Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

Amid this toil, Fedallah is seen calmly eyeing the Right Whale’s head, glancing between its deep wrinkles and the lines in his own palm. He stands within Ahab’s shadow, their forms blending together, while the crew whispers Laplandish speculations about the strange conjunction of heads and men.

Two great whale heads hang from the Pequod’s side—the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale—offering an unparalleled chance for comparative study. The Sperm Whale commands immediate respect: its head possesses a mathematical symmetry the Right Whale lacks, while its pepper-and-salt coloring marks it as a grey-headed veteran of deep waters. One yields instinctively to its pervading dignity.

The eyes, set far back near the jaw’s angle, prove strangely small for such magnitude. Their position prevents the whale from seeing directly ahead or astern; each eye commands its own field, separated by the massive bulk of head between them like two lakes divided by a mountain. The whale must perceive two distinct pictures with a blind void between. Whether its brain can simultaneously attend to both prospects remains a tantalizing question—and perhaps explains the creature’s bewildered movements when boats surround it, its divided vision trapping it in helpless perplexity.

The ear is stranger still: no external leaf, an opening barely large enough for a quill. The Sperm Whale possesses a visible orifice; the Right Whale’s is entirely covered by membrane. Yet what matters physical aperture? Were the whale’s eyes vast as telescopes, its ears capacious as cathedral porches, it would see and hear no better. Subtlety of mind outstrips enlargement.

The crew canters the head bottom-up. The mouth’s interior gleams like bridal satin, beautifully chaste—until one considers the lower jaw. This narrow lid, when raised, reveals a portcullis of teeth. In living but dispirited whales, the jaw hangs slack at right angles, a reproach to their tribe.

Now the jaw is hoisted aboard like an anchor. Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego mount as dentists, lancing gums and rigging tackles to wrench free the forty-two teeth—Michigan oxen dragging oak stumps. The bone is sawn into slabs and stacked like joists, the leviathan’s architecture reduced to building material.

Crossing the deck, the narrator turns to examine the Right Whale’s head—a form utterly unlike the Sperm Whale’s noble symmetry. Where that head suggests a Roman war-chariot, this one resembles a shoemaker’s last or a gigantic shoe, clumsy and inelegant. A barnacled crown sits upon the mass, while the lower lip hangs in a massive sullen pout, yielding hundreds of gallons of oil.

Through a natural fissure in the lip, the narrator enters a mouth like an Indian wigwam. Hundreds of baleen plates line the interior—curved blades of bone forming Venetian blinds that strain food from seawater. These fringed slats once furnished ladies’ busks and umbrella ribs, though such fashions have faded. The arrangement suggests a great organ’s pipes, while the tongue spreads beneath like a soft Turkish rug, fat and fragile, promising six barrels of oil.

The two heads present starkly different expressions in death. The Right Whale’s jaw, pressed tight against the ship’s side, conveys a grim practical resolve—the determination of a Stoic confronting mortality. The Sperm Whale’s broad brow wears a different aspect: a tranquil detachment, the calm of a philosopher who has reasoned himself past fear. One faced extinction with clenched purpose; the other met it with abstracted serenity, as if death were merely another idea to contemplate.

The narrator turns to examine the Sperm Whale’s head as a weapon of devastating potential. In its ordinary swimming posture, the whale presents a sheer vertical face to the water—a solid expanse utterly devoid of sensory organs. No nose, no eyes, no ears break this surface; the mouth hides entirely beneath, and the creature’s face offers nothing but blank wall. Behind this facade lies almost no bone for twenty feet, only dense wadded tissue. The outer casing proves astonishingly resistant: the sharpest harpoon glances off harmlessly, as though the surface were armored in hardened keratin.

Drawing an analogy from maritime practice, the narrator compares this structure to the thick ox-hide cushions packed with tow and cork that sailors suspend between vessels to absorb collision. The whale’s head functions similarly—an elastic buffer of immense proportions. He speculates further that the honeycomb interior might connect to the atmosphere, allowing the whale to inflate or compress its skull at will, adding pneumatic power to mechanical mass.

Behind this impregnable front swims tremendous life, all obedient to a single will. The resulting force seems capable of splitting isthmuses and merging oceans. The narrator warns that only those who face such terrible knowledge without flinching can claim to understand the whale’s true nature.

The Sperm Whale’s head divides into a lower bony quoin and an upper unctuous mass, which further separates into the junk—a honeycomb of oil-filled fibers—and the great Case. This Case resembles the Heidelburgh Tun, holding the most precious spermaceti in a pure, fluid state that crystallizes upon exposure to air. Lined with a pearl-colored membrane, this reservoir extends over twenty-six feet deep. To extract the oil, the crew must decapitate the whale with extreme caution to avoid rupturing the magazine. The severed head is then hoisted high by a complex wilderness of ropes, where it is secured in preparation for the critical and delicate operation of tapping the tun.

With the head secured aloft, the crew can now proceed to the delicate work of tapping the reservoir described in the previous chapter.

Tashtego climbs with feline agility along the yard-arm to reach the suspended whale head. After securing a whip tackle, he lowers himself onto the summit and diligently searches for the optimal entry point into the Tun. A heavy bucket is hoisted up to him, and using a long pole, he guides it deep into the casing to scoop out the valuable spermaceti. This rhythmic extraction continues until the reservoir is nearly drained, forcing the harpooneer to drive the pole ever deeper into the receding well.

Disaster strikes suddenly. Whether due to slippery footing or a momentary lapse, Tashtego loses his grip and plunges headfirst into the oily abyss, vanishing with a sickening gurgle. Daggoo attempts a frantic rescue by scaling the rigging, but as the head throbs with the trapped man’s struggles, a sharp crack heralds catastrophe. A massive hook tears free, causing the head to swing violently before the remaining tackle fails. A thunderous crash echoes as the massive head plunges into the waves, dragging the sinking Tashtego toward the depths while Daggoo clings desperately to the pendulous lines.

Queequeg instantly dives overboard, sword in hand. He pursues the descending head and slashes a hole in the casing. Reaching inside, he grasps Tashtego by the hair and hauls him out, delivering him to the waiting boat. The narrator explains the physics behind the sink: emptied of its buoyant oil, the heavy tendinous walls possessed greater specific gravity than water, causing a slow descent that allowed for the rescue. He reflects that Tashtego narrowly escaped a “sweet” death, buried and coffined in the purest spermaceti, much like a honey-hunter perishing in a hollow tree.