Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

Ishmael boarded their namesake ship off Patagonia at midnight and found a fine gam awaiting. The crew passed around good flip at ten gallons the hour; when a squall struck, they reefed topsails so top-heavy they had to swing each other aloft. The beef was tough but substantial, the dumplings symmetrically globular and indestructible. The Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship, her forecastle flowing with strong drink and crack fellows.

Why such hospitality aboard English whalers? The answer lies with the Dutch, who preceded them in the fishery and passed along their fat old fashions of plenty. Ishmael discovered an ancient volume titled Dan Coopman—The Merchant—which detailed the provisions for 180 Dutch whalemen: four hundred thousand pounds of beef, half a million pounds of biscuit, nearly three thousand firkins of butter, five hundred fifty ankers of gin, and ten thousand eight hundred barrels of beer. The statistics flood the reader with good cheer rather than parching him.

Reckoning thirty men per ship, each sailor received two barrels of beer for twelve weeks, plus his share of gin. Whether these fuddled harpooneers could aim true at flying whales seems doubtful—yet they did. But this was far North, where beer suits the constitution; at the Equator, it would make a man drowsy at his post.

The old Dutch whalers were high livers, and the English have not neglected their example. When cruising in an empty ship, get a good dinner out of the world, at least. And this empties the decanter.

How can a mere oarsman presume to know the subterranean parts of the whale? Ishmael anticipates the challenge. Since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated beneath the skin of an adult leviathan. Yet he claims two credentials: he once dissected a cub Sperm Whale hoisted onto a deck; and for knowledge of the full-grown skeleton, he is indebted to his late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque in the Arsacides.

Years ago, aboard the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, Ishmael spent the Arsacidean holidays at Tranquo’s palm villa at Pupella. The king, devoted to barbaric vertu, had gathered rare inventions of his people. Chief among them was a great Sperm Whale, found stranded after a gale. Once stripped and sun-dried, the skeleton was transported up the glen, where a temple of lordly palms sheltered it. Ribs hung with trophies; vertebrae bore hieroglyphics; in the skull, priests kept an aromatic flame burning, so the mystic head sent forth its vapory spout. The lower jaw, suspended from a bough, vibrated over devotees like Damocles’ sword.

The green wood, the living sap, the earth a weaver’s loom—through the leaves, the sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving verdure. The weaver-god weaves, deafened by his own humming. Amid this life-restless loom, the white skeleton lay lounging—Life folded Death; Death trellised Life.

Visiting with Tranquo, Ishmael paced the skeleton with a ball of twine, then cut a green measuring-rod and dived within. The priests shouted outrage, then fell to fighting over feet and inches, cracking sconces with yard-sticks. Seizing that chance, Ishmael concluded his admeasurements.

These dimensions are verifiable against skeleton authorities in Hull, Manchester, and Yorkshire, where Sir Clifford Constable displays an articulated whale like a chest of drawers. But the measurements themselves are copied from Ishmael’s right arm, where he had them tattooed—the only secure way to preserve such statistics. He left the rest of his body a blank page for a poem he was composing.

Ishmael opens with the whale’s living bulk: a Sperm Whale of largest magnitude weighs ninety tons, outweighing a village of eleven hundred. The landsman’s imagination strains against such mass.

The Tranque skeleton measured seventy-two feet; in life, the whale stretched ninety. Skull and jaw claimed twenty feet, leaving fifty of backbone. Ten ribs per side, the longest exceeding eight feet, formed an ivory chest like a ship’s hull under construction. In the Arsacides, such bones bridge streams.

Yet the skeleton is not the mould. The largest rib spans eight feet, but the living body reached sixteen in depth. Where naked spine lies, flesh and blood once wrapped the bone. The fins are mere joints; the flukes, an utter blank.

Foolish to think one knows the whale from dead bones in peaceful woods. Only amid quickest perils, within the eddyings of angry flukes, can the living whale be truly found out.

The spine stacked upright resembles Pompey’s Pillar. Forty-odd vertebrae taper to a white knob like a billiard ball. Smaller bones vanished, stolen by the priest’s children for marbles. Thus even the hugest living thing diminishes into child’s play.

The whale’s colossal bulk demands a writer expand rather than compress—he belongs in imperial folio, his coiled entrails vast as cables in a warship’s hold. Ishmael now turns from anatomy to archaeology, to fossils and antediluvian remains. Such grand terms would overwhelm any lesser creature, but Leviathan justifies the dictionary’s weightiest words. He consults Johnson’s quarto, fitting that the portly lexicographer should serve a whale author.

Writers rise with their subjects; Ishmael swells with his. His handwriting sprawls into billboard letters. He craves a condor’s quill, a volcanic crater for ink. The theme’s magnitude forces him to encompass all sciences, all generations of whales and men. A great book requires a great subject—no enduring volume was ever written about a flea.

His geological credentials are practical: stonemason, ditch-digger, well-sinker. Fossil whales emerge from Tertiary strata worldwide—the Alps, Lombardy, France, England, Scotland, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. Cuvier declared fragments from Paris and Antwerp belonged to unknown leviathanic species.

Most remarkable was the nearly complete Alabama skeleton of 1842. Enslaved workers thought it a fallen angel; local physicians named it Basilosaurus, assuming reptile. But anatomist Richard Owen recognized an extinct whale, renaming it Zeuglodon—a creature erased by Earth’s mutations.

Among these ancient bones, Ishmael drowns backward into prehistory. Before time itself, when ice crushed the tropics and no land was habitable, the whale ruled creation. His wake traced the future Andes. Ahab’s weapon drew blood older than any pharaoh’s. The biblical patriarchs seem like children beside this antemosaic existence. What preceded humanity will outlast it.

Leviathan’s image also haunts Egyptian ceilings—at Denderah, carved dolphins and griffins frame his ancient form, swimming before Solomon’s birth. John Leo, the Barbary traveler, described an African coastal temple built of whale bones, where a massive rib arches over worshippers. Some claim Jonah emerged there. In this temple of bone, Ishmael abandons us. Nantucketers and whalemen will worship in silence.

The user wants me to write a short transition paragraph between Chapter 104 (The Fossil Whale) and Chapter 105 (Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?).

Let me review what each chapter covers:

Chapter 104: Discusses fossil whales and ancient remains, arguing that whales have existed since before humanity and will outlast it. It ends with Ishmael abandoning us in a temple of bone, worshipping in silence.

Chapter 105: Discusses whether whales have diminished in size (they haven’t - modern whales are actually larger than fossil specimens) and whether whales will perish from hunting (Ishmael argues they won’t - their domain is too vast, they have refuges beyond human reach, they live long lives).