ordinary circumstances, ships passing one another in the wide expanse of ocean greet one another. This is especially true of whaling ships, which go on multi-year voyages and depend upon each other for letters home, for news of whale sightings, and for the friendship born of a common cause. This practice is distinguished from the that of merchant ships, who often greet one another coolly, and from warships, which practice highly diplomatic military greetings.

Whalers share a distinct jargon. To this point, the word “gam” is known only to whalers. It means the standard practice by which whaleships exchange crew upon meeting, with the two captains meeting on one ship, and the two first mates on the other. Peculiar to the gam is the lack of diplomatic nicety, and the necessity for each captain to stand in their intermediate boat as the exchange is made. It is a point of honor for the captain not to lose footing during the short travel.

The Cape of Good Hope is a well-travelled waterway, so soon the Pequod meets the Town-Ho, another homeward-bound whaling vessel. What is communicated from the Town-Ho is told to Tashtego in secrecy, and then to the crew, without ever reaching the ears of Ahab or his mates.

When retelling the tale, Ishmael recreates his own retelling of the Town-Ho’s story in Lima years later, at a place called the Golden Inn; this tale is often interrupted by the queries of his drinking companions.

Two years ago, a leak plagued the Town-Ho, one for which the source could not be discovered. The captain kept the ship sailing through the lucrative waters, and so the pumps had to be manned continuously to keep the ship afloat. The ship’s mate and part-owner was a Nantucketer named Radney; he demanded that the crew keep pumping the pumps in ankle-deep water rather than lose profit by docking and repairing the ship. A man named Steelkilt from the Great Lakes region of Buffalo led the crewman’s revolt against this mistreatment, his anger riled after being asked to shovel pig excrement on top of the rest of his duties. He bashes Radney’s face, and mutiny ensues, with Steelkilt and a small crew of mutineers versus the Captain, Radney, and those loyal to him. Eventually, an uneasy peace prevails, but Steelkilt still seeks revenge. On a night watch, he plots to bash in Radney’s head, but then Moby Dick is sighted. Radney and Steelkilt set out on the same boat.

In the pursuit, Moby Dick devours Radney whole, and Steelkilt cuts the line leading from the boat to the whale. Later, Steelkilt and his men abandon the Town-Ho, and the captain then replaces them with Pacific Islanders. Ishmael mysteriously hints that he has since spoken personally to Steelkilt, but of what he doesn’t say.

Ishmael, in his bid to educate his reader, intends to describe as well as he can the physical appearance of the whale. To do so, he must first run through some well-known but inaccurate pictorial examples. The oldest-known picture of a whale can be found on a cave in India. It is half-man and half-whale, and features a tail like an anaconda’s. As inaccurate as this depiction is, it is of a piece with as many “Christian” depictions such as in Hogarth’s “Perseus Descending” and many depictions of Jonah’s whale. These are mostly fanciful, appearing more like dragons and other mythical creatures than the real thing.

Pre-modern scientific studies are only a little better. Many get the position of the flukes wrong, or they exaggerate or underrepresent the size of the whale. Common modern representations of the whale, painted for commercial reasons above the doors of inns and bakeries, are equally inaccurate.

Ishmael adds that such illustrators have had only stranded and dead examples of whales to use as their subject, and so were deeply hindered in their efforts. Of particular note is the fact that a whale’s skeleton gives no impression at all of its sheer bulk. In conclusion, Ishmael says that the whale is among the most difficult animals on earth to paint.

Ishmael passes by poor prose depictions of whales to discuss better visual illustrations of the animal. Of these, he says, an illustrator and whaleman named Scoresby has made the best depiction of right whales. The best whaling pictures overall, however, are a pair of engravings of whaling scenes by a French illustrator named Garnery. These dynamically depict the desperate fight between man and whale. In general, Ishmael says, the French have a knack for depicting mechanical aspects, movement, and composition. An illustrator named H. Durand receives special mention for accurately depicting a whaleship in repose.

In London, a one-legged beggar regularly holds a sign depicting the whaling battle in which he lost his leg, and Ishmael says that this is among the most accurate depictions of a whale ever rendered. There are many other common merchants and craftsmen in places where whaling is common who do good work carving whales and whaling scenes out of whale’s teeth and other bits of flotsam.

Many whalemen, owing to their long voyages away from Christendom, become “savages,” and Ishmael counts himself among these. Due to the “wonderful patience of industry” of the average savage, says Ishmael, non-Christians are often the best illustrators of whales, especially in sculpture within a variety of media (295). By contrast, the whales depicted as ornaments on the homes of the rich are far less faithful to reality.

To conclude, Ishmael points out the vague shapes of whales that can be discerned in mountainous regions, as well as the constellation Cetus.

Further to the north-east, the Pequod comes across the feeding grounds of right whales, denoted by the yellowish, floating material known as “brit,” a krill-like substance. Being of little value to the Pequod, the whales feed in peace next to the sperm whaler. Ishmael compares them to mowers of wheat on a vast field. These appear at times so still that they barely seem animate.

The sea is an alien place, Ishmael says, full of unknown wonders, yet it encompasses two thirds of the known world. This is analogous to the plain physical appearance of humankind, which disguises the vastness of the human soul and its many unexamined subtleties.

Heading through the vast “meadow of brit” toward Java, Dagoo spots a great white mass protruding from the ocean’s surface (300). Ahab orders an immediate lowering of boats. As the excited men close in, Starbuck recognizes the creature for what it is; a giant squid.

It is a wondrously strange creature and a rare sight even for experienced whalemen that generates portents among the superstitious whalers. What is known of the giant squid is merely hypothesis. However, it is widely believed to be a staple food source for the sperm whale.

The squid disappears without incident.

In the interest of furthering the reader’s education, Ishmael explains the whale-line as “magical, sometimes horrible” (303). Once, durable, tar-seasoned hempen rope was used for whale-line. More recently, Manilla rope is used, due to its strength, elasticity, and softness. Despite its relative thinness, whale-line has extraordinary strength.

Four-hundred yards of whale-line are coiled into a tremendous tub in the front of each boat, and it is an important preoccupation of the harpooner to ensure that the line runs smoothly, free of snags. Both ends of the line end in a loop so that they can be attached to a second boat’s line; the line is never secured to the boat, as a rapidly sounding whale would drag the entire boat down. Before the boat is lowered, the line’s weight is distributed among the several oars of the rowers.

Whaling is a dangerous business and mirth is an important element of any boat’s crew to maintain high spirits. It is also common that a crewmate will get caught in a straining line, pulled out to sea, and never seen again. Ishmael reminds his readers that we are all attached to our own invisible whale-lines.

Though the more superstitious men see the appearance of the squid as a bad omen, Queequeg is more practical, assuming that a sperm whale cannot be far behind his food source. After a drowsy shift at the fore-masthead, Ishmael soon spies their target.

The boats lower, joined by Ahab and his mysterious crew. The whale surfaces nearest to Stubb’s boat, becomes aware of the pursuit, and begins the chase. Stubb smokes his pipe, urging his men forward. Tashtego strikes with his harpoon. Stubb loses the padding with which he holds the line, and demands the line be wetted for handling. As his boat is hauled closer to the whale, Stubb secures himself in a wooden brace known as a crotch. He stabs the whale several times with a lance until the struggling whale becomes still. Many gallons of blood spill into the ocean.

As a point of clarification, Ishmael outlines the duties of some of the members of the boat, particularly in regards to the final killing of its target. It is the headsman’s, or mate’s, first duty to steer the ship. It is the harpooneer’s first duty to strike the whale with hurtling strength, and his second duty to pull the foremost oar, all the while setting an example to the other oarsmen with loud provocations. When it comes time to kill the whale, however, it becomes the headsman’s duty to make the final blow, while the harpooneer steers, necessitating a difficult changing of seats. Ishmael finds this changing of duties unnecessary and exhausting for the harpooneer.

In further clarification, Ishmael explains the purpose of the crotch which Stubb leaned against to kill the whale. There are two on a boat, the purpose of each of which is to hold a harpoon, known as the first and second irons. Both of the whale-lines are connected to each harpoon.

While the purpose of the second harpoon is to be driven into the whale, thus doubling the chances of its capture, more often than not, the second harpoon is never thrown. In this case, it becomes a deadly liability and must be thrown overboard before the line whips around to its last end. In this way, with four boats surrounding a stuck whale, there may come to be several loose harpoons dangling from the enormous body. This is a fact, Ishmael says, which will become important in later chapters.

It takes effort to get the whale back to the Pequod, and it is dark when ship and boat crews finally meet. The crew secures the whale to the side of the ship until morning. Ahab appears depressed, with the thrill of the hunt dissipated and the true object of his hunt still ahead of him. By contrast, Stubb is swelled with pride and good cheer. He demands to eat a whale steak.

A cook named Fleece is woken at midnight. He sears the whale steak and serves Stubb at the massive capstan at midnight. Meanwhile, sharks feast on the dead whale lashed to the side of the ship. Stubb complains to the chef that his steak is overdone. He declares that, in order to be good, a whale-steak must be tough and rare. He points to the sharks as an example, and then commands the chef to tell the sharks to mind their manners, and to “help themselves civilly, and in moderation” (320). Under Stubb’s direction, Fleece then delivers a “sermon” to the sharks, imploring them to be good Christians. Both men find the sermon to be of no use, and so Stubb then instructs the elderly Fleece at length as to the proper cooking of a whale steak; “hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it” (324).

Whale-eating seems out of the ordinary, but it does have a history, says Ishmael. The tongue of the right whale was considered a delicacy in 16th Century France, and porpoises are still commonly eaten.

Among modern hunters, it is unusual to eat whale meat, except among strange people like Stubb and among the Inuit people. Dutch whalemen make delicious deep-fried fritters out of strips of whale fat.

The meat is incredibly fatty and is sometimes used as a medium for frying biscuits. Whale brains resemble calf’s brains as a delicacy if the whale is small enough.

The eating of any meat is rather barbaric, says Ishmael, and so no landsman should look down their nose at the eating of whale.

It is common to lash a captured whale to the side of a ship and then wait until morning to render it. Inevitably, there is some loss to shark feeding, and in some climates where sharks are heavy, custom must be ignored in order not to take too great a loss.

After Stubb’s capture, Queequeg and another seaman suspend three lanterns above the whale. Taking long whaling-staves, they then begin weeding back the sharks by puncturing their brains from over the side of the ship. It is a horrible scene, with live sharks feeding on sharks within a roiling sea of gore.

It is well-known that a shark will continue to bite long after it’s been killed. Queequeg once nearly lost a leg to a dead shark, which has given him a special respect for the animal.

The next morning is the sabbath, and instead of church, every sailor becomes a whale-butcher, using enormous cutting-tackles. The mates begin cutting into the whale to produce a massive block of flesh. Heaving from the sturdiest point of the ship, the lower mast-head, the blubber is brought aboard with a great rocking of the whole ship. The blubber is separated from the outer skin and is rendered below decks. The whale is rolled and stripped in this way like a peeled orange. The work is done in rhythm, with the next strip being pulled before the last is done, and the whole crew singing throughout.

There is a question in Ishmael’s mind as to where the inner skin of the whale ends and its layer of blubber begins. There is a thin outer substance which, when dried, becomes tough and brittle, but otherwise the whole is a consistency much like “firm, close-ground beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact” (332). A large whale will produce 100 barrels of oil from this substance.

The markings of the whale are equally difficult to discern, as they seem to exist just beneath the skin, rather than on top of it. Some of these markings are complex and resemble hieroglyphics.

The blubber of the whale keeps it warm in all climates. Men and whales are both warm-blooded, Ishmael notes, and he implores his readers to be equally ready for anything. “Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole” (334).

After the crew finishes their harvest, they release the remaining carcass. It remains as food for sharks and gulls, still visible after many hours. It is a pathetic sight.

Ishmael believes that such sites remain haunted long after the whale’s body has been devoured and sunk.

Beheading a whale is a difficult task, given that the whale has no neck. It happens before the blubber is harvested; during harvest it floats nearby, attached to a cable. After the carcass is stripped and released, the head is hauled to the side of the ship and fastened there.

During supper, around noon, Ahab finds himself alone with the giant head, which resembles the Sphynx in its lifelessness and stillness. Ahab, in gloomy reverence, imagines all the sights the whale has seen in its long life, “where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot” (339).

Soon, someone calls out. A sail is on the horizon, and Ahab is refreshed by the sight.

It is windy, and the Pequod begins to rock as the Jeroboam approaches. Both signal to one another as Nantucket whalers, and the Jeroboam lowers a boat. However, when Starbuck begins to lower a boat in greeting, he is waved off. There is pestilence aboard the Jeroboam. They speak at a distance, boat to ship. Stubb recognizes one of the men pulling the oar as a wild-eyed crewman from stories he had heard of the Jeroboam.

The story is that the crewman was once a common Shaker, though unstable, who felt driven by God to go to Nantucket as a green-hand to become a whaler. Once underway, he declared himself to be the archangel Gabriel and commanded the captain, Mayhew, to throw himself overboard. This frightened the superstitious crew such that, when the Captain declared his intention to kick Gabriel out at the nearest port, they protested. Now, Gabriel has free reign of the ship, and works when he pleases. His power has only increased since the plague enveloped the ship.

Mayhew, with several interruptions from Gabriel, relates a story about Moby Dick. When the Jeroboam sighted the white whale, Gabriel warned the crew away from him, declaring him to be a Shaker God reincarnated. Nevertheless, the captain and his mate Macey ambitiously lowered for him. Macey is killed in a freak accident in which he is thrown from the boat without any damage done to the boat itself. Again, this incident elevated Gabriel among the superstitious crew.

After a botched exchange of letters, owing to the rocking of the boat and to Gabriel’s continued interference, the crews separate.

As a point of clarification, Ishmael describes how the initial hook that is fastened to a strip of blubber in the stripping process is done so by a human hand; in the Pequod’s case, by Queequeg. As Ishmael is the harpooneer’s oarsman, it is also his duty to hold the so-called monkey-rope connected to Queequeg as he stands on the dead whale’s back and performs this dangerous task. While performing this task, Ishmael considers that his own free will becomes secondary to protecting Queequeg, and how all people are thus locked to one another by mutual survival. Adding to the danger are the ever-feeding sharks beneath Queequeg, which are only slightly held at bay by Dagoo and Tashtego’s whale-staves. When Dough-Boy attempts to give Queequeg ginger water to revive him, Starbuck demands that he bring grog instead and to throw all ginger water over the side of the ship.

Against custom, Ahab demands the capture of an inferior right whale. One is quickly spied among the brit, and Stubb and Flask lower for it. Both boats circle the Pequod while battling the whale, finally killing it. As they return, Stubb wonders what the captain wants with this “lump of foul lard” and Flask informs him of a superstition which states that a ship which has once lashed a sperm whale’s head on its starboard side while lashing a right whale’s head opposite can never sink (354). This rumor comes from Fedallah, and the men express their distaste for the stowaway. Flask goes on to say that he thinks that Fedallah is an immortal devil of legendary stories. The two men boast about what they’d do if they ever caught him doing anything devilish.

True to the rumor, Ahab commands that the right whale’s head is hoisted onto the leeward side of the ship.

The main difference between the sperm and right whales are in the shape of their heads. Ishmael says that the sperm whale’s head has more character and dignity. In both animals, the eye sits far back and to the side. How a whale reconciles the two images on either side of its head is a matter for conjecture, but Ishmael assumes it must be akin to a human being solving two separate intellectual puzzles in his head at once. It is smaller than one would assume.

The ear of each whale is lodged nearly invisibly near the eye. The sperm whale’s ear has a visible opening, whereas the right whale’s ear is covered over by a membrane.

The jaw of the sperm whale is aesthetically pleasing, with a row of impressive, hard teeth. Both jaw and teeth are collected for use later.

The head of the right whale is less pleasing and more confusing; from one angle it looks like a shoe, and from another like a bass violin. His mouth is pouting, with a split lip. Rather than teeth, the animal has “Venetian blinds” with which it strains the sea for brit and small fish (365). While these tooth-bristles were once used for combs and brushes, such demand has declined in recent years. The very delicate tongue will yield six barrels of oil.

In both whales’ heads there is the same placidity in death as there was in life.

As a final note on whale heads, Ishmael considers their effectiveness as weapons. In the sperm whale, the head represents “a dead, blind wall” with nothing vulnerable like a mouth or nose projecting forward (368). Harpoons bounce from it, and the whale can barrel ahead with it at great speed and buoyancy. Its power, says Ishmael, is not to be underestimated.

The unctuous upper part of the sperm whale’s head, called the case, is free of bone and cranium. In it, there is an unusual store of spermaceti in its most “clear, limpid and odoriferous state” (372). On touching the air, this “tun” of material begins to crystallize, while the rest of it spills out in a liquid form. It is held back by a very fine membrane, and removing the valuable substance requires delicacy, so as not to waste the valuable, perfumed material within.

Tashtego nimbly runs out over the main-yard-arm, hovering above the whale’s head case, and lowers himself using a tackle over the mass, with his oarsman at the other end of the rope. Finding the most secure entry point within the membrane, Tashtego lowers a bucket into the spermaceti, which is caught by another crewman on a long pole. This harvest continues for hours until Tashtego slips and falls into the oily, sucking head case of the whale.

Dagoo rushes to the rescue, but as he reaches the bucket into the fragrant spermaceti, the whale’s head unmoors and begins to sink. Queequeg dives in after the head, and, after several tense moments, reemerges with Tashtego. Ishmael compares such work to the delivering of a baby. Imagining Tashtego being pulled to the bottom of the sea, he considers the sweet, decadent nature of such a death.

Ishmael attempts a physiognomical survey of the whale, or a study of the sperm whale’s face. The sperm whale has no nose, which adds to the grace of the whale. It has a “sublime” frontage; its brow is like a prairie. In its placidity and silence, it reminds the narrator of kings and philosophers.

Physiognomy is a poor science, thinks Ishmael, if it cannot see the wisdom in the face of a wise peasant or in the face of a beautiful whale.

The brain of the sperm whale is twenty feet from his forehead. It is extraordinarily small and can be held in the hand. It is so small that some whalemen believe that the spermaceti case is, in fact, the true brain of the animal. However, Ishmael believes that the higher functioning of the whale is distributed throughout the nervous system coursing through the spine. In this same way, “much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone” (382). The sperm whale’s backbone is comparatively prodigious.