Crew Discovers the Spectre Is a Giant Squid
The four boats are soon on the water, with Ahab’s in advance, all swiftly pulling toward their prey. The creature goes down, and while with suspended oars they await its reappearance, it slowly rises again in the same spot where it sank. Gazing upon the most wondrous phenomenon the secret seas have yet revealed to mankind, the crew forgets for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lies floating on the water with innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. It has no perceptible face or front, no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct, but undulates there on the billows as an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
Starbuck Reacts to the Giant Squid Sighting
As the creature disappears again with a low sucking sound, Starbuck still gazes at the agitated waters where it sank. With a wild voice he exclaims, “Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!” When Flask asks what it was, Starbuck identifies it as the great live squid, which few whale-ships ever beheld and returned to tell of.
Crew Identifies Creature as Rare Giant Squid
The crew confirms Starbuck’s identification of the creature as the rare giant squid that few whale-ships have ever beheld and lived to tell of. This extraordinary sighting represents one of the most unusual encounters possible in the sperm whale fishery.
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