Read Online Why Read Moby-Dick by Nathaniel Philbrick - Free Book Online

and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.”
    Ishmael points to several historical instances, including the story of the Essex, that illustrate “the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale.” Clearly, a whale is no ship’s carpenter. Far from passive and dull, a bull whale not only is huge but also thinks with the crafty intelligence of a man.
    Ishmael describes the wondrous way a craft as tiny as a whaleboat negotiates the massive swells of the ocean: “[T]he sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen . . . all this was thrilling.” And then there is the even more wondrous way a whale dives underneath the sea: “[T]he monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.”
    No one has ever written a more beautiful and horrifying account of the death of a whale than the magnificent set piece contained in chapter 61, “Stubb Kills a Whale.” Perched on the onrushing bow of the whaleboat, the second mate merrily probes for “the life” of the whale with his lance until the giant creature begins to die. “His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men.” The whale goes into its final paroxysms, “spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. . . . Stubb scattered the dead ashes [of his pipe] over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.”
    In his detailed descriptions of the whale’s anatomy, Melville is carefully, meticulously preparing us for the novel’s climax. In the chapter titled “The Battering-Ram,” Ishmael anatomizes the “compacted collectedness” of the sperm whale’s block-shaped head. It is, he tells us, “a dead, blind wall, . . . [an] enormous boneless mass . . . as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.” In addition to this mysterious “wad” of insensitivity, we are introduced to the whale’s tiny and “lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.” The spout hole is “countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head” so that “even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.” The whale’s tail is “a dense webbed bed of welded sinews . . . knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments . . . so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it . . . where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power.”
    Reading Moby-Dick, we are in the presence of a writer who spent several impressionable years on a whaleship, internalized everything he saw, and seven or so years later, after