Moby Dick by Herman Melville (readera ebook reader .txt) ๐
Description
โCall me Ishmaelโ says Moby Dickโs protagonist, and with this famous first line launches one of the acclaimed great American novels. Part adventure story, part quest for vengeance, part biological textbook and part whaling manual, Moby Dick was first published in 1851. The story follows Ishmael as he abandons his humdrum life on shore for an adventure on the waves. Finding the whaler Pequod at harbour in Nantucket, he signs up for a three year term without meeting the Captain of the ship, a mysterious figure called Ahab. It is only well into the voyage that Ahabโs thirst for vengeance against the eponymous white whale Moby Dickโand the consequencesโbecome clear.
The novel is semi-autobiographical: Herman Melville had had his own experience of whaling, having spent a year and a half aboard a whaling ship and further years travelling the world in the early 1840s. Herman used the knowledge gained from his experiences and wide reading on the subject to furnish Moby Dick with an almost encyclopaedic quality at times. The literary style varies widely, veering from soliloquies and staged scenes to dream sequences to comprehensive lists of ships provisions, but everything serves to further detail the world thatโs being painted.
Presented here is the New York edition, which was published later than the London edition and reverted numerous changes the original publishers had made, as well as including the initially omitted epilogue.
Read free book ยซMoby Dick by Herman Melville (readera ebook reader .txt) ๐ยป - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Herman Melville
Read book online ยซMoby Dick by Herman Melville (readera ebook reader .txt) ๐ยป. Author - Herman Melville
It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the masthead standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty spars along the seacoast, to which the lookouts ascended by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a henhouse. A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper masthead, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mastheads are kept manned from sunrise to sunset; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the masthead; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinnerโ โfor all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four yearsโ voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the masthead would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the tโ gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the tโ gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bullโs horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.
Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mastheads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crowโs-nests, in which the lookouts of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled A Voyage Among the Icebergs, in Quest of the Greenland Whale, and Incidentally for the Rediscovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland; in this admirable volume, all standers of mastheads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crowโs-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleetโs good craft. He called it the Sleetโs crowโs-nest, in honor of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our
Comments (0)