Moby Dick
MOBY-DICK
HERMAN MELVILLE was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. His father died when he was only twelve, and Herman worked as a bank clerk and later an elementary school teacher before shipping off on a whaling ship bound for the Pacific. Upon his return, he published a number of books based on his experiences at sea, which won him immediate success. By 1850, he was married and had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he wrote Moby-Dick. His later works, including Moby-Dick, became increasingly complex and alienated many of his readers. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where he died in 1891.
NATHANIEL PHILBRICK is the author of the New York Times best-selling Mayflower (Penguin, 2006), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, and In the Heart of the Sea (Penguin, 2000), winner of the National Book Award. He has lived on the island of Nantucket since 1986.
DR. MARY K. BERCAW EDWARDS is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the author of Melville’s Sources (1987) and Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville’s Early Works (2009), as well as the editor of Melville’s White-Jacket(2002) and Omoo (Penguin, 2007). An experienced sailor, she has fifty-eight thousand miles at sea under sail as well as twenty-nine years of working aboard the whaleship Charles W. Morgan at Mystic Seaport museum.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby-Dick
OR, THE WHALE
A Penguin Enriched eBook Classic
Introduction by
ANDREW DELBANCO
Foreword by
NATHANIEL PHILBRICK
Notes and Explanatory Commentary by
TOM QUIRK
Enriched eBook Features Editor
MARY K. BERCAW EDWARDS
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First published in the United States of America by Harper & Brothers 1851
Published by Northwestern University Press as Volume Six of The Writings of Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and B. Thomas Tanselle 1988
Published by arrangement with Northwestern University Press
Edition with an introduction by Andrew Delbanco and notes and glossary by Tom Quirk published in Penguin Books 1992
Edition with a foreword by Nathaniel Philbrick published 2001
This edition with Penguin Enriched eBook Classic features by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards published 2009
Copyright © Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988
Introduction copyright © Andrew Delbanco, 1992
Notes and glossary copyright © Tom Quirk, 1992
Foreword copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick, 2001
Penguin Enriched eBook Classic features copyright © Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, 2009
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-101-10043-1
(CIP data available)
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Contents
Foreword by Nathaniel Philbrick
Introduction by Andrew Delbanco
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text
MOBY-DICK
ETYMOLOGY
EXTRACTS
CHAPTER 1 Loomings
CHAPTER 2 The Carpet Bag
CHAPTER 3 The Spouter-Inn
CHAPTER 4 The Counterpane
CHAPTER 5 Breakfast
CHAPTER 6 The Street
CHAPTER 7 The Chapel
CHAPTER 8 The Pulpit
CHAPTER 9 The Sermon
CHAPTER 10 A Bosom Friend
CHAPTER 11 Nightgown
CHAPTER 12 Biographical
CHAPTER 13 Wheelbarrow
CHAPTER 14 Nantucket
CHAPTER 15 Chowder
CHAPTER 16 The Ship
CHAPTER 17 The Ramadan
CHAPTER 18 His Mark
CHAPTER 19 The Prophet
CHAPTER 20 All Astir
CHAPTER 21 Going Aboard
CHAPTER 22 Merry Christmas
CHAPTER 23 The Lee Shore
CHAPTER 24 The Advocate
CHAPTER 25 Postscript
CHAPTER 26 Knights and Squires
CHAPTER 27 Knights and Squires
CHAPTER 28 Ahab
CHAPTER 29 Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb
CHAPTER 30 The Pipe
CHAPTER 31 Queen Mab
CHAPTER 32 Cetology
CHAPTER 33 The Specksynder
CHAPTER 34 The Cabin Table
CHAPTER 35 The Mast-Head
CHAPTER 36 The Quarter-Deck • Ahab and all
CHAPTER 37 Sunset
CHAPTER 38 Dusk
CHAPTER 39 First Night-Watch
CHAPTER 40 Forecastle—Midnight
CHAPTER 41 Moby Dick
CHAPTER 42 The Whiteness of the Whale
CHAPTER 43 Hark!
CHAPTER 44 The Chart
CHAPTER 45 The Affidavit
CHAPTER 46 Surmises
CHAPTER 47 The Mat-Maker
CHAPTER 48 The First Lowering
CHAPTER 49 The Hyena
CHAPTER 50 Ahab’s Boat and Crew—Fedallah
CHAPTER 51 The Spirit-Spout
CHAPTER 52 The Pequod meets the Albatross
CHAPTER 53 The Gam
CHAPTER 54 The Town Ho’s Story
CHAPTER 55 Monstrous Pictures of Whales
CHAPTER 56 Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales
CHAPTER 57 Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, &c.
CHAPTER 58 Brit
CHAPTER 59 Squid
CHAPTER 60 The Line
CHAPTER 61 Stubb kills a Whale
CHAPTER 62 The Dart
CHAPTER 63 The Crotch
CHAPTER 64 Stubb’s Supper
CHAPTER 65 The Whale as a Dish
CHAPTER 66 The Shark Massacre
CHAPTER 67 Cutting In
CHAPTER 68 The Blanket
CHAPTER 69 The Funeral
CHAPTER 70 The Sphinx
CHAPTER 71 The Pequod Meets the Jeroboam • Her Story
CHAPTER 72 The Monkey-rope
CHAPTER 73 Stubb & Flask kill a Right Whale
CHAPTER 74 The Sperm Whale’s Heard
CHAPTER 75 The Right Whale’s Head
CHAPTER 76 The Battering-Ram
CHAPTER 77 The Great Heidelburgh Tun
CHAPTER 78 Cistern and Buckets
CHAPTER 79 The Prairie
CHAPTER 80 The Nut
CHAPTER 81 The Pequod meets the Virgin
CHAPTER 82 The Honor and Glory of Whaling
CHAPTER 83 Jonah Historically Regarded
CHAPTER 84 Pitchpoling
CHAPTER 85 The Fountain
CHAPTER 86 The Tail
CHAPTER 87 The Grand Armada
CHAPTER 88 Schools & Schoolmasters
CHAPTER 89 Fast Fish and Loose Fish
CHAPTER 90 Heads or Tails
CHAPTER 91 The Pequod meets the Rose Bud
CHAPTER 92 Ambergis
CHAPTER 93 The Castaway
CHAPTER 94 A Squeeze of the Hand
CHAPTER 95 The Cassock
CHAPTER 96 The Try-Works
CHAPTER 97 The Lamp
CHAPTER 98 Stowing Down & Clearing Up
CHAPTER 99 The Doubloon
CHAPTER 100 The Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby of London
CHAPTER 101 The Decanter
CHAPTER 102 A Bower in the Arsacides
CHAPTER 103 Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton
CHAPTER 104 The Fossil Whale
CHAPTER 105 Does the Whale Diminish?
CHAPTER 106 Ahab’s Leg
CHAPTER 107 The Carpenter
CHAPTER 108 The Deck • Ahab and the Carpenter
CHAPTER 109 The Cabin • Ahab and Starbuck
CHAPTER 110 Queequeg in his Coffin
CHAPTER 111 The Pacific
CHAPTER 112 The Blacksmith
CHAPTER 113 The Forge
CHAPTER 114 The Gilder
CHAPTER 115 The Pequod meets the Bachelor
CHAPTER 116 The Dying Whale
CHAPTER 117 The Whale-Watch
CHAPTER 118 The Quadrant
CHAPTER 119 The Candles
CHAPTER 120 The Deck
CHAPTER 121 Midnight, on the Forecastle
CHAPTER 122 Midnight, Aloft
CHAPTER 123 The Musket
CHAPTER 124 The Needle
CHAPTER 125 The Log and Line
CHAPTER 126 The Life-Buoy
CHAPTER 127 Ahab and the Carpenter
CHAPTER 128 The Pequod meets the Rachel
CHAPTER 129 The Cabin • Ahab and Pip
CHAPTER 130 The Hat
CHAPTER 131 The Pequod meets the Delight
CHAPTER 132 The Symphony
CHAPTER 133 The Chase • First Day
CHAPTER 134 The Chase • Second Day
CHAPTER 135 The Chase • Third Day
EPILOGUE
List of Textual Emendations
Explanatory Notes
Glossary of Nautical Terms
Maps and Illustrations
Penguin Enriched eBook Classics Features
How to Navigate Guide
Chronology
Filmography of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851)
Nineteenth-Century Reviews
Suggested Further Reading
Moby-Dick in Popular Culture
Melville’s Whaling Years
Cannibal Talk in Moby-Dick
Sermons in Moby-Dick
Enriched eBook Notes
Illustrations for Moby-Dick
FOREWORD
Even though I hadn’t read a word of it, I grew up hating Moby-Dick. My father was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh with a specialty in American maritime literature, and that big, battle-scarred book came to represent everything I resented about his job: all the hours he spent in his attic study, relentlessly reading and writing, more often than not with Moby-Dick spread out before him.
Sometimes at dinner he even dared talk about the novel, inevitably in an excited, reverential tone that only exasperated me all the more. And yet, despite my best efforts to look as bored as possible, I found myself hanging on every word. For you see, when my brother and I were very young, my father had told us a bed-time story.
The story was about a whale, a real whale that had rammed and sunk a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The men had taken to their little whaleboats, and instead of sailing for the nearby islands, they headed for South America, thousands of miles away. When a rescue ship found them three months later, only a few of the men were left alive, and in their hands were the bones of their dead shipmates. (That my brother and I grew up without permanent psychological damage is a testament to our mother’s remarkable parenting skills.) I was a little hazy on the details, but I understood that Moby-Dick had something to do with that ship-ramming whale. But, of course, there was no way I was going to crack open the novel and find out for myself.
I resisted until my senior year in high school when my English teacher made it clear that I had no choice but to read Moby-Dick if I was going to graduate in the spring. By that point I had developed an insatiable love of sailing—not your normal recreational activity for a teenager from the Steel City. For reasons too improbable and complex to go into here, I had dedicated myself to racing a Sunfish sail-boat, practicing every weekend on a little manmade lake about an hour outside the city. The previous year I’d qualified for the Sunfish World Championship in Martinique. I finished near the bottom of the fleet, but I was hooked. The exotic tang of saltwater had intoxicated me; I found myself dreaming about the tide-heave of the sea. For me, a shy kid in a big urban high school, sailing seemed my only hope of escape.
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