Moby Dick

Stories relating to whaling are embedded deeply into the world’s culture and form ancient myth and legend. Ishmael recounts Perseus’s mythological battle with the leviathan to win Andromeda’s hand. He notes that a whale’s skeleton was long displayed in the Greek city of Joppa and was said to be the same leviathan. A similar Christian story is told of St. George and the Dragon. Ishmael notes many old stories jumble whales and dragons together. The Philistines worshipped Dagon, another presumed whale. Hercules was swallowed and spit out by a whale, echoing the story of Jonah. Ishmael also sees aspects of the whale in the Hindu gods.

The most central whale-related story in western culture is the biblical story of Jonah. Ishmael acknowledges that such a tale seems far-fetched to modern ears, particularly to whalers who are familiar with the physical dimensions of whales both in and out. It is possible, however, that a person could fit in a whale’s mouth, but not for very long. It is possible that Jonah took passage on a man-made vessel called The Whale, yet this does not account for Jonah’s three day’s journey from the Mediterranean Sea to Nineveh, which would take longer on a ship. Ishmael believes Jonah was instead vomited up in Turkey and cites several Turkish scholars in this assertion.

Queequeg and others believe that a boat moves faster when its underside is greased in oil. In one instance soon after the event with the Jungfrau, Stubb’s boat lowers for and attaches itself to a whale, which, instead of sounding, swims straight ahead at full bore, threatening to come free of the barbed harpoon. The greased boat assists in this pursuit.

In the event of a running whale, the mate must use his palm to balance his spear, which is distinguished from the harpoon by its longer length. He then pitches it into the air to land in the whale. This act is called pitchpoling, and Stubb does it perfectly.

Ishmael now addresses the problem of whether or not a whale’s spouting is composed of water or of pure vapor. As noted, the whale has lungs and not gills, and he breathes through the spout at the top of his head. His lung capacity is great, and as a hunter of whales, one learns to correlate a whale’s soundings with its breath intake. His breathing apparatus is unique; the whale cannot be said to smell or vocalize in the manner of a person.

As the spout’s chief purpose is designed to expel air, the question becomes, how much of this vapor is combined with water? It is nearly impossible to tell by close example, and many whalers believe that looking straight into a whale’s spout will lead to blinding. Because one can often observe a rainbow within the spout, Ishmael believes that the spout is all mist. Ishmael conclude that the misty doubts  one has about the unknown are often clarified by a rainbow of intuition.

As with the neck, it is hard to know where a whale’s tail begins. It travels down from the whale’s trunk in beautiful lines receding from the girth of a man down to an inch thickness at the end of its flukes. It has many tendons and great tensile strength and flexibility. Such brawniness is likened to the human musculature found in the paintings of masters.

The horizontal tail has five chief functions: a means of forward propulsion; a weapon; a “sweep” against the ocean, when the whale takes sensual pleasure from gently waving it back and forth across the water’s surface; a means of “lobtailing”, or violently smacking the water with an upturned tail; and a means of “fluking,” or turning a tail to the sky and holding it in position.

Ahab takes the boat near the coast of Java, which is known to be rich in whales, but also host to many local pirates, who occasionally board American and English ships. The Pequod sights a large pod of whales, called by Ishmael a “grand armada.” As the ship begins the pursuit of these whales, they find themselves easily outsailing a group of Malay pirates on their tail. Ahab nervously watches both his quarry and the pirates, even as they are left behind.

Curiously, the whales, rather than run, congregate in a large and violently moving circle, which Ishmael likens to panic in a large theater. The boats are lowered to capture them, but the capture is deceptively difficult, as one whale, when caught by Queequeg’s harpoon, leads his boat (with Ishmael as oarsman) into the center of the thrashing pod. The crew attempts to use a wooden block called a drugg to mark several whales for later capture. The whale pod seems to stretch for miles around.

Soon, Ishmael’s crew realizes that, rather than panicking, the whales are in fact attempting to protect a group of placid mothers in the process of giving birth. The line attached to the stuck whale mingles with the line of an umbilical cord. One wounded whale on the outskirts of the pod begins to thrash, whipping a loose cutting spade around him, sending the rest into a panic. It is a horrible sight.

Ishmael’s boat narrowly escapes this thrashing, and among his crew, only Queequeg’s beloved hat is lost. “The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish,” Ishmael says (427). As it happens, only one whale is caught that day.

Large pods such as the one described in the previous chapter are uncommon; rather, whales tend to swim in schools of between twenty and fifty whales. Large males often take up the rear of such a school to protect the females. These groups migrate vast distances in search of food and warm water. There is often competition among males, which Ishmael likens to a mannerly courtship among royal princes. Younger whales go from pod to pod and “leaves his anonymous babies all over the world,” whereas older whales stick with one pod into their senescence (429). As the dominant whale in a school is sometimes called a schoolmaster, he thus emulates human schoolmasters, who teach moral behavior in old age that they did not practice in their youth.

Whales that have been marked by one ship may often be picked up by another. This sometimes causes disputes for which there are precious few legal resources. The common law is that a “fast fish,” or a fish attached to a line, belongs to the party attached to the other end, whereas a “loose fish” is fair game, no matter the effort expended by another to slow it down.

Anything may count as a line for determining a “fast fish,” even “a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb” (433). In a complicated case in England, a group of whalers abandoned a boat with a whale still attached to it. The whale was then apprehended by another ship. The judge determined that the accoutrements of the boat now belong to the new owners, as the whale should be considered “loose” at the time of capture, thus owning the property of the harpoon stuck in its back. The ruling is the sort that is applicable to many situations on land, including large questions of war and hereditary political power, to which people and land are perpetually “loose fish” to the strong.

Ishmael cites an English law which states that all whales caught on the English coast must give the head to the king and the tail to the queen. He cites another incident in which a whaleship chases their quarry into English waters and is commanded to relinquish it to the local duke, whose emissary declares the fish a “fast fish” by legal claim. To reasonable people, this claim seems unfair, and so Ishmael proposes a legal distinction that would cleverly define the head and tail—that is, that part owed to the king and queen— as only that cartilaginous stuff which is least valuable in the whale.

After a week, Stubb proposes that the Pequod should soon run across the whales they had drugged. Soon enough, the Pequod runs across The Rose-bud, a whaleship sailing under a French flag. They have fastened two “blasted” whales to their side—that is, whales that have already died and begun to decompose. Such whales emit a disgusting smell, and produce inferior oil. Stubb, recognizing the Pequod’s druggs on the dead quarry, expresses a belief that only the worst or least experienced whalemen would go so low as to lower for a blasted whale.

With Ahab satisfied that the Rose-bud has not seen Moby Dick, Stubb concocts a plan. Knowing that the crew resents processing the disgusting whale, Stubb works with a translator on board to convince the captain to release the most rotted whale as being the source of a terrible pestilence. The inexperienced captain does so, thanking Stubb for his service (all the while receiving insults from Stubb in an English the translator keeps a secret). With the rotted whale released, Stubb instantly pulls his boat around, digs into the carcass’s spleen, and pulls out a fragrant, semi-hard substance. It is Ambergris, “worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist” (446).

Ambergris, or “grey amber” is used in delicate perfumery and as a flavoring in the finest cooking. It can only be found in the bowels of a sick or dead whale. Whether it is the cause of a whale’s sickness or an immune response to sickness in the whale is a mystery.

Ishmael considers it a delicious irony that such fine stuff is found in such a low place as a whale’s digestive tract. He considers literary allusions to glory being sown in dishonor, and further dispels the myth that whaling itself is a lowly task. He further dispels the myth that whales smell bad, but that is due to occasional accidents in the sealing of whale oil, and not in the animal or in the profession itself.

When boats are lowered for a whale, the smallest or most “timorous” crewmates are left behind to tend the ship. So it is with Dough-Boy, and the “gloomy-jolly” tambourine-playing Pip. Whereas Dough-Boy has a dull personality, Pip has a “pleasant, genial, jolly brightness” (451), which had only been a little dulled by his apprehension at the quest to find and kill Moby Dick.

One of Stubb’s oarsman sprains his hand, and so a nervous Pip fills in on lowering duties. The first lowering with Pip is a success, but Stubb exhorts him to maintain his flagging courage. In his second lowering, Pip is knocked out of the boat and caught in the whale-line, and the whale is let go to save Pip’s life. The grew grow angry with him. Stubb warns Pip that he should always stick to the boat or risk getting left behind. Unfortunately, in his third lowering, Pip falls from the boat again as it races away, fastened to a whale. This time, he is left behind. Though Stubb assumes that the two boats in their wake would soon catch Pip, it takes them a long time to catch up to the young man. Pip thinks he has been abandoned.

The sensitive Pip, thinking himself as good as dead, observes the nearly infinite expanse of water around him, as well as its depths, which become a match for his own brilliant mind. He is “carried down alive to the wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes” (453). When the ship rescues him later, he has experienced a mental health crisis.

Before being processed into oil, whale blubber must be squeezed by several hands into a malleable and liquid state. The lumps of whale fat, or “sperm,” give off a heady fragrance, and after a time, the squeezer begins to lose track of where his fingers end and the sperm begins. In so squeezing over the course of a whole morning, the men will find one another squeezing one another’s hands and meeting eyes in a mutual feeling of astounding intimacy and bliss which Ishmael describes in terms which evoke a heaven on Earth.

In this process, various byproducts are produced, including an oily membrane called slobgollion, a dark residue called gurry, and little bits of tendon found at the tail of the whale called nippers. The careful men at the head of this procession, who cut the large hunks of blubber for processing, use precarious spades and poles which endanger their fingers and toes.

At the head of the Try-Works, in which the final processing of blubber takes place, there is a mincer who gets the separated fat ready for boiling. One of the curiosities of his profession is that he wears a three-foot-long coat (or cassock) of dried, black whale skin for protection.

Among the most distinctive elements of a whaling vessel is a large protruding kiln, connected to a small factory called a try-works, set between the foremast and mainmast. Within the try-works is a giant masonry furnace, fueled largely with whale fat, which are used to heat two large pots. The purpose of this furnace is to render blubber into its finest oil essence. This work is usually done at night. The harpooners feed the pots while the try-works are firing. It is dangerous work, as hot oil tends to splash as the ship pitches around. Ishmael considers the Try-works a hellish symbol of Ahab’s soul. That night, Ishmael falls asleep while on watch, dreaming that the ship’s compass and steering had broken down, and that he and the ship were doomed.

Ishmael warns his readers from staring too long into man-made fire, and especially factory-fire. He implores us to be guided by the sun and its natural rhythms.

Whereas merchant vessels usually spare their oil lamps for lack of fuel, a whale ship is often brightly illuminated. Ishmael says there is something noble-looking about seeing a lot of sleeping watchmen reposed within fully-illuminated sleeping quarters. The whaler is free and easy with the valuable commodity of lamp oil.

As the last of the whale blubber is reduced within the fire, the cleaning and stowing of the ship begins. The oil is sealed into barrels, with every crewman sealing the barrels for storage. The processing of a whale is incredibly filthy, with blood, oil, and soot getting everywhere. Within a day of cleaning, however, the ship and the crew are spotless. Often, just as this process ends, it begins again with the sighting of a whale, and the cycle begins anew. Ishmael finds this cycle as relentless as that of the earth coursing through its seasons around the sun.