Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

White-Horse

White-horse is a substance obtained from the tapering part of the sperm whale and from the thicker portions of its flukes. Despite being tough with congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—it still contains oil. After being severed from the whale, white-horse is cut into portable oblong blocks before going to the mincer. The blocks resemble pieces of Berkshire marble in appearance.

Plum-Pudding

Plum-pudding refers to fragmentary pieces of the whale’s flesh that adhere to the blanket of blubber and participate in its unctuousness. The narrator describes it as a refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold, with an exceedingly rich, mottled tint featuring a bestreaked snowy and golden ground dotted with spots of deep crimson and purple. Despite reason, the narrator confesses to having stolen behind the foremast to taste it, comparing its flavor to what a royal cutlet from Louis le Gros might taste if killed on the first day after venison season coinciding with an unusually fine vintage of Champagne vineyards.

Slobgollion

Slobgollion is a singular, puzzling substance that appears during the sperm processing business. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy matter most frequently found in the tubs of sperm after prolonged squeezing and subsequent decanting. The narrator holds it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case coalescing together. The name is original to the whalemen, as is the nature of the substance itself.

Gurry

Gurry is a term properly belonging to right whalemen but sometimes used by sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous substance scraped from the back of the Greenland or right whale. This material covers the decks of those who hunt that ignoble Leviathan, though it appears incidentally in sperm whaling operations as well.

Nippers

While not indigenous to the whale’s vocabulary, the term nippers becomes native when applied by whalemen. A whaleman’s nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan’s tail, averaging an inch in thickness and roughly the size of the iron part of a hoe. When moved edgewise along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squeegee, using nameless blandishments like magic to allure along with it all impurities.

Blubber-Room

The blubber-room serves as the receptacle for blanket-pieces stripped and hoisted from the whale. When the time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment becomes a scene of terror for novices, especially by night. A space is cleared and lit by a dull lantern for the workmen, who generally go in pairs—a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The gaffman uses a hook to hold sheets of blubber from slipping as the ship pitches, while the spade-man stands barefoot on the blubber itself, perpendicularly chopping it into portable horse-pieces. The spade is razor-sharp, and the footing precarious; toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men, as they sometimes cut off their own or their assistants’ toes when the material slides away like a sledge.

CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.

This chapter of Moby Dick focuses on the mincer, a specialized sailor aboard the Pequod, his distinctive protective garment crafted from whale anatomy, the process of mincing whale blubber for oil extraction, and the specific workplace instructions governing his role.

The Enigmatic Cone

A strange, enigmatic cone-shaped object lying in the Pequod’s lee scuppers near the windlass is noted as more surprising than the whale’s famous anatomical features. The cone is longer than a tall Kentuckian, nearly a foot in diameter at its base, and jet-black, compared to Queequeg’s ebony idol Yojo, and likened to the idol of Queen Maachah of Judea destroyed by her son King Asa as recorded in the First Book of Kings.

The Grandissimus

The sailor called the mincer, assisted by two allies, carries the whale’s grandissimus (as mariners term the organ) across the forecastle, staggering under its weight similarly to a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from a battlefield.

The Mincer’s Preparation

The mincer prepares the grandissimus’s outer pelt for use as a garment: he removes the dark pelt from the organ, turns it inside out like a pantaloon leg, stretches it to nearly double its original diameter, hangs it spread in the rigging to dry, trims off three feet of its pointed end, cuts two slits for armholes at the opposite end, and slips his entire body into the prepared pelt.