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114-522: The Moskstraumen has been featured in many historical accounts, generally exaggerated. It is also popularly known as maelstrom  – a Nordic word (malstrøm/malström) for a strong whirlpool which originates from the Dutch combination of malen (to grind) and stroom (stream). This term was introduced into the English language by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841, through his short story " A Descent into

228-647: A mannequin into the Corryvreckan ("the Hag") with a high-visibility vest and depth gauge . The mannequin was swallowed and spat up far down current with a depth gauge reading of 262 m (860 ft) and evidence of being dragged along the bottom for a great distance. About three miles (4.8 kilometers) downstream from Niagara Falls is the Niagara Whirlpool . Located mostly in Canada and partially in

342-575: 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

456-407: A drilling mishap on November 20, 1980. This was not a naturally occurring whirlpool, but a disaster caused by underwater drillers breaking through the roof of a salt mine. The lake then drained into the mine until the mine filled and the water levels equalized, but the formerly 10-foot (3.0 m) deep lake was now 1,300 feet (400 m) deep. This mishap caused a sinkhole, and in the end, resulted in

570-415: 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;

684-465: 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

798-527: 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

912-458: A little inward from the shore can hardly getaway. I have heard a certain high nobleman of the Gauls relating that a number of ships, shattered at first by a tempest, were afterward devoured by this same Charybdis . And when one only out of all the men who had been in these ships, still breathing, swam over the waves, while the rest were dying, he came, swept by the force of the receding waters, up to

1026-523: 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

1140-451: 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

1254-401: 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

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1368-536: A plane or the nearby 601-metre (1,972 ft) tall Lofotodden Hill on Moskenesøya. There are regular tourist boat trips between Moskenesøya and Værøya. The Moskstraumen is created as a result of a combination of several factors, including tides, strong local winds, position of the Lofoten and the underwater topography; unlike most other major maelstroms, such as Saltstraumen , Gulf of Corryvreckan , Naruto whirlpools , Old Sow whirlpool , and Skookumchuck Narrows , it

1482-427: 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

1596-624: A shallow ridge between the Moskenesøya and Værøya islands which amplifies and whirls the tidal currents. The fictional depictions of the Moskstraumen by Edgar Allan Poe , Jules Verne , and Cixin Liu describe it as a gigantic circular vortex that reaches the bottom of the ocean, when in fact it is a set of currents and crosscurrents with a rate of 18 km/h (11 mph). Poe described this phenomenon in his short story " A Descent into

1710-845: A short story by Edgar Allan Poe named " A Descent into the Maelström " (1841). The second is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), a novel by Jules Verne . At the end of this novel, Captain Nemo seems to commit suicide, sending his Nautilus submarine into the Maelstrom (although in Verne's sequel Nemo and the Nautilus were seen to have survived). The "Norway maelstrom" is also mentioned in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick . In

1824-523: 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

1938-551: 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

2052-563: 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

2166-453: 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

2280-492: A squall knocks the engine out of commission, they face the whirlpool. Torquil manages to repair the engine before the tide turns, and they return to the mainland. This part of the picture uses footage Powell filmed, while tied to a mast to leave both hands free for the camera, at Corryvreckan, incorporated into scenes shot in a huge tank at the studio. In the 2007 film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ,

2394-488: 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

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2508-517: 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

2622-516: A whirlpool, which sucked entire ships into its fold in the narrow coast of Sicily , a disaster faced by navigators. During the 8th century, Paul the Deacon , who had lived among the Belgii, described tidal bores and the maelstrom for a Mediterranean audience unused to such violent tidal surges: Not very far from this shore... toward the western side, on which the ocean main lies open without end,

2736-432: 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

2850-487: 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

2964-468: Is a narrow strait located close to the Arctic Circle , 33 km (20 mi) south-east of the city of Bodø , Norway . It has one of the strongest tidal currents in the world. Whirlpools up to 10 metres (33 ft) in diameter and 5 metres (16 ft) in depth are formed when the current is at its strongest. Moskstraumen or Moske-stroom is an unusual system of whirlpools in the open seas in

3078-642: 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

3192-467: Is determined to get to the Isle of Kiloran and marry her fiancé. Dangerous weather delays her crossing, and her determination becomes desperate when she realizes that she is falling in love with Torquil MacNeil ( Roger Livesey ). Against the advice of experienced folk, she offers a young fisherman a huge sum of money to take her over. At the last moment, Royal Naval Officer Torquil steps into the boat, and after

3306-406: Is located in the open sea rather than in a strait or channel. Tides have an amplitude of about four metres (13 ft) and are semi-diurnal at Lofoten, meaning that they rise twice a day; they are the major contribution to the Moskstraumen. Tides are combined with the northerly Norwegian Sea currents and with storm-induced flow to result in a significant stream, with a reported speed varying between

3420-503: 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

3534-584: 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

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3648-513: Is of the 1500s, Olaus Magnus , a Swedish bishop, who had stated that a maelstrom more powerful than the one written about in the Odyssey sucked in ships, which sank to the bottom of the sea, and even whales were pulled in. Pytheas , the Greek historian, also mentioned that maelstroms swallowed ships and threw them up again. The monster Charybdis of Greek mythology was later rationalized as

3762-419: 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

3876-432: 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

3990-519: Is that very deep whirlpool of waters which we call by its familiar name "the navel of the sea". This is said to suck in the waves and spew them forth again twice every day. ... They say there is another whirlpool of this kind between the island of Britain and the province of Galicia , and with this fact the coasts of the Seine region and of Aquitaine agree, for they are filled twice a day with such sudden inundations that any one who may by chance be found only

4104-515: 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

4218-474: Is the proper term for a whirlpool that has a downdraft . In narrow ocean straits with fast flowing water, whirlpools are often caused by tides . Many stories tell of ships being sucked into a maelstrom, although only smaller craft are actually in danger. Smaller whirlpools appear at river rapids and can be observed downstream of artificial structures such as weirs and dams. Large cataracts , such as Niagara Falls , produce strong whirlpools. Saltstraumen

4332-448: 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

4446-580: The Atlantic Ocean and the deep Vestfjorden , creating eddies and whirlpools , the largest one having a diameter of some 40–50 meters (130–160 ft) and inducing surface water ripples up to 1 meter (3 ft 3 in) in amplitude. The currents are about eight kilometres (5.0 mi) wide and suck in various small microorganisms, thereby attracting fish and fishing boats, which could be in danger even in modern times. The flow currents are strongest around July–August. They can be clearly seen from

4560-535: 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

4674-479: 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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4788-621: 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

4902-474: The Life of St Columba , the author, Adomnan of Iona , attributes to the saint miraculous knowledge of a particular bishop who sailed into a whirlpool off the coast of Ireland. In Adomnan's narrative, he quotes Columba saying Cólman mac Beognai has set sail to come here and is now in great danger in the surging tides of the whirlpool of Corryvreckan. Sitting in the prow, he lifts up his hands to heaven and blesses

5016-590: The Lofoten Islands off the Norwegian coast . It is the second strongest whirlpool in the world with flow currents reaching speeds as high as 32 km/h (20 mph). This is supposedly the whirlpool depicted in Olaus Magnus's map, labeled as "Horrenda Caribdis" ( Charybdis ). The Moskstraumen is formed by the combination of powerful semi-diurnal tides and the unusual shape of the seabed , with

5130-565: 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

5244-588: 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

5358-424: 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

5472-465: 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

5586-550: 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

5700-412: The Maelström " (1841), which brought the term maelstrom , meaning strong whirlpool, into the English language. The Moskstraumen also features in the climax of Jules Verne 's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and is mentioned by Captain Ahab in Herman Melville 's 1851 novel Moby-Dick . A likely source of information on Moskstraumen for those writers was a fictional description of

5814-589: The Maelström ", which in 1841 was the first to use the word maelstrom in the English language; in this story related to the Lofoten Maelstrom, two fishermen are swallowed by the maelstrom while one survives. The Corryvreckan is a narrow strait between the islands of Jura and Scarba , in Argyll and Bute , on the northern side of the Gulf of Corryvreckan , Scotland . It is the third-largest whirlpool in

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5928-690: The Maelström ". Poe provides an alternative name for the whirlpool with the line: "We Norwegians call it the Moskoestrom, from the island of Moskoe in the midway." The Moskstraumen is located between the Lofoten Point of the island of Moskenesøya (in Moskenes Municipality ) and the small island of Mosken in Værøy Municipality . It involves strong tidal currents flowing through the shallows between these islands and

6042-485: The Moskstraumen by Jonas Danilssønn Ramus from 1715 which was translated into English and partly included into the 1823 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica . Poe quoted Jonas Ramus and Encyclopædia Britannica in his tale. The Moskstraumen is visited by characters in Liu Cixin 's Death's End . Rosa Arciniega 's 1933 Spanish-language dystopian novel Mosko-Strom: El Torbellino de las Grandes Metrópolis references

6156-490: The Moskstraumen. A.S. Byatt 's 2001 novel The Biographer's Tale also features the Maelstrom prominently. One of the first scientific descriptions of the Moskstraumen was presented by the Norwegian priest and poet Petter Dass in his poem "The Trumpet of Nordland" (published in 1739) which included a versified topographical description of northern Norway. There he clearly related the whirlpool with tides by noting that it

6270-520: The Oklahoma–Texas border, near the floodgates of the dam that forms the lake. At the time of the whirlpool's formation, the lake was being drained after reaching its highest level ever. The Army Corps of Engineers , which operates the dam and lake, expected that the whirlpool would last until the lake reached normal seasonal levels by late July. Powerful whirlpools have killed unlucky seafarers, but their power tends to be exaggerated by laymen. One of

6384-541: The United States, the whirlpool is crossed by the Whirlpool Aero Car . The basin of the whirlpool is 1,700 feet (518 meters) long and 1,200 feet (365 meters) wide. Its maximum water depth is 125 feet (38 meters). Old Sow whirlpool is located between Deer Island, New Brunswick , Canada, and Moose Island, Eastport, Maine , USA. It is given the epithet "pig-like" as it makes a screeching noise when

6498-451: 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

6612-500: 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

6726-399: 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

6840-416: 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

6954-569: 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

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7068-409: 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

7182-418: 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

7296-412: 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

7410-500: 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

7524-404: The chief (admiral) not to return until they had reached the extremity of the ocean, or if they had exhausted the provisions and the water. They set out. Their absence extended over a long period, and, at last, only one boat returned. On our questioning, the captain said: 'Prince, we have navigated for a long time, until we saw in the midst of the ocean as if a big river was flowing violently. My boat

7638-517: 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,

7752-789: 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

7866-400: 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,

7980-412: 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

8094-537: The current exceeding 30 km/h (19 mph). French Pass ( Te Aumiti ) is a narrow and treacherous stretch of water that separates D'Urville Island from the north end of the South Island of New Zealand. In 2000 a whirlpool there caught student divers, resulting in fatalities. A short-lived whirlpool sucked in a portion of the 1,300-acre (530 ha) Lake Peigneur in Louisiana, United States after

8208-420: 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

8322-473: 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

8436-604: The destruction of five houses, the loss of nineteen barges and eight tug boats, oil rigs, a mobile home, trees, acres of land, and most of a botanical garden. The adjacent settlement of Jefferson Island was reduced in area by 10%. A crater 0.5 miles (0.8 km) across was left behind. Nine of the barges, which had sunk, later resurfaced after the whirlpool subsided. A more recent example of an artificial whirlpool that received significant media coverage occurred in early June 2015, when an intake vortex formed in Lake Texoma , on

8550-471: 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,

8664-400: The edge of that most frightful abyss. And when now he beheld yawning before him the deep chaos whose end he could not see, and half dead from very fear, expected to be hurled into it, suddenly in a way that he could not have hoped he was cast upon a certain rock and sat him down. Three of the most notable literary references to the Lofoten Maelstrom date from the nineteenth century. The first is

8778-402: 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

8892-510: 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

9006-517: The few reports of a large disaster comes from the fourteenth-century Mali Empire ruler Mansa Musa , as reported by a contemporary, Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari : The ruler who preceded me did not believe that it was impossible to reach the extremity of the ocean that encircles the earth (meaning Atlantic), and wanted to reach that (end) and obstinately persisted in the design. So he equipped two hundred boats full of men, like many others full of gold, water and victuals sufficient for several years. He ordered

9120-523: The final battle between the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman takes place with both ships sailing inside a giant whirlpool which appears to be over a kilometer wide and several hundred meters deep. The fantasy novels Eldest and The Bellmaker (otherwise unconnected) both feature a scene where the protagonists' ship escapes pursuit by successfully navigating a massive whirlpool, while

9234-405: 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

9348-427: 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

9462-643: 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

9576-405: 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

9690-525: 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

9804-439: The meaning 'grinding current' or literally 'mill-stream', in the sense of milling (grinding) grain. 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

9918-410: 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,

10032-466: 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

10146-494: 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,

10260-420: 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

10374-477: 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

10488-469: 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

10602-468: 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

10716-472: 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

10830-567: The pursuing vessel fails to do so and is dragged under. One of the earliest uses in English of the Scandinavian word malström or malstrøm was by Edgar Allan Poe in his short story " A Descent into the Maelström " (1841). The Nordic word itself is derived from the Dutch word maelstrom ( pronounced [ˈmaːlstroːm] ; modern spelling maalstroom ), from malen ('to mill' or 'to grind') and stroom ('stream'), to form

10944-523: 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"

11058-691: 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

11172-479: 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

11286-422: The sources from about 11 to 20 kilometres per hour (6.8 to 12.4 mph) and above. This flow occurs at the significant depths of about 500 metres (1,600 ft). It then meets a ridge of only about 20 meters (66 ft) deep (other sources say 40–60 metres (130–200 ft))) at the chain of Moskenesøya, Mosken, and Værøy islands that causes an upward movement and eddies around the island edges. The Moskstraumen

11400-499: 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

11514-609: 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

11628-453: The turbulent, terrible seas. Yet the Lord terrifies him in this way, not so that the ship in which he sits should be overwhelmed and wrecked by the waves, but rather to rouse him to pray more fervently that he may sail through the peril and reach us here. The Corryvreckan whirlpool plays a key role in the 1945 Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I'm Going! . Joan Webster ( Wendy Hiller )

11742-615: The vortex is at its full fury and reaches speeds of as much as 27.6 km/h (17.1 mph). The smaller whirlpools around this Old Sow are known as "Piglets". The Naruto whirlpools are located in the Naruto Strait near Awaji Island in Japan, which have speeds of 26 km/h (16 mph). Skookumchuck Narrows is a tidal rapids that develops whirlpools, on the Sunshine Coast , British Columbia , Canada with speeds of

11856-534: 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

11970-480: 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

12084-704: 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

12198-479: 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

12312-618: The world. Flood tides and inflow from the Firth of Lorne to the west can drive the waters of Corryvreckan to waves of more than 9 metres (30 ft), and the roar of the resulting maelstrom, which reaches speeds of 18 km/h (11 mph), can be heard 16 km (10 mi) away. Though it was classified initially as non-navigable by the Royal Navy it was later categorized as "extremely dangerous". A documentary team from Scottish independent producers Northlight Productions once threw

12426-466: 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

12540-513: Was described in the 13th century in the Old Norse poems Edda and remained an attractive subject for painters and writers, including Edgar Allan Poe , Walter Moers , and Jules Verne . The Swedish bishop Olaus Magnus included the Moskstraumen into his detailed report on the Nordic countries and their map, Carta Marina (1539). He attributed the whirlpool to divine forces and mentioned that it

12654-664: Was likely written in the 1750s and published in 1824. In 1999 the German painter Ingo Kühl visited the Lofoten, set up a provisional studio in Reine in a rorbu and painted the Moskstraumen. Whirlpool A whirlpool is a body of rotating water produced by opposing currents or a current running into an obstacle. Small whirlpools form when a bath or a sink is draining. More powerful ones formed in seas or oceans may be called maelstroms ( / ˈ m eɪ l s t r ɒ m , - r ə m / MAYL -strom, -⁠strəm ). Vortex

12768-432: Was much stronger than the previously known Sicilian whirlpool Charybdis . Most other writers of the time believed that the Moskstraumen played an important role in the ocean circulation, but, given a large number of tales and lack of scientific observations, grossly overestimated the size and power of the phenomenon. The Moskstraum, referred to simply as the Maelstrom, was the inspiration for Poe's short story " A Descent into

12882-597: Was the last one; others were ahead of me. As soon as any of them reached this place, it drowned in the whirlpool and never came out. I sailed backward to escape this current.' Tales like those by Paul the Deacon , Edgar Allan Poe , and Jules Verne are entirely fictional. However, temporary whirlpools caused by major engineering disasters, such as the Lake Peigneur disaster, have been recorded as capable of submerging medium-sized watercraft such as barges and tugboats. Besides Poe and Verne, another literary source

12996-532: Was the strongest at full and new Moon and the weakest at half-Moon. He also noted that since the large fjords of the Moskenesøya had to be filled and emptied within 6 hours, the related water flow should create strong currents. Dass' novel was however not translated into English and remained unknown in Europe. The relation of the Moskstraumen with the tides was further mentioned by A. Schelderup in an article which

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