have praised it.
Ishmael then looks at where the idea that whales smell bad comes from. Some
whaling vessels might have skipped cleaning themselves a long time ago, but
the current bunch of South Sea Whalers always scrub themselves clean. The
oil of the whale works as a natural soap.
Chapters 93-101
Summary
These are among the most important chapters in Moby- Dick. In The Castaway,
Pip, who usually watches the ship when the boats go out, becomes a
replacement in Stubb's boat. Having performed passably the first time out,
Pip goes out a second time and this time he jumps from the boat out of
anxiety. When Pip gets foul in the lines, and his boatmates have to let the
whale go free to save him, he makes them angry. Stubb tells him never to
jump out of the boat again because Stubb won't pick him up next time. Pip,
however, does jump again, and is left alone in the middle of the sea's
"heartless immensity." Pip goes mad.
A Squeeze of the Hand, which describes the baling of the case (emptying the
sperm's head), is one of the funniest chapters in the novel. Because the
spermaceti quickly cools into lumps, the sailors have to squeeze it back
into liquid. Here, Ishmael goes overboard with his enthusiasm for the
"sweet and unctuous" sperm. He squeezes all morning long, getting
sentimental about the physical contact with the other sailors, whose hands
he encounters in the sperm. He goes on to describe the other parts of the
whale, including the euphemistically-named "cassock" (the whale's penis).
This chapter is also very funny, blasphemously likening the whale's organ
to the dress of clergymen because it has some pagan mysticism attached to
it. It serves an actual purpose on the ship: the mincer wears the black
"pelt" of skin from the penis to protect himself while he slices the horse-
pieces of blubber for the pots.
Ishmael then tries to explain the try-works, heavy structures made of pots
and furnaces that boil the blubber and derive all the oil from it. He
associates the try-works with darkness and a sense of exotic evil: it has
"an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the
vicinity of funereal pyres." Furthermore, the pagan harpooneers tend it.
Ishmael also associates it with the red fires of Hell that, in combination
with the black sea and the dark night, so disorient him that he loses sense
of himself at the tiller. Everything becomes "inverted," he says, and
suddenly there is "no compass before me to steer by."
In a very short chapter, Ishmael describes in The Lamp how whalemen are
always in the light because their job is to collect oil from the seas. He
then finishes describing how whale's oil is processed: putting the oil in
casks and cleaning up the ship. Here he dismisses another myth about
whaling: whalers are not dirty. Sperm whale's oil is a fine cleaning agent.
But Ishmael admits that whalers are hardly clean for a day when the next
whale is sighted and the cycle begins again.
Ishmael returns to talking about the characters again, showing the
reactions of Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, the Manxman, Queequeg, Fedallah,
and Pip to the golden coin fixed on the mainmast. Ahab looks at the
doubloon from Ecuador and sees himself and the pains of man. Starbuck sees
some Biblical significance about how man can find little solace in times of
trouble. Stubb, first saying he wants to spend it, looks deeper at the
doubloon because he saw his two superiors gazing meaningfully at it. He can
find little but some funny dancing zodiac signs. Then Flask approaches, and
says he sees "nothing here, round thing made of gold and whoever raises a
certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So what's all this staring
been about?" Pip is the last to look at the coin and says, prophetically,
that here's the ship's "navel"{ something at the center of the ship,
holding it together.
Then the Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby, a whaling ship from London with a
jolly captain and crew. The first thing Ahab asks, of course, is if they
have seen Moby Dick. The captain, named Boomer, has, and is missing an arm
because of it. The story is pretty gory, but Boomer does not dwell too much
on the horrible details, choosing instead to talk about the hot rum toddies
he drank during his recovery. The ship encountered the white whale again
but did not want to try to fasten to it. Although the people on board the
Enderby think he is crazy, Ahab insists on knowing which way the whale went
and returns to his ship to pursue it.
In the next chapter, Ishmael backtracks, to explain why the name Enderby is
significant: this man fitted the first ever English sperm whaling ship.
Ishmael then exuberantly explains the history behind Enderby's before
telling the story of the particular whaler Samuel Enderby. The good food
aboard the Enderby earns the ship the title "Decanter."
Chapter 102-114
Summary
Ishmael now tries another tactic for interpreting the whale. In the chapter
called A Bower in the Arsacides, he discusses how he learned to measure a
whale's bones. When he was visiting his friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, he
lived in a culture in which the whale skeleton was sacred. After telling
how he learned to measure, he goes on to tell the results of the
measurements. He begins with the skull, the biggest part, then the ribs,
and the spine. But these bones, he cautions, give only a partial picture of
the whale since so much esh is wrapped around them. A person cannot still
find good representation of a whale in its entirety.
And Ishmael continues to "manhandle" the whale, self- consciously saying
that he does the best he knows how. So he decides to look at the Fossil
Whale from an "archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of
view." He can't be too grandiloquent with his exaggerated words and diction
because the whale itself is so grand. He ashes credentials again, this time
as a geologist and then discusses his finds. But, again, he is unsatisfied:
"the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his
fully invested body." But this chapter does give a sense of the whale's age
and his pedigree.
Ishmael finally gives up, in awe, deconstructing the whale- -now he wants
to know if such a fabulous monster will remain on the earth. Ishmael says
that though they may not travel in herds anymore, though they may have
changed haunting grounds, they remain. Why? Because they have established a
new home base at the poles, where man cannot penetrate; because they've
been hunted throughout history and still remain; because the whale
population is not in danger for survival since many generations of whales
are alive at the same time.
Ahab asks the carpenter to make him a new leg because the one he uses is
not trustworthy. After hitting it heavily on the boat's wooden oor when he
returned from the Enderby, he does not think it will keep holding. Indeed,
just before the Pequod sailed, Ahab had been found lying on the ground with
the whalebone leg gouging out his thigh. So the carpenter, the do-it-all
man on the ship, has to make Ahab a new prosthetic leg. They discuss the
feeling of a ghost leg. When Ahab leaves, the carpenter thinks he is a
little queer.
A sailor then informs Ahab, in front of Starbuck, that the oil casks are
leaking. The sailor suggests that they stop to fix them, but Ahab refuses
to stop, saying that he doesn't care about the owners or profft. Starbuck
objects and Ahab points a musket at him. Says Starbuck, "I ask thee not to
beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab;
beware of thyself, old man." In cleaning out the stowed oil casks, Queequeg
falls sick. Thinking he is going to die, Queequeg orders a coffn made. He
lies in it and closes the cover, as Pip dances around the coffn. Soon,
Queequeg feels well again and gets out. Ishmael attributes this to his
"savage" nature.
In The Pacific, Ishmael gets caught up in the meditative, serene Pacific
Ocean. At the end of the chapter, he comes back to Ahab, saying that no
such calming thoughts entered the brain of the captain. Ishmael then pans
over to the blacksmith whose life on land disintegrated. With
characteristic panache, Ishmael explains that the sea beckons to broken-
hearted men who long for death but cannot commit suicide. The Forge
dramatizes an exchange between the blacksmith and Ahab in which the captain
asks the blacksmith to make a special harpoon to kill the white whale.
Although Ahab gives the blacksmith directions, he takes over the crafting
of the harpoon himself, hammering the steel on the anvil and tempering it
with the blood of the three harpooneers (instead of water). The scene ends
with Pip's laughter.
In The Gilder, Ishmael considers how the dreaminess of the sea masks a
ferocity. He speaks of the sea as "gilt" because it looks golden in the sun-
set and is falsely calm. The sea even makes Starbuck rhapsodize, making an
apostrophe (direct address of an absent or imaginary person or of a
personified abstraction, especially as a digression in the course of a
speech or composition) to the sea; Stubb answers him by surprise and, as
usual, makes light of the situation.
Chapters 115-125
Summary
These chapters show how badly off the Pequod really is. The somber Pequod,
still on the lookout for Moby Dick, runs into the Bachelor, a festive
Nantucket whaler on its way home with a full cargo. The captain of the
Bachelor, saying that he has only heard stories of the white whale and
doesn't believe them, invites Ahab and the crew to join his party. Ahab
declines. The next day, the Pequod kills several whales and the way that a
dying whale turns towards the sun spurs Ahab to speak out to it in wondrous
tones. While keeping a night vigil over a whale that was too far away to
take back to the ship immediately, Ahab hears from Fedallah the prophecy of
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