The sailors aboard the Pequod now
see this very Gabriel in front of them. As Captain Mayhew tells
Ahab a story about the White Whale, Gabriel interrupts continually.
According to Mayhew, he and his men first heard about the existence
of Moby Dick when they were speaking to another ship. Gabriel then
warned against killing it, calling it “the Shaker God incarnated.”
They ran into Moby Dick a year later, and the ship’s leaders decided
to hunt it. As a mate stood in the ship to throw his lance, the
whale flipped the mate into the air and tossed him into the sea.
No one was harmed except for the mate, who drowned.
Gabriel had watched this episode from the masthead.
The apparent fulfillment of his prophecy has led the crew to become
his disciples. When Ahab confirms that he still intends to hunt
the White Whale, Gabriel points to him, saying, “Think, think of
the blasphemer—dead, and down there!—beware of the blasphemer’s
end!” Ahab realizes that the Pequod is carrying
a letter for the dead mate and tries to hand it over to Captain
Mayhew on the end of a cutting-spade pole. Gabriel manages to grab
it, impales it on the boat-knife, and sends it back to Ahab’s feet
as the Jeroboam’s boat pulls away.
Chapter 72: The Monkey-Rope
Ishmael backtracks to explain how Queequeg initially
inserts the blubber hook into the whale for the cutting-in. Ishmael,
as Queequeg’s bowsman, ties the monkey-rope around his own waist,
“wedding” himself to Queequeg, who is on the whale’s floating body
trying to attach the hook. (In a footnote, we learn that only on
the Pequod were the monkey and this holder actually
tied together, an improvement introduced by Stubb, who found that
it increases the reliability of the holder.) While Ishmael holds
Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo brandish their whale-spades to keep
the sharks away. When Dough-Boy, the steward, offers Queequeg some
tepid ginger and water, the mates frown at the influence of pesky
Temperance activists and make the steward bring him alcohol. The
remainder of the ginger, a gift from “Aunt Charity,” a Nantucket
matron, is thrown overboard.
Chapter 73: Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and
Then Have a Talk Over Him
The Pequod spots a right whale.
After killing the whale, Stubb asks Flask what Ahab might want with
this “lump of foul lard” (right whales were far less valuable than
sperm whales). Flask responds that Fedallah says that a whaler with
a sperm whale’s head on her starboard side and a right whale’s head
on her larboard will never capsize afterward. They then both confess
that they don’t like Fedallah and think of him as “the devil in
disguise.” The right whale’s head is lifted onto the opposite side
of the boat from the sperm whale’s head, and, in fact, the Pequod settles
into balance. As Ishmael observes, however, the ship would float
even better with neither head there. He observes Fedallah standing
in Ahab’s shadow and notes that Fedallah’s shadow “seem[s] to blend
with, and lengthen Ahab’s.”
Analysis: Chapters 66–73
This series of chapters juxtaposes the practical matters
of whaling with a series of perceptual problems. The sharks that
swarm around the boat seem to possess malevolent agency even after
they are killed. Whale carcasses find their way into ships’ logs
as rocks or shoals, giving rise to long-lasting errors. Ishmael
argues that the whale’s blubber is its skin, but his argument suggests
that any such classification of the whale’s parts must be arbitrary.
Such difficulties suggest that mistakes and misreadings cannot be
avoided, and that comparison and approximation are the only means
by which things can be described.
Instead of anthropomorphizing the whale—that is, assigning
it human characteristics—Ishmael takes features of the whale and presents
them as potential models for human life. He admires and envies the
whale’s blubber, which insulates the whale and enables it to withstand
its environment, as evidenced by his cry of “Oh, man! admire and
model thyself after the whale!” For Ishmael, however, the human
acquiring of such an attribute has metaphorical significance: the
idea of “remain[ing] warm among ice” hearkens back to the image,
in Chapter 58, of the soul’s small island
of “peace and joy” amid terrorizing oceans. With its “rare
virtue of a strong individual vitality,” then, the whale, unlike
man, according to Ishmael, exists in a sort of bliss of perfection,
self-possession, and independence.
