Moby Dick Pod

"As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love."Ishmael discuses the differences between the sexes of the whales. 

"Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up."The Pequod discovers a pod of whales in the pacific and go on a long hunt. Cows & calfs.

"Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will." We're talking about the tail of the whale. 

"And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts."Ishmael considers the spout of the whale and its larger meaning. 

"The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the monster die."Description of another weapons used to kill whales. 

"Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless."We're still talking about Jonah. 

"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method."A literary comparison of whaling heroes and myths. 

"For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all."The Pequod meets a German ship at the same time a whale is spotted. A hunts ensues and the whales is killed but is too heavy and sinks. The whale is old and an easy target. Cruelty is on display. 

"I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul."Ishmael talks whale phrenology. 

"As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled."We discuss the pseudo science of Physiognomist or Phrenologist, which Ishmael also calls pseudo science and says he doesn't quite understand but tries anyway. 

"...smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale."Tashtego has a terrible accident. Queequeg saves the day. 

"Attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and—in this particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped."We're still talking about the guts of the whale. 

"But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then?"Not gonna lie, I have no idea what this chapter was about. 

"I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death."We're still talking about Whale carcasses. 

"This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed."We examine the difference in whale's heads. Eyes & ears. 

"And so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free to fly."Flask and Stubb kill and whale and gossip about Fedallah and how much they think he's the devil. 

"That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad."Ishmael holds Queequeg vertically by a rope while he works on cutting up the whale and contemplates their connection. Some ginger tea gets brought out and tossed overboard. 

"lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen."The Pequod encounters another ship, The Jeroboam, which has been taken over by a madman religious fanatic who believes himself to be the archangel Gabriel. 

"That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations."The Whale is beheaded and Ahab asks the whale to speak. Which... the whale does not do. 

"Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world."Thoughts on the death of a whale.

"Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own."Ishmael talks about the whale's skin and marvels at its extraordinary qualities. 

"The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods."The sailors cut the blubber off of the whale. A gruesome sight.  

"These two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks*, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part."The nearby sharks want a piece of that whale and the sailors must keep them away by stabbing into the water. 

"Who is not a cannibal?"Stubb eats whale. Which may or may not be civilized. And why do we eat the things we do?  And who's to say? 

"If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil."Stubb teases and torments the ship's cook, Fleece, about the proper way to cook a whale steak. Fleece gives a sermon to the sharks down below. 

"Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters."We learn about a tool used by whalemen. 

"The vast majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them."We learn of the fortitude and superhuman strength of the harpooner. 

"Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight."The title says it all. 

What is this book anyway? 

"All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life." Ishmael describes the horrors and subtleties of the whale-line. 

"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!"A squid is mistaken for Moby Dick. 

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?"Ishmael pontificates on the cruel and unpredictable nature of  land, life, and the sea.

Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me.Ishmael talks about other images of whales. 

From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies.Ishmael reviews different art and artists who have tried to capture whales in pictures.  

"Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan."Ishmael tells us how everyone does the Whale wrong. 

"The next instant the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale."In which Herman Melville needs an editor. Haha. Just kidding. A story heard from a person, who then repeated the story in his sleep and Ishmael overhears it, in which, a mutiny occurs on another ship named The Town-Ho, and after that some people get killed by Moby Dick and basically the head mutineer, a BA guy from Buffalo, New York escapes to France. Also, it's told to a bunch of random guys in Lima, Peru. 

"In the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows."Ishmael tells us about the Gam, a tradition where sailors trade information and chit chat.  

"Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific Ocean!"The Pequod passes another ship, The Albatross and they attempt to brief conversation but nature seems to have other plans. 

"Beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm."The crew all witness a whale spout and there's the feeling like nature is personifying and turning against the ship. Probably nothing to worry about. 

"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." Ishmael ponders Ahab's phantom crew of whale hunters. 

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own."Ishmael rethinks his voyage on the Pequod and makes Queegqueg the inheritor of his possessions. 

"Devils are good fellows enough."They hunt the a pod of whales in the middle of a squall, Ahab has a secret whale-boat crew unbeknownst to the rest of The Pequod until now. 

"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"The Pequod spots a whale. 

"To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order."Ahab walks a fine line between dominion over the ship's crew and chaos. 

"For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it."Ishmael reviews other times whales have attacked ships. 

"And when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire."Ahab's got a chart of the seas and is also insane. And also has a demon inside him which doesn't sleep. Definitely the qualities you'd want in your captain.  

"There is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck"There's a mysterious noise. 

"What the White Whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid."Ishmael talks about all things white. 

"Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing."We learn of the sailor's lore surrounding Moby Dick and also of how Ahab came to lose his leg and his return to Nantucket. 

"Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy"The crew starts dancing, drinking, getting horny, and starting a race war. 

"Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!"Stubb's thoughts. A true Melville-needed-an-editor chapter.