Archive (Page 4) • Moby Dick • Buttondown

Chapter 75: The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.

November 26, 2025

Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale’s head. As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a Roman...

Chapter 74: The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.

November 26, 2025

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...

Chapter 73: Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk

November 26, 2025

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. But we must let it continue...

Chapter 72: The Monkey-Rope.

November 26, 2025

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here,...

Chapter 71: The Jeroboam’s Story.

November 26, 2025

Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock. By and by, through the glass the...

Chapter 70: The Sphynx.

November 26, 2025

It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a...

Chapter 69: The Funeral.

November 26, 2025

“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!” The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble...

Chapter 68: The Blanket.

November 26, 2025

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...

Chapter 67: Cutting In.

November 26, 2025

It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what...

Chapter 66: The Shark Massacre.

November 26, 2025

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,...

Chapter 65: The Whale as a Dish.

November 26, 2025

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...

Chapter 64: Stubb’s Supper.

November 26, 2025

Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow business of towing the...

Chapter 63: The Crotch.

November 26, 2025

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters. The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves...

Chapter 62: The Dart.

November 26, 2025

A word concerning an incident in the last chapter. According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off from the ship, with the...

Chapter 61: Stubb Kills a Whale.

November 26, 2025

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,...

Chapter 60: The Line.

November 26, 2025

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...

Chapter 59: Squid.

November 26, 2025

Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her keel, so...

Chapter 58: Brit.

November 26, 2025

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. For...

Chapter 57: Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in

November 26, 2025

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...

Chapter 56: Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True

November 26, 2025

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...