Bibliography

This is an automatically generated bibliography describing the content of this study carrel.

1. chapter-001
   • author: None
   • title: chapter-001
   • date: None
   • words: 195
   • flesch: 84
   • summary: HVALUR, Icelandic. WHALE, English. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.
   • keywords: nuee
   • versions: original; plain text
2. chapter-002
   • author: None
   • title: chapter-002
   • date: None
   • words: 3523
   • flesch: 83
   • summary: And God created great whales. If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great whales.
   • keywords: great; leviathan; ocean; sea; whale
   • versions: original; plain text
3. chapter-003
   • author: None
   • title: chapter-003
   • date: None
   • words: 2241
   • flesch: 75
   • summary: With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle.
   • keywords: land; sea; water
   • versions: original; plain text
4. chapter-004
   • author: None
   • title: chapter-004
   • date: None
   • words: 1449
   • flesch: 76
   • summary: Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original--the Tyre of this Carthage;--the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh!
   • keywords: nantucket; old
   • versions: original; plain text
5. chapter-005
   • author: None
   • title: chapter-005
   • date: None
   • words: 5979
   • flesch: 77
   • summary: But beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer's not coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.
   • keywords: bed; harpooneer; head; landlord; room; thought
   • versions: original; plain text
6. chapter-006
   • author: None
   • title: chapter-006
   • date: None
   • words: 1673
   • flesch: 68
   • summary: At that time in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next movement was to crush himself--boots in hand, and hat on--under the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his boots.
   • keywords: arm; queequeg
   • versions: original; plain text
7. chapter-007
   • author: None
   • title: chapter-007
   • date: None
   • words: 757
   • flesch: 74
   • summary: But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone. They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.
   • keywords: good
   • versions: original; plain text
8. chapter-008
   • author: None
   • title: chapter-008
   • date: None
   • words: 835
   • flesch: 78
   • summary: There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. THE STREET If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
   • keywords: bedford; new
   • versions: original; plain text
9. chapter-009
   • author: None
   • title: chapter-009
   • date: None
   • words: 953
   • flesch: 72
   • summary: In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.
   • keywords: memory; tablets
   • versions: original; plain text
10. chapter-010
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-010
    • date: None
    • words: 970
    • flesch: 64
    • summary: At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom--the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February's snow. Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea.
    • keywords: pulpit; ship
    • versions: original; plain text
11. chapter-011
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-011
    • date: None
    • words: 3631
    • flesch: 79
    • summary: And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep. But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah.
    • keywords: god; jonah; sea; shipmates
    • versions: original; plain text
12. chapter-012
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-012
    • date: None
    • words: 1571
    • flesch: 73
    • summary: Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be.
    • keywords: man; queequeg
    • versions: original; plain text
13. chapter-013
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-013
    • date: None
    • words: 736
    • flesch: 69
    • summary: For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed.
    • keywords: bed
    • versions: original; plain text
14. chapter-014
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-014
    • date: None
    • words: 891
    • flesch: 73
    • summary: Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two.
    • keywords: queequeg
    • versions: original; plain text
15. chapter-015
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-015
    • date: None
    • words: 1726
    • flesch: 74
    • summary: From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive. no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale! Look you, roared the Captain, I'll kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.
    • keywords: like; queequeg
    • versions: original; plain text
16. chapter-016
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-016
    • date: None
    • words: 765
    • flesch: 70
    • summary: Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snowshoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself.
    • keywords: sea
    • versions: original; plain text
17. chapter-017
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-017
    • date: None
    • words: 1213
    • flesch: 70
    • summary: And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin.
    • keywords: clam; hussey
    • versions: original; plain text
18. chapter-018
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-018
    • date: None
    • words: 5595
    • flesch: 74
    • summary: It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.
    • keywords: bildad; captain; old; peleg; thou
    • versions: original; plain text
19. chapter-019
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-019
    • date: None
    • words: 2330
    • flesch: 77
    • summary: THE RAMADAN As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name. At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.
    • keywords: queequeg; thought
    • versions: original; plain text
20. chapter-020
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-020
    • date: None
    • words: 1390
    • flesch: 79
    • summary: HIS MARK As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced their papers. I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets noways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands.
    • keywords: bildad; peleg
    • versions: original; plain text
21. chapter-022
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-022
    • date: None
    • words: 938
    • flesch: 70
    • summary: Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare captain and duplicate ship. For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends.
    • keywords: ship
    • versions: original; plain text
22. chapter-023
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-023
    • date: None
    • words: 1101
    • flesch: 83
    • summary: What's that for, Queequeg? Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy! Queequeg, don't sit there, said I. Oh! perry dood seat, said Queequeg, my country way; won't hurt him face.
    • keywords: queequeg
    • versions: original; plain text
23. chapter-024
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-024
    • date: None
    • words: 1669
    • flesch: 77
    • summary: I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. so every way brimful of every interest to him,--poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land, looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say, Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can. As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came too near.
    • keywords: bildad
    • versions: original; plain text
24. chapter-025
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-025
    • date: None
    • words: 378
    • flesch: 78
    • summary: THE LEE SHORE Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington!
    • keywords: bulkington
    • versions: original; plain text
25. chapter-026
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-026
    • date: None
    • words: 1680
    • flesch: 70
    • summary: THE ADVOCATE As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration!
    • keywords: ship; whale; whaling
    • versions: original; plain text
26. chapter-027
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-027
    • date: None
    • words: 289
    • flesch: 78
    • summary: Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is used at coronations?
    • keywords: oil
    • versions: original; plain text
27. chapter-028
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-028
    • date: None
    • words: 1236
    • flesch: 64
    • summary: Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew.
    • keywords: man; starbuck
    • versions: original; plain text
28. chapter-029
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-029
    • date: None
    • words: 1704
    • flesch: 67
    • summary: And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers.
    • keywords: like; pequod; stubb
    • versions: original; plain text
29. chapter-030
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-030
    • date: None
    • words: 1422
    • flesch: 62
    • summary: AHAB For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
    • keywords: ahab; ship
    • versions: original; plain text
30. chapter-031
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-031
    • date: None
    • words: 1246
    • flesch: 84
    • summary: For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the odd second mate, came up from below, and with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel.
    • keywords: old; stubb
    • versions: original; plain text
31. chapter-032
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-032
    • date: None
    • words: 294
    • flesch: 87
    • summary: THE PIPE When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized?
    • keywords: pipe
    • versions: original; plain text
32. chapter-033
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-033
    • date: None
    • words: 885
    • flesch: 97
    • summary: 'Wise Stubb,' said he, 'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a chimney hag. Remember what I say; be kicked by him; account his kicks honors; and on no account kick back; for you can't help yourself, wise Stubb.
    • keywords: stubb
    • versions: original; plain text
33. chapter-034
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-034
    • date: None
    • words: 5190
    • flesch: 76
    • summary: Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,--the Greenland whale is deposed,--the great sperm whale now reigneth!
    • keywords: book; chapter; fish; great; sperm; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
34. chapter-035
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-035
    • date: None
    • words: 986
    • flesch: 44
    • summary: For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this--the first lives aft, the last forward.
    • keywords: captain; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
35. chapter-036
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-036
    • date: None
    • words: 2252
    • flesch: 68
    • summary: Besides, if it were so that any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab. The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see whether it be all right with that important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid Dinner, Mr. Flask, follows after his predecessors.
    • keywords: ahab; cabin; flask
    • versions: original; plain text
36. chapter-037
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-037
    • date: None
    • words: 2635
    • flesch: 54
    • summary: But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow's nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing.
    • keywords: head; mast; ship; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
37. chapter-038
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-038
    • date: None
    • words: 2846
    • flesch: 85
    • summary: Captain Ahab, said Tashtego, that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick. Moby Dick? shouted Ahab. men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen--Moby Dick--Moby Dick! Captain Ahab, said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder.
    • keywords: ahab; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
38. chapter-041
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-041
    • date: None
    • words: 282
    • flesch: 96
    • summary: Crying its eyes out?--Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate's pennant, and so am I--fa, la! lirra, skirra! Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left--that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.
    • keywords: stubb
    • versions: original; plain text
39. chapter-042
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-042
    • date: None
    • words: 1633
    • flesch: 100
    • summary: (Reclining on a mat.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!--the Heeva-Heeva! Crack, crack, old ship!
    • keywords: old; sailor
    • versions: original; plain text
40. chapter-043
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-043
    • date: None
    • words: 3809
    • flesch: 55
    • summary: For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick.
    • keywords: ahab; moby; sperm; whale; white
    • versions: original; plain text
41. chapter-044
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-044
    • date: None
    • words: 3667
    • flesch: 55
    • summary: Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title Lord of the White Elephants above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Csarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness--as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again.
    • keywords: great; man; soul; things; white; whiteness
    • versions: original; plain text
42. chapter-046
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-046
    • date: None
    • words: 2067
    • flesch: 56
    • summary: At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of which districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the two others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.
    • keywords: ahab; sperm; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
43. chapter-047
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-047
    • date: None
    • words: 3577
    • flesch: 62
    • summary: THE AFFIDAVIT So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earliest part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair. One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales.
    • keywords: sea; ship; sperm; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
44. chapter-048
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-048
    • date: None
    • words: 1009
    • flesch: 49
    • summary: Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash--aye, cash.
    • keywords: ahab
    • versions: original; plain text
45. chapter-049
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-049
    • date: None
    • words: 943
    • flesch: 74
    • summary: There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance--aye, chance, free will, and necessity--no wise incompatible--all interweavingly working together.
    • keywords: sword
    • versions: original; plain text
46. chapter-050
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-050
    • date: None
    • words: 4035
    • flesch: 80
    • summary: Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship nor boat to be seen. Give way, men, whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet of his sail; there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.
    • keywords: boat; like; pull; stubb
    • versions: original; plain text
47. chapter-051
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-051
    • date: None
    • words: 848
    • flesch: 65
    • summary: Queequeg, said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen? Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen.
    • keywords: whale
    • versions: original; plain text
48. chapter-052
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-052
    • date: None
    • words: 1034
    • flesch: 49
    • summary: Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt--above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent--those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.
    • keywords: ahab; boat
    • versions: original; plain text
49. chapter-053
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-053
    • date: None
    • words: 1531
    • flesch: 67
    • summary: These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow. THE SPIRIT-SPOUT Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena.
    • keywords: like; night
    • versions: original; plain text
50. chapter-054
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-054
    • date: None
    • words: 728
    • flesch: 75
    • summary: As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries--a whaler at sea, and long absent from home. and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to---- At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger's flanks.
    • keywords: ship
    • versions: original; plain text
51. chapter-055
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-055
    • date: None
    • words: 1660
    • flesch: 63
    • summary: High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees.
    • keywords: ships; whaling
    • versions: original; plain text
52. chapter-056
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-056
    • date: None
    • words: 8093
    • flesch: 70
    • summary: and for what are you bound?' demanded Steelkilt; 'no lies.' 'I am bound to Tahiti for more men.' 'Very good. The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:--'It's not our fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was boy's business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw; ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men?
    • keywords: captain; gentlemen; lakeman; radney; ship; steelkilt; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
53. chapter-057
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-057
    • date: None
    • words: 1925
    • flesch: 66
    • summary: But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale.
    • keywords: leviathan; like; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
54. chapter-058
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-058
    • date: None
    • words: 1332
    • flesch: 63
    • summary: OF THE LESS ERRONEOUS PICTURES OF WHALES, AND THE TRUE PICTURES OF WHALING SCENES In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, &c. But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery.
    • keywords: sea; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
55. chapter-059
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-059
    • date: None
    • words: 980
    • flesch: 66
    • summary: Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds.
    • keywords: savage; whales
    • versions: original; plain text
56. chapter-060
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-060
    • date: None
    • words: 1015
    • flesch: 64
    • summary: But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment's consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it. BRIT Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds.
    • keywords: ocean; sea
    • versions: original; plain text
57. chapter-061
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-061
    • date: None
    • words: 935
    • flesch: 68
    • summary: For though other species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.
    • keywords: whale
    • versions: original; plain text
58. chapter-062
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-062
    • date: None
    • words: 1499
    • flesch: 55
    • summary: Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an sthetics in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. All men live enveloped in whale-lines.
    • keywords: boat; line
    • versions: original; plain text
59. chapter-063
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-063
    • date: None
    • words: 2003
    • flesch: 77
    • summary: But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by Stubb's producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted.
    • keywords: boat; stubb; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
60. chapter-064
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-064
    • date: None
    • words: 577
    • flesch: 62
    • summary: But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started--what that is none know To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.
    • keywords: harpooneer
    • versions: original; plain text
61. chapter-065
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-065
    • date: None
    • words: 478
    • flesch: 60
    • summary: Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse. Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be simultaneously dangling about him.
    • keywords: second
    • versions: original; plain text
62. chapter-066
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-066
    • date: None
    • words: 3067
    • flesch: 80
    • summary: Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness--'top dat dam slappin' ob de tail! Here, take this lantern, snatching one from his sideboard; now then, go and preach to 'em! Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.
    • keywords: stubb; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
63. chapter-067
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-067
    • date: None
    • words: 1007
    • flesch: 74
    • summary: The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious.
    • keywords: whale
    • versions: original; plain text
64. chapter-068
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-068
    • date: None
    • words: 641
    • flesch: 63
    • summary: Queequeg no care what god made him shark, said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin. Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks,[15] by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part.
    • keywords: sharks
    • versions: original; plain text
65. chapter-069
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-069
    • date: None
    • words: 746
    • flesch: 63
    • summary: For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the scarf, simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard. Into this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows.
    • keywords: blubber
    • versions: original; plain text
66. chapter-070
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-070
    • date: None
    • words: 1214
    • flesch: 71
    • summary: It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say.
    • keywords: skin; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
67. chapter-071
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-071
    • date: None
    • words: 447
    • flesch: 79
    • summary: Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din.
    • keywords: whale
    • versions: original; plain text
68. chapter-072
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-072
    • date: None
    • words: 894
    • flesch: 73
    • summary: The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship's side--about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms.
    • keywords: head
    • versions: original; plain text
69. chapter-073
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-073
    • date: None
    • words: 2306
    • flesch: 68
    • summary: THE JEROBOAM'S STORY Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock. Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;--why it's Macey, and he's dead! Poor fellow!
    • keywords: boat; gabriel; ship
    • versions: original; plain text
70. chapter-074
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-074
    • date: None
    • words: 1675
    • flesch: 76
    • summary: I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and the ship--where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and swaying of both. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there with that great iron hook--poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.
    • keywords: ginger; queequeg
    • versions: original; plain text
71. chapter-075
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-075
    • date: None
    • words: 2238
    • flesch: 76
    • summary: Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats, Stubb's and Flask's, were detached in pursuit. Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale's body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that poured from the smitten rock.
    • keywords: devil; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
72. chapter-076
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-076
    • date: None
    • words: 1670
    • flesch: 68
    • summary: It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion.
    • keywords: eyes; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
73. chapter-077
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-077
    • date: None
    • words: 1258
    • flesch: 77
    • summary: The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whale-bone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
    • keywords: right; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
74. chapter-078
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-078
    • date: None
    • words: 880
    • flesch: 60
    • summary: So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelop; considering the unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction.
    • keywords: head
    • versions: original; plain text
75. chapter-079
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-079
    • date: None
    • words: 652
    • flesch: 60
    • summary: It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since--as has been elsewhere set forth--the head embraces one third of the whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's side. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale.
    • keywords: whale
    • versions: original; plain text
76. chapter-080
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-080
    • date: None
    • words: 1676
    • flesch: 68
    • summary: Why, diving after the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out our poor Tash by the head. Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which he had sunk.
    • keywords: bucket; head
    • versions: original; plain text
77. chapter-081
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-081
    • date: None
    • words: 951
    • flesch: 73
    • summary: Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.
    • keywords: sperm; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
78. chapter-082
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-082
    • date: None
    • words: 918
    • flesch: 68
    • summary: If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebr to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. But in life--as we have elsewhere seen--this inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm.
    • keywords: brain
    • versions: original; plain text
79. chapter-083
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-083
    • date: None
    • words: 4440
    • flesch: 75
    • summary: His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders. It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming.
    • keywords: boats; derick; ship; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
80. chapter-084
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-084
    • date: None
    • words: 1167
    • flesch: 60
    • summary: Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other.
    • keywords: perseus; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
81. chapter-085
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-085
    • date: None
    • words: 793
    • flesch: 65
    • summary: It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three days' journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general miracle.
    • keywords: whale
    • versions: original; plain text
82. chapter-086
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-086
    • date: None
    • words: 819
    • flesch: 69
    • summary: Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium. It is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme headway.
    • keywords: whale
    • versions: original; plain text
83. chapter-087
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-087
    • date: None
    • words: 2090
    • flesch: 67
    • summary: Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal, and as that long canal--like the grand Erie Canal--is furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air?
    • keywords: spout; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
84. chapter-088
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-088
    • date: None
    • words: 1866
    • flesch: 68
    • summary: Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. First, when used as a fin for progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.
    • keywords: flukes; tail; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
85. chapter-089
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-089
    • date: None
    • words: 4799
    • flesch: 64
    • summary: The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying in the Fishery,--the more whales the less fish. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of Sunda and Malacca.
    • keywords: like; line; long; straits; time; whales
    • versions: original; plain text
86. chapter-090
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-090
    • date: None
    • words: 1203
    • flesch: 63
    • summary: His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines.
    • keywords: harem; young
    • versions: original; plain text
87. chapter-091
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-091
    • date: None
    • words: 1447
    • flesch: 69
    • summary: Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? FAST-FISH AND LOOSE-FISH
    • keywords: fast; fish
    • versions: original; plain text
88. chapter-092
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-092
    • date: None
    • words: 1066
    • flesch: 71
    • summary: In his treatise on Queen-Gold, or Queen-pinmoney, an old King's Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and Queen, because of its superior excellence.
    • keywords: duke; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
89. chapter-093
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-093
    • date: None
    • words: 2593
    • flesch: 75
    • summary: Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales?
    • keywords: man; stubb; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
90. chapter-094
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-094
    • date: None
    • words: 985
    • flesch: 67
    • summary: The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose. Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course.
    • keywords: ambergris; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
91. chapter-095
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-095
    • date: None
    • words: 1651
    • flesch: 73
    • summary: poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns around his chest and neck. We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.
    • keywords: pip; stubb
    • versions: original; plain text
92. chapter-096
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-096
    • date: None
    • words: 1295
    • flesch: 72
    • summary: Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,--literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
    • keywords: sperm; squeeze
    • versions: original; plain text
93. chapter-097
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-097
    • date: None
    • words: 505
    • flesch: 63
    • summary: Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, king Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the first book of Kings. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.
    • keywords: idol
    • versions: original; plain text
94. chapter-098
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-098
    • date: None
    • words: 1848
    • flesch: 77
    • summary: As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
    • keywords: fire; try; works
    • versions: original; plain text
95. chapter-099
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-099
    • date: None
    • words: 250
    • flesch: 74
    • summary: But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. THE LAMP Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors.
    • keywords: oil
    • versions: original; plain text
96. chapter-100
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-100
    • date: None
    • words: 1037
    • flesch: 68
    • summary: One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening. STOWING DOWN AND CLEARING UP Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;--but
    • keywords: great; oil
    • versions: original; plain text
97. chapter-101
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-101
    • date: None
    • words: 2525
    • flesch: 88
    • summary: There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket. Wonder if he means me?--complimentary!--poor lad!--I could go hang myself. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes.
    • keywords: look; old; sun
    • versions: original; plain text
98. chapter-102
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-102
    • date: None
    • words: 2768
    • flesch: 74
    • summary: Hast seen the White Whale? So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing down under the stern. Man my boat! cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near him--Stand by to lower! In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger.
    • keywords: ahab; arm; captain
    • versions: original; plain text
99. chapter-103
    • author: None
    • title: chapter-103
    • date: None
    • words: 1782
    • flesch: 74
    • summary: Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open.
    • keywords: english; ship; whale
    • versions: original; plain text
100. chapter-104
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-104
     • date: None
     • words: 1581
     • flesch: 72
     • summary: There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances.
     • keywords: great; skeleton; whale
     • versions: original; plain text
101. chapter-105
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-105
     • date: None
     • words: 941
     • flesch: 75
     • summary: According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants. In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length compared with the living body.
     • keywords: feet
     • versions: original; plain text
102. chapter-106
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-106
     • date: None
     • words: 1446
     • flesch: 63
     • summary: For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore.
     • keywords: leviathan; whale
     • versions: original; plain text
103. chapter-107
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-107
     • date: None
     • words: 1587
     • flesch: 56
     • summary: Though so short a period ago--not a good life-time--the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. For Pliny tells us of whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length--Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!
     • keywords: feet; whale
     • versions: original; plain text
104. chapter-108
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-108
     • date: None
     • words: 945
     • flesch: 50
     • summary: But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;--he called the carpenter. AHAB'S LEG The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to his own person.
     • keywords: ahab
     • versions: original; plain text
105. chapter-109
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-109
     • date: None
     • words: 1069
     • flesch: 57
     • summary: For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:--repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it.
     • keywords: carpenter; like
     • versions: original; plain text
106. chapter-110
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-110
     • date: None
     • words: 1639
     • flesch: 94
     • summary: Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Oh, sir, it will break bones--beware, beware!
     • keywords: leg; sir
     • versions: original; plain text
107. chapter-111
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-111
     • date: None
     • words: 936
     • flesch: 78
     • summary: Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab? Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.--On deck! But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, Sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man. He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that! murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared.
     • keywords: ahab
     • versions: original; plain text
108. chapter-112
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-112
     • date: None
     • words: 2280
     • flesch: 73
     • summary: So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but--as we have elsewhere seen--mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. So that--let us say it again--no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest, and the ocean's invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher towards his destined heaven.
     • keywords: coffin; poor; queequeg
     • versions: original; plain text
109. chapter-113
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-113
     • date: None
     • words: 431
     • flesch: 68
     • summary: The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. THE PACIFIC When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.
     • keywords: sea
     • versions: original; plain text
110. chapter-114
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-114
     • date: None
     • words: 956
     • flesch: 61
     • summary: But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest. The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!
     • keywords: blacksmith; old
     • versions: original; plain text
111. chapter-115
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-115
     • date: None
     • words: 1253
     • flesch: 84
     • summary: they are always flying in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;--look here, they burn; but thou--thou liv'st among them without a scorch. Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab, answered Perth, resting for a moment on his hammer; I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou scorch a scar. Would'st thou brand me, Perth? wincing for a moment with the pain; have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then? Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab.
     • keywords: ahab; thou
     • versions: original; plain text
112. chapter-116
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-116
     • date: None
     • words: 653
     • flesch: 70
     • summary: But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,--in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.
     • keywords: like
     • versions: original; plain text
113. chapter-117
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-117
     • date: None
     • words: 910
     • flesch: 71
     • summary: As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single fish. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig.
     • keywords: ship
     • versions: original; plain text
114. chapter-118
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-118
     • date: None
     • words: 524
     • flesch: 72
     • summary: It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns. Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.
     • keywords: whale
     • versions: original; plain text
115. chapter-119
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-119
     • date: None
     • words: 478
     • flesch: 87
     • summary: Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be thine? And who are hearsed that die on the sea? But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in America. I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it. Take another pledge, old man, said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom,--Hemp only can kill thee.
     • keywords: man
     • versions: original; plain text
116. chapter-120
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-120
     • date: None
     • words: 913
     • flesch: 77
     • summary: Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab's, was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun! Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: Foolish toy!
     • keywords: thou
     • versions: original; plain text
117. chapter-121
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-121
     • date: None
     • words: 2580
     • flesch: 83
     • summary: Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:-- All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm--God, God is against thee, old man; forbear!
     • keywords: starbuck; thee; thou
     • versions: original; plain text
118. chapter-122
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-122
     • date: None
     • words: 192
     • flesch: 101
     • summary: Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud.
     • keywords: sir
     • versions: original; plain text
119. chapter-123
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-123
     • date: None
     • words: 652
     • flesch: 92
     • summary: MIDNIGHT--THE FORECASTLE BULWARKS Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the anchors there hanging. Shake yourself; you're Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat collar.
     • keywords: flask
     • versions: original; plain text
120. chapter-124
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-124
     • date: None
     • words: 55
     • flesch: 102
     • summary: We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. MIDNIGHT ALOFT--THUNDER AND LIGHTNING The Main-top-sail yard.--Tashtego passing new lashings around it.
     • keywords: thunder
     • versions: original; plain text
121. chapter-125
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-125
     • date: None
     • words: 1250
     • flesch: 86
     • summary: boy!--But if I wake thee not to death, old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week may sink, with all the crew! The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels.
     • keywords: fair; man
     • versions: original; plain text
122. chapter-126
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-126
     • date: None
     • words: 1229
     • flesch: 74
     • summary: But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's. Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.
     • keywords: ahab; sun
     • versions: original; plain text
123. chapter-127
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-127
     • date: None
     • words: 1145
     • flesch: 94
     • summary: THE LOG AND LINE While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log and line.
     • keywords: line; pip
     • versions: original; plain text
124. chapter-128
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-128
     • date: None
     • words: 1428
     • flesch: 84
     • summary: In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses.
     • keywords: coffin; life
     • versions: original; plain text
125. chapter-129
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-129
     • date: None
     • words: 742
     • flesch: 95
     • summary: What's here? Life buoy, sir. But art thou not also the undertaker? Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into something else.
     • keywords: sir
     • versions: original; plain text
126. chapter-130
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-130
     • date: None
     • words: 1438
     • flesch: 72
     • summary: The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats--ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction--the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew; but among the number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which was only solved for him by his chief mate's instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the majority first.
     • keywords: boat; ship
     • versions: original; plain text
127. chapter-131
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-131
     • date: None
     • words: 594
     • flesch: 99
     • summary: and crazy!--but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again. They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. THE CABIN (Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.)
     • keywords: thee
     • versions: original; plain text
128. chapter-132
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-132
     • date: None
     • words: 1716
     • flesch: 63
     • summary: For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew.
     • keywords: ahab; night
     • versions: original; plain text
129. chapter-134
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-134
     • date: None
     • words: 1639
     • flesch: 89
     • summary: Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey--more a demon than a man!--aye, aye! what a forty years' fool--fool--old fool, has old Ahab been!
     • keywords: ahab; old
     • versions: original; plain text
130. chapter-135
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-135
     • date: None
     • words: 3615
     • flesch: 76
     • summary: Boats, boats! Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails set--all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out, said Tashtego.
     • keywords: ahab; boat; whale; white
     • versions: original; plain text
131. chapter-136
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-136
     • date: None
     • words: 3350
     • flesch: 78
     • summary: Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being. Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.
     • keywords: ahab; man; men; whale
     • versions: original; plain text
132. chapter-137
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-137
     • date: None
     • words: 4596
     • flesch: 86
     • summary: Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.
     • keywords: ahab; boat; ship; whale
     • versions: original; plain text
133. chapter-138
     • author: None
     • title: chapter-138
     • date: None
     • words: 277
     • flesch: 84
     • summary: Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.
     • keywords: day
     • versions: original; plain text