Moby-Dick

by Herman Melville

A few years ago, I read Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. And a few months ago, I watched a lecture about it on YouTube. The lecture came from a class called The American Novel Since 1945 (ENGL 291), taught at Yale by Prof. Hungerford. It is currently here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyZ4ia25gg

The lecture mentioned several things that are paralleled in Moby-Dick or reference it in some way. That’s what led me to want to read it. I’ve never thought I wanted to, since it has a reputation for being pretty arduous. I can’t say it didn’t live up to that reputation! I started reading this on January 16 and finally finished on May 25. I’m all set for 19th century whaling facts for quite a while.

But I did enjoy it, particularly the first hundred pages and the last hundred or so. I can’t say anything about this book that hasn’t been said before. I’ll keep a plot synopsis every hundred pages and include some quotes that stuck out to me. Page numbers are from the Penguin Classics paperback.

Chapter 1-19 (first hundred pages)

First impressions: This book is a lot funnier than I expected! And the opening chapters have the feeling of gathering a party for a D&D campaign – the dark Spouter-Inn feels like the Prancing Pony in LOTR.

Here’s my synopsis, with some quotes sprinkled in:

Feeling restless (“grim about the mouth”), Ishmael desires to go out to sea to see more of the world.

I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay the passengers a single penny that I ever heard of... There is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves [Adam and Eve] entailed upon us. But being paid,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! (6-7)

I can’t help but note that there are many times with Melville takes liberties with the Scriptures to make a joke or a point. Adam and Eve’s sin was disobeying a command, not stealing. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And a monied man can enter heaven, since all things are possible with God (as Jesus says in that very passage). But he (Melville or Ishmael) is doing this on purpose to make the passage funny.

Anyway, he makes it to Bedford, Mass., where he stays at the Spouter-Inn.

[At the Spouter-Inn] Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without -- within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. (15)

[When he finally gets in bed at the inn] Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. (22)

They have no room for him, but he can share the bed with a certain harpooner who isn’t there at the moment. This turns out to be the savage Queequeg, and the scene where Q comes in and discovers Ish in the bed is hilarious. They soon become good friends and happily share the bed – “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” (26)

[When he finally gets in bed at the inn] Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. (22)

Q is neither fully savage nor fully civilized. He is kind-hearted but has strange habits, like climbing under the bed to put on his boots. He worships a wooden statue he calls Yojo. He carries his harpoon with him always, using it to shave and to grapple food nearer to himself at breakfast.

Ish goes into town and finds a chapel, where hears a sermon (46-54) on the book of Jonah. The old sea captain turned pastor, Father Mapple, climbed up into the pulpit via a ship’s ladder, and then he pulled the ladder up after him, as if to fortify himself against assault! The sermon was not bad in many of its details, actually; although it did not point the hearer to Christ, it did urge repentence.

[from the sermon:] "Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!

"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! [to tell people 'what their itching ears want to hear'] Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!"

I thought that was a decent message about the pastoral office, at least.

Ish and Q become closer; Ish is concerned about Q’s pagan beliefs but concludes, “I’ll try a pagan friend, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” Q invites Ish to worship Yojo with him, and Ish deliberates:

I was a good Christian, born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in the worshipping of his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth--pagan and all included--can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? [He should take a look at Exodus 34:14 -- "for you shall not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God"] And what is the will of God?--to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me--that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. (58)

I like the phrase “luxurious discomforts of the rich” (59), referring to using a fireplace in a room you’re sleeping in and making it too hot and uncomfortable.

Eventually, they make it to Nantucket, and Q decides that Ish should choose the boat they both join up with. Ish finds the Pequod, owned mainly by captains Bildad and Peleg, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ish signs up.

For his repeated claims to be a Good Christian, Ish sounds more like a Unitarian. For example, from p. 94, “hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling.” (94)

Q comes to the Pequod. At first, they don’t want to take him, since he is obviously a savage, but when they see how Q wields a harpoon, they instantly sign him up. “Pious harpooners never make good voyagers–it takes the shark out of ’em,” concludes Peleg.

After signing up, Q and Ish meet a mysterious “prophet” (p. 100ff) who says some ominous things about Capt. Ahab, but they think he’s a kook.

Chapter 20-41 (pp. 100-200)

We meet some of the sailors: Starbuck, the first mate; Stubb, the second; and Flask, the third.

Starbuck was “happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; … calm and collected.”

“When Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trousers, he put his pipe into his mouth… Against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.” (129)

Flask was “very pugnacious concerning whales… it was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered.”

The crew do not see their captain, or at least Ishmael doesn’t, for several days even after they have left (not until p. 143, when “reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter deck.”) He had a white mark running from his hair down one side of his face and into his clothing.

At one point (138-9), Ahab snaps at Stubb, and Stubb almost feels compelled to fight over being called a dog. But a moment later, he comes close to praying for Ahab, not that he is even a man of prayer.

In ch. 30, Ahab flings his pipe into the water when the “smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone!”

Chapter 32, “Cetology,” is a lengthy discourse on various kinds of whales. This is what people warn you about when you’re talking about reading Moby-Dick. But I still found it helpful and not too fussy. And it includes this gem: “Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty.” How true!

We also learn that whales were not separated from fish until AD 1766 by Linnaeus. Which explains how the “fish” in the book of Jonah could have been whale. Ishmael defines a whale as “a spouting fish with a horizontal tale.”

The chapter ends, “For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone [top stone] to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught–nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

Ch. 36 is a key turning point: Ahab discusses the White Whale with the crew, and some (like Tashtego) have heard of him and declare him named Moby Dick. The men drink together – “so brimming life is gulped and gone (180)” – and declare they will go after Moby Dick. Starbuck is worried but can’t oppose the captain.

Ahab boasts in defiance of God, claiming to be both prophet and fulfiller, so sure is he that he will accomplish what he says. (183) Starbuck foresees doom: “I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it.” (184) He must fulfill his duties, but he hopes for God to intervene: “[Ahab’s] heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside.”

“Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demogorgon.” (184)

Stubb, meanwhile, is always laughing. “A laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what will, one comfort’s always left–that unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestinated.” He takes comfort in something like fatalism.

Ch. 41: Moby Dick is said by some to be “ubiquitous,” being “encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.” His reputation is cunning, feigning to flee, then turning to smash a ship or attack. When Ahab leapt at him and attacked with a six-inch knife, “then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.”

After that, Ahab began to descend into obsession. “His torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.” He suppressed the madness in order to be given command of this ship, but his only purpose was to hunt the white whale. And as for the crew, “by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times [Ahab’s] hate seemed almost theirs.” The crew was made 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. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.” (203)

Some more quotes I liked from this section:

[Writing about Bulkington, a sailor who, having just returned from a four-year voyage, set out again on the Pequod:] The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. (116)

In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. (123) ["Quoggy" appears to be a word Melville invented.]

[Writing about watching for whales from the mast-head:] Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. 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 whale-ships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time."

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phædon instead of Bowditch in his head. 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. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. (171-2)

Chapter 42-58 (pp. 204-300)

Chapter 42’s second paragraph is a single sentence, over a page long, on the subject of “whiteness.” Although the color white as associated with many good things (listed there at length), “yet lurks an illusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes … panic to the soul.”

Page 223: Moby Dick is definitively NOT a fable or an allegory.

Ch. 46: “To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.” (230) Ahab has to control the psychology of his men (especially Starbuck).

Ch. 48: Their first attempt at killing a whale. It turns out that Ahab has a secret crew that’s been hiding in the cargo area of the Pequod. When they lower the boats to attack, Ahab boards a harpoon boat with a crew led by the demoniacal Fedallah. It’s not common for a captain to have his own harpoon boat like that, and the owners of the Pequod would surely disapprove.

Queequeg harpoons the whale (not Moby Dick though), but then the whale knocks their boat over, and they are almost hit by the Pequod as it passes; they are eventually pulled on board.

Ishmael rewrote his will (p. 248). “All the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection,” since he felt that he should have died in that first lowering of the boats.

A spout of water is seen repeatedly late at night, but no whale is spotted. They sale around the Cape of Good Hope (southern tip of Africa).

Ch. 53: A “gam” is when two ships pull up alongside each other, and the captains and mates converse, exchange news and letters, etc.. The Pequod passed a ship called the Albatross, but they did not have a gam (as ships normally would), because Ahab only wants to talk to captains who have news of Moby Dick.

Ch. 54: This chapter tells the story of a ship called the Town-Ho. There was a conflict between the mate, Radney, and a sailor, Steelkilt. Steelkilt punched Radney and led a mutiny, but they mutineers were captured, and Radney flogged Steelkilt. Steelkilt plotted revenge, but before he could get it, the Town-Ho encountered Moby Dick, who ate Radney alive.

Ch. 55 is about how artistic depictions of whales are all wrong. Re: the pictures in a certain book, “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 upan any intelligent public of schoolboys.” (287) Or re: another picture, “before showing that picture to any Nantucketeer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket.” (288)

Ch. 58: They are NE of the Crozetts (an archipelago in the Indian Ocean), and some Right Whales are eating brit (plankton) around them.

The sea rightly inspires fear and awe:

However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it. (298)

And the evil sea and the peaceful land provide an analogy for the soul of man:

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! (299)

A couple more quotes I liked from this section:

For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it. (224)

[Re: Radney and Steelkilt:] When a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness. (269)

Chapter 59-83 (pp. 300-401)

Ch. 59: They see a giant squid, “the Anak” of the tribe of cuttlefish. (Anak is from Numbers 13:33, a progenitor of the Nephilim.) This is a good omen to the men that sperm whales are nearby.

Ch. 60 describes the various ropes and lines which are used to capture and kill a whale. From p. 306,

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

The men chase a sperm whale, and Stubb and Tashtego kill it. Some description of the various implements and processes involved. The harpooner rows very hard, then has to cast the harpoon. The “crotch” is a wooden support for harpoons.

Stubb calls the black cook, Fleece, to prepare a whale steak for him from his kill. He has Fleece command the sharks below to stop eating the whale carcass, so Fleece delivers a sermon to the sharks (in vernacular).

Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. (321)

The sharks, naturally, don’t listen, so Fleece tells them to fill up their bellies and then die. Like Ahab, they are single-minded gluttons.

On p. 324, Eskimo is spelled “Esquimeaux”!

The next chapters describe how they process the whale carcass. Using long, sharp spades, they strip the skin (thick with blubber) off the whale, like pealing an orange. They also behead the whale (ch 70), hanging the head from the side of the ship (causing it to lean a little to that side).

Ch. 71: Another ship, The Jeroboam, sails up. They have a plague onboard and do not board The Pequod. One of their men has convinced his shipmates that he is the archangel Gabriel. He told them that Moby Dick was the incarnation of the Shaker god, and when MD killed their harpooner a while back, they began to believe Gabriel. When Ahab tells the Jeroboam’s captain that he still intends to hunt Moby Dick, Gabriel says, “Think, think of the blasphemer—dead, and down there!—beware of the blasphemer’s end!”

Encountering some Right Whales, they kill one, even though they aren’t hunting Right Whales. There is a superstition that a ship with a Sperm and Right whale head hung on either side cannot be capsized.

Lots more description of whale anatomy. Most notably, the Sperm Whale’s head has a “case” which Ishmael compares to the “Great Heidelburgh Tun,” a giant wine barrel. Tashtego is lowered onto the whale’s head to tap the case, sending up buckets of oil, but he slips and falls into the case, leaving him 20 feet down inside the whale’s head. As they try to get him out, the tackle breaks and the head drops into the ocean. Queequeg jumps in, cuts a whole near the bottom end, and “delivers” Tashtego like a baby through it, saving him.

The meet another ship, the Jungfrau (virgin), asking to borrow some oil. After they provide the oil, whales are spotted, and the ships race toward one. The Pequod arrives first and kills a sperm whale, but its body unexpectedly sinks.

Chapter 84-104 (pp. 402-499)

Ch. 87 was great. Traveling through Indonesia, the Pequod passes through the Straits of Sunda, which guard this area from “the all-grasping western world” (415). They come upon “the grand armada,” a huge school of sperm whales. As they pursue the whales, they are likewise pursued by local pirates: “through that same gate [the straits], he [Ahab] was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end.”

They outrun the pirates. The whales look to be outrunning them, but then they pause – “They were now at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert irresolution” (419). They were “gallied” – ie, frightened. Somehow the Pequod ends up in the middle of the school, in a placid lake with the women and children. Ultimately, they kill only one whale.

Ch. 89 gives the concept of fast fish and loose fish. A fast fish is one that is claimed, and a loose fish is unclaimed and free to be pursued. In general, posession is 9/10 of the law. He applies the concept more generally:

“What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast Fish?” – this took some decoding. “Brother Jonathan” is the precursor to “Uncle Sam,” a personification of America. When MD was published in 1851, Texas had only recently, in 1845, become a state. Thus, a fast fish – claimed for the USA.

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish? What was Poland to the Czar? What was India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? (!!!) All Loose-Fish. (435)

In ch. 91, the Pequod comes across a French ship that is trying to harvest oil from the bloated corpse of a whale which they simply came across. “It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed.” (440) The French ship is humorously named “Bouton de Rose” – The Rose-Bud.

Stubb visits The Rose-Bud and finds a man who speaks English and wants out of this stench. They devise a plan and go to the captain. Stubb says whatever he likes to the man, in English: “tell him he looks sort of babyish to me,” or “tell him he’s no more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he’s a baboon.” But the man “translates” this as if Stubb is warning the captain that his crew came across a boat recently where eight men had died from a strange fever after dealing with a dead whale like this.

The captain calls off work on the whale in a panic, Stubb returns to the Pequod, and the French ship leaves. But now, the Pequod pulls up to the whale and, cutting deep into its decaying body, pulls out handfuls of ambergris, a very valuable substance used by perfumers which forms in the whale’s digestive system.

Ch. 93: The story of Pip, the cabin boy. He went out on the harpoon boat with Stubb but got scared and jumped in the water, forcing them to cut a line to a harpooned whale rather than leave him alone in the ocean. Later, when he does it again, they do leave him for a while, and the experience drives him insane (or possibly grants him prophetic wisdom?).

Ch. 95: The mincer skins the whale’s penis (the “cassock”) and wears it like a protective tunic when chopping up the fat.

Ch. 99: The crew considers the doubloon which Ahab has promised to whoever spots the white whale. Each interprets the symbols on the coin differently.

Stubb’s line from p. 473 (referring to his almanac) would make a good book plate:

Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.

Ch. 100: They meet The Samuel Enderby, the Bizarro Pequod. This jolly and hospitable crew has encountered MD, and their captain lost an arm due to the encounter. They later encountered him again but, having learned their lesson, let him be!

Ch, 104 mentions what sort of dictionary Ishmael uses:

And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one [a dictionary] 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. (496)

Chapter 105-135 (pp. 500-625)

We meet the carpenter (ch. 107), who makes a new leg for Ahab. “He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he ever had one, ust have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.” He’s compared to the 1850s equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife: “So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.” (510)

p. 513, Ahab has phantom limb syndrome. He calls the feeling of his old leg the “Old Adam.”

Starbuck: “Let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man.” (518)

Ch. 110: Queequeg takes ill, and the carpenter builds him a coffin. When Q recovers, he uses the coffin as a chest for his clothes. (524)

Cha. 112: We meet the blacksmith. “This old man’s was a patient hammer wielded by a patient arm.” Ahab comes to him (ch 113) and finds him too calm: “In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad.” He gives the blacksmith a pouch of horse-shoe stubbs, “the best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.” (531) The blacksmith makes for Ahab a harpoon. Ahab has him make the barbs out of Ahab’s razors.

Page 532 is key. When the blacksmith calls for Ahab to bring the water to temper the metal, Ahab instead calls in Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo. “What say ye, pagans? Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?” Thus the harpoon is tempered in their blood!

“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” Ahab cries – “I baptize you, not in the name of the Father, but in the name of the Devil!” According to a letter from Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorn, this Latin phrase is the “secret motto” of the book.

Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. (535)

Ch. 115: The Pequod meets The Bachelor, a full ship heading home to Nantucket. They have the chance to join her on the trip home but of course decline.

Ch. 118: Ahab curses and destroys a tool called the quadrant, which measures the position of the sun:

Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck... (544)

I include this quote (from p. 553, ch 120) because I laughed and read it out loud to Karianne and Kaeta, as an example of how inscrutable the language in this book can be!

Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud.

Ch. 123: Starbuck stops outside Ahab’s door and considers killing him in his sleep. This is the scene paralleled in Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy.

Ch. 124: Due to a storm, the ship’s compasses flip!

Ch. 126: After losing a life buoy trying (and failing) to save a sailor who falls overboard, they seal up Queequeg’s coffin to make a replacement.

Ch. 128: The Pequod meets The Rachel, which has recently sceen the white whale. The captain begs Ahab to help search for one of their whaling boats, which was lost during the chase after MD. Ahab refuses. The ship “was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.”

Ahab knows he’s losing his mind, but he doesn’t want to get better. To the insane Pip (see ch. 93) he says, “There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like, and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.” (580) This is like an artist who knows drugs are killing him but still uses them because they help him produce art.

Ch. 131: They meet the misnamed ship The Delight, gutted from an encounter with MD.

Ch. 133: They encounter Moby Dick at last. MD surfaces beneath Ahab’s boat and knocks them all into the water. The Pequod rescues them. As they pass the wrecked boat, Starbuck calls it a bad omen. Ahab replies,

“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives’ darkling hint.

Ch. 134: Day 2 of the chase.

They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to. (606)

MD destroys Ahab’s boat again and snaps his new leg. Fedallah drowns. Starbuck tries to get Ahab to heed their situation:

Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow [Fedallah] gone—**all good angels mobbing thee with warnings**:—what more wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!” (611)

Ch. 135: The final day of the chase. They realize they somehow passed MD, and he is now chasing them. When they lower to attack him, MD destroys two of their boats but leaves Ahab’s. Ahab sees the body of Fedallah, caught up in the tangled lines that wrap MD.

Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. (613)

Now Moby Dick rams the Pequod itself, and the ship begins to sink. When MD gets close enough, Ahab hurls the special harpoon at him:

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.

But Ahab is caught around the neck by his own line, and down he goes.

The sinking Pequod creates a vortex which sucks down the other whaling ships. Only Ishmael survives – Queequeg’s coffin pops up from the vortex, and he grabs it. The next day, The Rachel (still searching for her lost crew) finds and rescues him.