94-526: Acushnet may refer to : Places [ edit ] Acushnet, Massachusetts , U.S. Acushnet Center, Massachusetts Acushnet Heights Historic District , New Bedford, Massachusetts Acushnet River , in Massachusetts Other uses [ edit ] Acushnet Company , golf equipment manufacturer Acushnet , a whaling ship on which Herman Melville served Topics referred to by
188-575: A comical " prose poem " that blends "high and low with a relaxed assurance". Similar passages include the "marvelous hymn to spiritual democracy" in the middle of "Knights and Squires". The elaborate use of the Homeric simile may not have been learned from Homer himself, yet Matthiessen finds the writing "more consistently alive" on the Homeric than on the Shakespearean level, especially during
282-415: A few handfuls. Days later, Pip , a little African American cabin-boy, jumps in panic from Stubb's whale boat and the whale must be cut loose because Pip is entangled in the line; a few days later Pip again jumps in panic, is left alone in the sea, and has gone insane by the time he is picked up. Cooled spermaceti congeals and must be squeezed back into liquid state; blubber is boiled in the try-pots on deck;
376-465: A force of linearity and Ishmael a force of digression. While both have an angry sense of being orphaned, they try to come to terms with this hole in their beings in different ways: Ahab with violence, Ishmael with meditation. And while the plot in Moby-Dick may be driven by Ahab's anger, Ishmael's desire to get a hold of the "ungraspable" accounts for the novel's lyricism. Buell sees a double quest in
470-527: A grand, ungodly, god-like man" who nevertheless "has his humanities". They hire Queequeg the following morning. A man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate should Ishmael and Queequeg join Ahab. While provisions are loaded, shadowy figures board the ship. On a cold Christmas Day, the Pequod leaves the harbor. Ishmael discusses cetology (the zoological classification and natural history of the whale), and describes
564-523: A masque of the situation confronting man, a pageant of the humors within men, a parade of the nations, and so forth, as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the White Whale". Scholar Nathalia Wright sees the meetings and the significance of the vessels along other lines. She singles out the four vessels which have already encountered Moby Dick. The first, the Jeroboam , is named after
658-451: A metrical pattern, the rhythms are "evenly controlled—too evenly perhaps for prose", Bezanson suggests. A third level is the idiomatic , and just as the poetic it hardly is present in pure form. Examples of this are "the consistently excellent idiom" of Stubb, such as in the way he encourages the rowing crew in a rhythm of speech that suggests "the beat of the oars takes the place of the metronomic meter". The fourth and final level of rhetoric
752-462: A middle school. The Acushnet Elementary School serves students from preschool to fourth grade, and the Albert F. Ford Middle School serves students from fifth to eighth grade. The schools are located next to each other on Middle Road, near the geographic center of town. Rising high school students are able to attend one of two public high schools in neighboring municipalities: Fairhaven High School of
846-401: A mysterious spell on Ishmael: "Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine". Instead of rounding Cape Horn , Ahab heads for the equatorial Pacific Ocean via southern Africa. One afternoon, as Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat—"its warp seemed necessity, his hand free will, and Queequeg's sword chance"— Tashtego sights a sperm whale . Five previously unknown men appear on deck and are revealed to be
940-403: A private Catholic school serving kindergarten through eighth grade. Moby Dick Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 epic novel by American writer Herman Melville . The book is centered on the sailor Ishmael 's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab , captain of the whaling ship Pequod , for vengeance against Moby Dick , the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on
1034-427: A resident of Nantucket. When Ahab finally appears on the quarterdeck , he announces he is out for revenge on the white whale which took one leg from the knee down and left him with a prosthesis fashioned from a whale's jawbone. Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick a doubloon , a gold coin, which he nails to the mast. Starbuck objects that he has not come for vengeance but for profit. Ahab's purpose exercises
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#17327766763821128-523: A spare seachest, which is later caulked and pitched to replace the Pequod ' s life buoy. The Pequod sails northeast toward Formosa and into the Pacific Ocean. Ahab, with one nostril, smells the musk from the Bashee isles, and with the other, the salt of the waters where Moby Dick swims. Ahab goes to Perth, the blacksmith, with a bag of racehorse shoenail stubs to be forged into the shank of
1222-551: A special crew selected by Ahab and explain the shadowy figures seen boarding the ship. Their leader, Fedallah , a Parsee , is Ahab's harpooneer. The pursuit is unsuccessful. Southeast of the Cape of Good Hope , the Pequod makes the first of nine sea-encounters, or " gams ", with other ships: Ahab hails the Goney (Albatross) to ask whether they have seen the White Whale, but the trumpet through which her captain tries to speak falls into
1316-563: A special harpoon, and with his razors for Perth to melt and fashion into a harpoon barb. Ahab tempers the barb in blood from Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo. The Pequod gams next with the Bachelor , a Nantucket ship heading home full of sperm oil. Every now and then, the Pequod lowers for whales with success. On one of those nights in the whaleboat, Fedallah prophesies that neither hearse nor coffin can be Ahab's, that before he dies, Ahab must see two hearses — one not made by mortal hands and
1410-453: A speech on the spirit of fire, seeing the lightning as a portent of Moby Dick. Starbuck sees the lightning as a warning, and feels tempted to shoot the sleeping Ahab with a musket. The next morning, when he finds that the lightning disoriented the compass, Ahab makes a new one out of a lance, a maul, and a sailmaker's needle. He orders the log be heaved, but the weathered line snaps, leaving the ship with no way to fix its location. The Pequod
1504-488: A throne", and "my fingers ... began ... to serpentine and spiralize ". For Arvin, the essence of the writing style of Moby-Dick lies in the manner in which the parts of speech are 'intermixingly' assorted in Melville's style—so that the distinction between verbs and nouns, substantives and modifiers, becomes a half unreal one—this is the prime characteristic of his language. No feature of it could express more tellingly
1598-517: A whaling voyage. The inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a bed with the tattooed cannibal Polynesian Queequeg , a harpooneer whose father was king of the fictional island of Rokovoko . The next morning, Ishmael and Queequeg attend Father Mapple 's sermon on Jonah , then head for Nantucket . Ishmael signs up with the Quaker ship-owners Bildad and Peleg for a voyage on their whaler Pequod . Peleg describes Captain Ahab : "He's
1692-432: A yardarm opposite the sperm whale's head. Ishmael compares the two heads in a philosophical way: the right whale is Lockean , stoic , and the sperm whale is Kantean , platonic . Tashtego cuts into the head of the sperm whale and retrieves buckets of spermaceti . He falls into the head, which in turn falls off the yardarm into the sea. Queequeg dives after him and frees his mate with his sword. The Pequod next gams with
1786-487: Is "a matter of shaping what exists by the way in which we see it". The point is not that Ahab would discover the whale as an object, but that he would perceive it as a symbol of his making. Yet Melville does not offer easy solutions. Ishmael and Queequeg's sensual friendship initiates a kind of racial harmony that is shattered when the crew's dancing erupts into racial conflict in "Midnight, Forecastle" (Ch. 40). Fifty chapters later, Pip suffers mental disintegration after he
1880-642: Is dedicated to Hawthorne, "in token of my admiration for his genius". The book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale , in a single-volume edition in New York in November. The London publisher, Richard Bentley , censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change of
1974-573: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Acushnet, Massachusetts Acushnet ( / ə ˈ k ʊ ʃ n ə t / ) is a town in Bristol County , Massachusetts , United States. The population was 10,559 at the 2020 census. Acushnet is a part of the South Coast region of Massachusetts which encompasses the cities and towns that surround Buzzards Bay (excluding
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#17327766763822068-503: Is modeled on a notoriously hard-to-catch albino whale Mocha Dick , and the book's ending is based on the sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820. The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and of extracting whale oil , as well as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration of class and social status , good and evil, and the existence of God . The book's literary influences include Shakespeare , Thomas Carlyle , Sir Thomas Browne and
2162-584: Is now heading southeast toward Moby Dick. A man falls overboard from the mast. The life buoy is thrown, but both sink. Queequeg now proposes that his superfluous coffin be used as a new life buoy. Starbuck orders the carpenter to seal and waterproof it. The next morning, the ship meets in another truncated gam with the Rachel , commanded by Captain Gardiner from Nantucket. The Rachel is seeking survivors from one of her whaleboats which had gone after Moby Dick. Among
2256-419: Is reminded that as a slave he would be worth less money than a whale. Commodified and brutalized, "Pip becomes the ship's conscience". His views of property are another example of wrestling with moral choice. In Chapter 89, " Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish , Ishmael expounds the legal concept "fast-fish and loose-fish", which gives right of ownership to those who take possession of an abandoned fish or ship; he compares
2350-432: Is revealed, but only to the crew: a defiant sailor who struck an oppressive officer is flogged, and when that officer led the chase for Moby Dick, he fell from the boat and was killed by the whale. Ishmael digresses on pictures of whales, brit (microscopic sea creatures on which whales feed), squid and—after four boats are lowered in vain because Daggoo mistook a giant squid for the white whale—whale-lines. The next day, in
2444-515: Is the composite , "a magnificent blending" of the first three and possible other elements: The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on
2538-448: Is the series of nine meetings between the Pequod and other ships. These meetings are important in three ways. First, their placement in the narrative: the initial two meetings and the last two are both close to each other. The central group of five gams are separated by about 12 chapters. This pattern provides a structural element, remarks Bezanson, as if the encounters were "bones to the book's flesh". Second, Ahab's developing responses to
2632-849: The Acushnet Center census-designated place , which is the most densely-populated part of town. The CDP contains 28.7% of the town's overall population and just 7.7% of its land area. Acushnet lies along the Acushnet River and its tributaries, including the Keene River and Squinn Brook, which feed the New Bedford Reservoir, in turn feeding the Acushnet. The Acushnet River is the town line between it and New Bedford south of Main Street. There are several other ponds in
2726-535: The Bible . In addition to narrative prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions , soliloquies , and asides . In August 1850, with the manuscript perhaps half finished, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne and was deeply impressed by his Mosses from an Old Manse , which he compared to Shakespeare in its cosmic ambitions. This encounter may have inspired him to revise and deepen Moby-Dick , which
2820-569: The Elizabeth Islands , Bourne and Falmouth ), Mount Hope Bay and the Sakonnet River . Acushnet was first settled in 1659. It has been included as a part of three separate towns throughout its history. It was formerly the northeastern section of the town of Dartmouth , as well as Old Dartmouth , which included the towns of Westport , New Bedford , and Fairhaven . In 1787, New Bedford separated from Dartmouth, and included
2914-479: The Indian Ocean , Stubb kills a sperm whale, and that night Fleece, the Pequod ' s black cook, prepares him a rare whale steak. Fleece, at Stubb's request, delivers a sermon to the sharks that fight each other to feast on the whale's carcass, tied to the ship, saying that their nature is to be voracious, but they must overcome it. The whale is prepared, beheaded, and barrels of oil are tried out. Standing at
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3008-621: The Jungfrau from Bremen. Both ships sight whales simultaneously, with the Pequod winning the contest. The three harpooneers dart their harpoons, and Flask delivers the mortal strike with a lance. The carcass sinks, and Queequeg barely manages to escape. The Pequod ' s next gam is with the French whaler Bouton de Rose , whose crew is ignorant of the ambergris in the gut of the diseased whale in their possession. Stubb talks them out of it, but Ahab orders him away before he can recover more than
3102-615: The MBTA Commuter Rail system is currently in the process of expanding their route to end in neighboring New Bedford. New Bedford also has the nearest airport, the New Bedford Regional Airport . The nearest airport with national service is T.F. Green Airport in Rhode Island, 40 mi (64 km) to the west. According to the U.S. Census Bureau , the mean travel time to work among residents
3196-565: The Pequod ' s own fate. Second, the increasingly impressive encounters with whales. In the early encounters, the whaleboats hardly make contact; later there are false alarms and routine chases; finally, the massive assembling of whales at the edges of the China Sea in "The Grand Armada". A typhoon near Japan sets the stage for Ahab's confrontation with Moby Dick. The third pattern is the cetological documentation, so lavish that it can be divided into two subpatterns. These chapters start with
3290-566: The Titleist brand name, under which golf balls, golf clubs, and other golf paraphernalia are marketed. According to the United States Census Bureau , the town has a total area of 19.0 square miles (49.1 km ), of which 18.4 square miles (47.7 km ) is land and 0.54 square miles (1.4 km ), or 2.76%, is water. Acushnet is bordered to the east and northeast by Rochester , to the southeast by Mattapoisett , to
3384-532: The town meeting form of government, with open town meetings and the Board of Selectmen leading the Town Administrator. The town has its own police force, and two fire stations, near the population center of town and in the northeast corner of town. Acushnet is divided into three electoral precincts . Precinct 1 contains the southern part of town, including Acushnet Center . Precincts 2 and 3 encompass
3478-588: The "[masquerade in kingly weeds of] a wild egoism, anarchic, irresponsible, and destructive". "Above all", say the scholars Bryant and Springer, Moby-Dick is language: "nautical, biblical , Homeric , Shakespearean , Miltonic , cetological , alliterative , fanciful, colloquial , archaic and unceasingly allusive ". Melville stretches grammar, quotes well-known or obscure sources, or swings from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition, seaman's slang, mystic speculation, or wild prophetic archaism. Melville coined words, critic Newton Arvin recognizes, as if
3572-424: The Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. The novel uses several levels of rhetoric. The simplest is "a relatively straightforward expository style", such as in the cetological chapters, though they are "rarely sustained, and serve chiefly as transitions" between more sophisticated levels. A second level is the " poetic ", such as in Ahab's quarterdeck monologue, to the point that it can be set as blank verse . Set over
3666-520: The English vocabulary were too limited for the complex things he had to express. Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly plural, such as allurings , coincidings , and leewardings . Equally abundant are unfamiliar adjectives and adverbs, including participial adjectives such as officered , omnitooled , and uncatastrophied ; participial adverbs such as intermixingly , postponedly , and uninterpenetratingly ; rarities such as
3760-546: The Fairhaven Public School District to the south, or New Bedford High School of New Bedford Public Schools to the west. High school students may also choose to attend Old Colony Regional Vocational Technical High School in neighboring Rochester, Bristol County Agricultural High School in Dighton, or any other local private high school. The town is also home to Saint Francis Xavier School,
3854-550: The Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him" ( I Kings 16:33). An early enthusiast for the Melville Revival, British author E. M. Forster remarked in 1927: " Moby-Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem." Yet he saw as "the essential" in the book "its prophetic song", which flows "like an undercurrent" beneath the surface action and morality. The hunt for
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3948-451: The adjectives unsmoothable , spermy , and leviathanic , and adverbs such as sultanically , Spanishly , and Venetianly ; and adjectival compounds ranging from odd to magnificent, such as "the message-carrying air", "the circus-running sun", and " teeth-tiered sharks". It is rarer for Melville to create his own verbs from nouns, but he does this with what Arvin calls "irresistible effect", such as in "who didst thunder him higher than
4042-500: The ancient history of whaling and a bibliographical classification of whales, getting closer with second-hand stories of the evil of whales in general and of Moby Dick in particular, a chronologically ordered commentary on pictures of whales. The climax to this section is chapter 57, "Of whales in paint etc.", which begins with the humble (a beggar in London) and ends with the sublime (the constellation Cetus). The next chapter ("Brit"), thus
4136-399: The awareness that lies below and behind Moby-Dick —the awareness that action and condition, movement and stasis, object and idea, are but surface aspects of one underlying reality. Later critics have expanded Arvin's categories. The superabundant vocabulary can be broken down into strategies used individually and in combination. First, the original modification of words as "Leviathanism" and
4230-416: The bipolar observer/hero narrative", that is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who are intertwined and contrasted with each other, with Ishmael the observer and narrator. As the story of Ishmael, remarks Robert Milder, it is a "narrative of education". Bryant and Springer find that the book is structured around the two consciousnesses of Ahab and Ishmael, with Ahab as
4324-569: The book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". Its opening sentence , "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous. Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850 and finished 18 months later, a year after he had anticipated. Melville drew on his experience as a common sailor from 1841 to 1844, including on whalers, and on wide reading in whaling literature. The white whale
4418-409: The book, are developed enough to be called "events". As Bezanson writes, "in each case a killing provokes either a chapter sequence or a chapter cluster of cetological lore growing out of the circumstance of the particular killing," thus these killings are "structural occasions for ordering the whaling essays and sermons". Buell observes that the "narrative architecture" is an "idiosyncratic variant of
4512-418: The book: Ahab's is to hunt Moby Dick, Ishmael's is "to understand what to make of both whale and hunt". One of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of genres. Bezanson mentions sermons, dreams, travel account, autobiography, Elizabethan plays, and epic poetry. He calls Ishmael's explanatory footnotes to establish the documentary genre "a Nabokovian touch". A significant structural device
4606-412: The chapter structure can be divided into "chapter sequences", "chapter clusters", and "balancing chapters". The simplest sequences are of narrative progression, then sequences of theme such as the three chapters on whale painting, and sequences of structural similarity, such as the five dramatic chapters beginning with "The Quarter-Deck" or the four chapters beginning with "The Candles". Chapter clusters are
4700-500: The chapters on the significance of the color white, and those on the meaning of fire. Balancing chapters are chapters of opposites, such as "Loomings" versus the "Epilogue", or similars, such as "The Quarter-Deck" and "The Candles". Scholar Lawrence Buell describes the arrangement of the non-narrative chapters as structured around three patterns: first, the nine meetings of the Pequod with ships that have encountered Moby Dick. Each has been more and more severely damaged, foreshadowing
4794-517: The coin in a way shaped by his own personality. Later, the American edition has Ahab "discover no sign" (Ch. 133) of the whale when he is staring into the deep. In fact, Moby Dick is then swimming up at him. In the British edition, Melville changed the word "discover" to "perceive", and with good reason, for "discovery" means finding what is already there, but "perceiving", or better still, perception,
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#17327766763824888-789: The concept to events in history, such as the European colonization of the Americas , the partitions of Poland , and the Mexican–American War . The novel has also been read as critical of the contemporary literary and philosophical movement Transcendentalism , attacking the thought of leading Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. The life and death of Ahab has been read as an attack on Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance , for one, in its destructive potential and potential justification for egoism . Richard Chase writes that for Melville, "Death—spiritual, emotional, physical—is
4982-400: The crew members of the Pequod . Although Ishmael initially is afraid of Queequeg as a tattooed possible cannibal, he soon decides that he would "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." While it may be rare for a mid-19th century American book to feature Black characters in a nonslavery context, slavery is frequently mentioned. The theme of race is carried primarily by Pip,
5076-412: The crew members. The chief mate is 30-year-old Starbuck , a Nantucket Quaker with a realist mentality, whose harpooneer is Queequeg; second mate is Stubb , from Cape Cod , happy-go-lucky and cheerful, whose harpooneer is Tashtego , a proud, pure-blooded Indian from Gay Head ; and the third mate is Flask , also from Martha's Vineyard , short, stout, whose harpooneer is Daggoo , a tall African, now
5170-420: The deck and stands near Fedallah. On the first day of the chase, Ahab smells the whale, climbs the mast, and sights Moby Dick. He claims the doubloon for himself, and orders all boats to lower except for Starbuck's. The whale bites Ahab's boat in two, tosses the captain out of it, and scatters the crew. On the second day of the chase, Ahab leaves Starbuck in charge of the Pequod . Moby Dick smashes into splinters
5264-473: The destroyed ship is the hearse made of American wood in Fedallah's prophecy. Moby Dick returns "within a few yards of Ahab's boat", a harpoon is darted, the line gets tangled, and Ahab stoops to free it. In doing so, the line loops around Ahab's neck. As the mortally stricken whale swims away, the captain is drawn with him out of sight. Queequeg's coffin comes to the surface, and it is the only thing to escape
5358-471: The diminutive Black cabin boy. When Pip has almost drowned, and Ahab, genuinely touched by Pip's suffering, questions him gently, Pip "can only parrot the language of an advertisement for the return of a fugitive slave: 'Pip! Reward for Pip!'". Editors Bryant and Springer suggest that perception is a central theme—the difficulty of seeing and understanding, which makes deep reality hard to discover and truth hard to pin down. Ahab explains that, like all things,
5452-402: The evil whale wears a disguise: "All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks"—and Ahab is determined to "strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside, except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall" (Ch. 36, "The Quarter-Deck"). This theme pervades the novel, perhaps never so emphatically as in "The Doubloon" (Ch. 99), where each crewmember perceives
5546-510: The exaggerated repetition of modified words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity", "pitied" and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin"). Second, the use of existing words in new ways, as when the whale "heaps" and "tasks". Third, words lifted from specialized fields, as "fossiliferous". Fourth, the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires"). Fifth, using
5640-470: The federal level, Acushnet is part of Massachusetts's 9th congressional district , which is represented by William R. Keating ; it is represented in the United States Senate by Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey . The town of Acushnet first established a free library in 1896. The town's Russell Memorial Library, dedicated to a member of the prominent Russell family of New Bedford, lies in
5734-405: The final chase the "controlled accumulation" of such similes emphasizes Ahab's hubris through a succession of land-images, for instance: "The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field" ("The Chase – Second Day", Ch. 134). A paragraph-long simile describes how the 30 men of the crew became a single unit: For as
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#17327766763825828-427: The fouled lines, is lashed to the whale's back, so Moby Dick turns out to be the hearse Fedallah prophesied. Ahab plants his harpoon in the whale's flank. Moby Dick smites the whaleboat, tossing its men into the sea. Only Ishmael is unable to return to the boat. He is left behind in the sea, and so is the only crewman of the Pequod to survive the final encounter. The whale destroys the Pequod . Ahab then realizes that
5922-643: The gam by rushing back to his ship. The narrator now discusses the subjects of (1) whalers' supply; (2) a glen in Tranque in the Arsacides islands full of carved whale bones, fossil whales, whale skeleton measurements; (3) the chance that the magnitude of the whale will diminish and that the leviathan might perish. Leaving the Samuel Enderby , Ahab wrenches his ivory leg and orders the carpenter to fashion him another. Starbuck informs Ahab of oil leakage in
6016-405: The head of the whale, Ahab begs it to speak of the depths of the sea. The Pequod next encounters the Jeroboam , which not only lost its chief mate to Moby Dick, but also is now plagued by an epidemic. The whale carcass still lies in the water. Queequeg mounts it, tied to Ishmael's belt by a monkey-rope as if they were Siamese twins . Stubb and Flask kill a right whale whose head is fastened to
6110-525: The hold. Reluctantly, Ahab orders the harpooneers to inspect the casks. Queequeg, sweating all day below decks, develops a chill and soon is almost mortally feverish. The carpenter makes a coffin for Queequeg, who fears an ordinary burial at sea . Queequeg tries it for size, with Pip sobbing and beating his tambourine, standing by and calling himself a coward while he praises Queequeg for his gameness. Queequeg suddenly rallies, briefly convalesces, and leaps up, back in good health. Henceforth, he uses his coffin for
6204-616: The land to the Puritans inhabited the lands leading up to the river. In 1841, Herman Melville joined the crew of the whaler Acushnet. He later wrote about his travels at sea culminating in the novel Moby Dick . In 1910, the Acushnet Process Company (now the Acushnet Company ), was founded in the town, and continues to be one of Southeastern Massachusetts's most enduring industries. The Acushnet Company owns
6298-471: The lands of Fairhaven and Acushnet. In 1812, Fairhaven was incorporated as a separate town, again including the lands of Acushnet. Finally, the town was officially incorporated in 1860. The name "Acushnet", which is also the name of the river the town lies on, comes from the Wampanoag Cushnea , meaning "peaceful resting place near water", originally designating the fact that the tribe which sold
6392-410: The meetings plot the "rising curve of his passion" and of his monomania. Third, in contrast to Ahab, Ishmael interprets the significance of each ship individually: "each ship is a scroll which the narrator unrolls and reads". Bezanson sees no single way to account for the meaning of all of these ships. Instead, they may be interpreted as "a group of metaphysical parables, a series of biblical analogues,
6486-466: The missing is Gardiner's young son. Ahab refuses to join the search. Twenty-four hours a day, Ahab now stands and walks the deck, while Fedallah shadows him. Suddenly, a sea hawk grabs Ahab's slouched hat and flies off with it. Next, the Pequod , in a ninth and final gam, meets the Delight , badly damaged and with five of her crew left dead by Moby Dick. Her captain shouts that the harpoon which can kill
6580-656: The northwestern and northeastern sections of the town, respectively. On the state level, Acushnet is represented in the Massachusetts House of Representatives by William Straus in Precinct 1 ( 10th Bristol District ) and by Paul Schmid in Precincts 2 and 3 ( 8th Bristol district ); it is represented in the Massachusetts Senate by Mark Montigny ( 2nd Bristol and Plymouth district ). On
6674-494: The novel's "central consciousness and narrative voice". Walter Bezanson first distinguishes Ishmael as narrator from Ishmael as character, whom he calls "forecastle Ishmael", the younger Ishmael of some years ago. Narrator Ishmael, then, is "merely young Ishmael grown older". A second distinction is between either or both Ishmaels with the author Herman Melville. Bezanson warns readers to "resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael". According to critic Walter Bezanson,
6768-420: The other half of this pattern, begins with the book's first description of live whales, and next the anatomy of the sperm whale is studied, more or less from front to rear and from outer to inner parts, all the way down to the skeleton. Two concluding chapters set forth the whale's evolution as a species and claim its eternal nature. Some "ten or more" of the chapters on whale killings, beginning at two-fifths of
6862-477: The other made of American wood — that Fedallah will precede his captain in death, and finally that only hemp can kill Ahab. As the Pequod approaches the Equator , Ahab scolds his quadrant for telling him only where he is and not where he will be. He dashes it to the deck. That evening, an impressive typhoon attacks the ship. Lightning strikes the mast, setting the doubloon and Ahab's harpoon aglow. Ahab delivers
6956-469: The participial modifier to emphasize and to reinforce the already established expectations of the reader, as the words "preluding" and "foreshadowing" ("so still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene ..."; "In this foreshadowing interval ..."). Other characteristic stylistic elements are the echoes and overtones, both imitation of distinct styles and habitual use of sources to shape his own work. His three most important sources, in order, are
7050-482: The population. 8.3% of residents were born outside the United States. 13.1% of residents aged 5 years or older spoke a language other than English at home. There were 4,108 households, with an average household size was 2.57. In 2022, the median income for a household in the town was $ 88,196, and the median income per capita was $ 44,630. About 6.4% of the population was below the poverty line . Acushnet uses
7144-468: The predecessor of the biblical King Ahab . Her "prophetic" fate is "a message of warning to all who follow, articulated by Gabriel and vindicated by the Samuel Enderby , the Rachel , the Delight , and at last the Pequod ". None of the other ships has been completely destroyed because none of their captains shared Ahab's monomania ; the fate of the Jeroboam reinforces the structural parallel between Ahab and his biblical namesake: "Ahab did more to provoke
7238-472: The price of self-reliance when it is pushed to the point of solipsism , where the world has no existence apart from the all-sufficient self." In that regard, Chase sees Melville's art as antithetical to that of Emerson's thought, in that Melville "[points] up the dangers of an exaggerated self-regard, rather than, as ... Emerson loved to do, [suggested] the vital possibilities of the self". Newton Arvin further suggests that self-reliance was, for Melville, really
7332-452: The same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Acushnet . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Acushnet&oldid=1206181429 " Categories : Disambiguation pages Place name disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
7426-523: The sea before he can answer. Ishmael explains that because of Ahab's absorption with Moby Dick, he sails on without the customary "gam", which Ishmael defines as a "social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships", in which the two captains remain on one ship and the chief mates on the other. In the second gam off the Cape of Good Hope, with the Town-Ho , a Nantucket whaler, the concealed story of a "judgment of God"
7520-691: The sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales. ("Nantucket", Ch. 14). Bezanson calls this chapter
7614-479: The ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance , Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written
7708-464: The south by Fairhaven , to the west by New Bedford , and to the northwest by Freetown . The town line between Acushnet, Rochester and Mattapoisett forms a portion of the border between Bristol and Plymouth counties. Acushnet lies approximately 50 miles (80 km) south of Boston , 20 miles (32 km) west of Cape Cod , 4 miles (6 km) north of Buzzards Bay , and 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Providence, Rhode Island . Acushnet contains
7802-499: The three boats that seek him, and tangles their lines. Ahab is rescued, but his ivory leg and Fedallah are lost. Starbuck begs Ahab to desist, but Ahab vows to slay the white whale, even if he would have to dive through the globe itself to get his revenge. On the third day of the chase, Ahab sights Moby Dick at noon. Sharks appear as well. Ahab lowers his boat for the final time, leaving Starbuck again on board. Moby Dick breaches and destroys two boats. Fedallah's corpse, still entangled in
7896-609: The title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in the text of both editions as "Moby Dick", without the hyphen. Reviewers in Britain were largely favorable, though some objected that the tale seemed to be told by a narrator who perished with the ship, as the British edition lacked the epilogue recounting Ishmael's survival. American reviewers were more hostile. Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford, Massachusetts , with plans to sign up for
7990-431: The town's population center. In fiscal year 2008, the town of Acushnet spent 0.87% ($ 189,813) of its budget on its public library—some $ 18 per person. On December 5, 2015, Russell Memorial Library closed its doors to relocate to the former Marie S. Howard School on Middle Road. The Acushnet Public Library opened on December 21, 2015. The Acushnet Public School District contains two public schools, an elementary school and
8084-466: The town's population lies along the New Bedford line, with the biggest area being in the southwest corner of the town, near the town hall. A short, 2.8-mile (4.5 km) stretch of Route 105 passes through the northeast corner of town, both entering and exiting through Rochester. Otherwise, the town contains no state or federal highways. Route 18 and Route 140 both pass through New Bedford to
8178-636: The town, including Hamlin's Mill Pond (along the Acushnet), East Pond and a portion of Tinkham Pond, which lies along the Mattapoisett town line. The town lies within the coastal plain, mostly below 80 feet (24 m) elevation, with higher points around Mendon and Perry Hills in the southeast of town and in the Sassaquin area in the northwest corner of town, where the highest point in town rises slightly above 160 feet (49 m) above sea level. Most of
8272-534: The vortex when the Pequod sinks. For a day and a night, Ishmael floats on it, until the Rachel , still looking for its lost seamen, rescues him. Ishmael is the narrator, shaping his story with the use of many different genres including sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings. Repeatedly, Ishmael refers to his writing of the book: "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself? I must, else all these chapters might be naught." Scholar John Bryant calls him
8366-480: The warm oil is decanted into casks, and then stowed in the ship. After the operation, the decks are scrubbed. The coin hammered to the main mast shows three Andes summits, one with a flame, one with a tower, and one a crowing cock. Ahab stops to look at the doubloon and interprets the coin as signs of his firmness, volcanic energy, and victory; Starbuck takes the high peaks as evidence of the Trinity ; Stubb focuses on
8460-427: The west of town, with the former passing within feet of the town line as it enters Freetown. Interstate 195 , the nearest interstate to the town, passes just south of the town through Fairhaven, with the nearest exits being Exits 27–29. SRTA operates a short bus route through the southern part of town, which links to Fairhaven. There is no rail service or airports within the town. The Middleborough/Lakeville Line of
8554-704: The whale can be seen as a metaphor for an epistemological quest—in the words of biographer Laurie Robertson-Lorant, "man's search for meaning in a world of deceptive appearances and fatal delusions". Ishmael's taxonomy of whales merely demonstrates "the limitations of scientific knowledge and the impossibility of achieving certainty". She also contrasts Ishmael's and Ahab's attitudes toward life, with Ishmael's open-minded and meditative, "polypositional stance" as antithetical to Ahab's monomania , adhering to dogmatic rigidity. Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco cites race as an example of this search for truth beneath surface differences, noting that all races are represented among
8648-479: The white whale has yet to be forged, but Ahab flourishes his special lance and once more orders the ship forward. Ahab shares a moment of contemplation with Starbuck. Ahab speaks about his wife and child, calls himself a fool for spending 40 years on whaling, and claims he can see his own child in Starbuck's eye. Starbuck tries to persuade Ahab to return to Nantucket to meet both their families, but Ahab simply crosses
8742-466: The zodiacal arch over the mountains; and Flask sees nothing of any symbolic value at all. The Manxman mutters in front of the mast, and Pip declines the verb "look". The Pequod next gams with the Samuel Enderby of London, captained by Boomer, a down-to-earth fellow who lost his right arm to Moby Dick. Nevertheless, he carries no ill will toward the whale, which his ship's surgeon, Dr. Bunger, describes not as malicious, but as awkward. Ahab puts an end to
8836-530: Was 28.4 minutes. As the 2020 census , there were 10,558 residents in the town, with a population density of 573.0 inhabitants per square mile (221.2/km ). 18.3% of residents were under 18 years of age, with 3.7% under 5 years. 21.5% of residents were age 65 or older. 52.3% of the population was female. The racial makeup of the town was 93.9% White , 0.3% African American , 0.1% Native American , 0.5% Asian , 0.0% Pacific Islander , and 4.4% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.9% of
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