Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (98 page)

Warlike African tribe.

Queen Isabella I of Spain (1451-1504), who established the Spanish Inquisition.

The reference is to the Erie Canal, but borrows the grandeur of Venice’s chief waterway.

Ceremonies in which judgments were passed by the Spanish Inquisition.

Church unit or office of an archbishop.

Sultan of Egypt and Syria from 1174 to 1193.

See note on p. 65.

Priestly caste among Hindus.

Mythical creature that is part horse, part griffin, another mythical animal.

See note on p. 223.

The king is deformed in Shakespeare’s play.

English utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) left his skeleton to the University of London, where it was displayed.

Patagonia is a far southern region of South America that extends from the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean.

Using microscopes of his own design, Anthony van Leuwenhoeck (1632-1723) discovered the first microorganism.

Location in East London near the Thames docks.

Native American tribe with a warlike reputation.

Described in
The Iliad
(book 18), by Homer.

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), German painter and engraver.

Alvaro Mendaña discovered the Solomon Islands in 1567.

Constellations in the southern skies: Argo-Navis is a boat, Cetus a whale, Hydras a water snake.

Author’s note: That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.

In the Bible, Numbers 16, he and others opposed Moses and were destroyed.

Legendary sea monster off the coast of Norway.

Founder of Anakim, a pre-Islamic Canaanite tribe that was destroyed by Joshua; see the Bible, Joshua 11:21-22.

Offered themselves as sacrifices to save the city, besieged by Edward III after the battle at Crécy in 1346.

In Byron’s poem
Mazeppa
, the hero is tied to a wild horse.

River between Argentina and Uruguay.

Author’s note: It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire interior of the sperm whale’s enormous head consists. Though apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot [a small boat (galley) using both sails and oars] into a sharp-pointed New York pilot-boat.

Author’s note: Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient.

Blowhole.

In the West called the Grand Canal, the longest in the world; the Hwang-Ho is also called the Yellow River, which the canal connects to the Yangtze River.

Author’s note: A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its broad flukes or lobes.

Top of a windlass that rotates horizontally.

Lookouts posted when a ship is not under way.

Author’s note: The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about the bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.

Harvard professor Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) was a geologist and zoologist.

Samuel Johnson helped uncover a hoax there.

The biblical story begins in Judith 2:4; she beheads him in 13:6-10.

Mythical creature thought to harbor unrevealed secrets.

The Christian evangelist who “might almost convert a better man” were Ahab better than he is.

Jeroboam I becomes known for evil actions; see the Bible, I Kings.

A cowardly braggart.

The celibate Shakers formed small communities and followed strict religious customs; Neskyeuna was a town near Albany, New York, where they first settled.

In the Christian views, he will blow the trumpet on Judgment Day.

Author’s note: The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.

Yellow or orange-yellow.

Lowest deck on a ship.

Darbies are handcuffs or fetters.

English astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738-1822) built the best telescope of his day.

Small boat (galley) using both sails and oars.

See note on p. 292.

Hakluytus Posthumous, or Purchas His Pilgrims
(1625), accounts by English clergyman Samuel Purchas of travel and adventure.
^‡
Author’s note: This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.

Early eighteenth century.

In Holland; long considered the largest one.

Egyptian city in the translated poem “The Veiled Statue at Sais,” by J. C. F. von Schiller (1759-1805), which tells of a youth devastated by lifting the veil.

Huge wine cask in the German town; on this page it is called a tierce, though that is actually a smaller cask.

Author’s note: Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides.

A woman’s long cloak.

In Islamic communities, the crier who calls people to worship.

Water wears away the rock, which breaks off as the falls retreat.

Platonic idealism is seen as dangerous because unrealistic.

Renowned Greek sculptor of the fifth-century B.C.

Phillip Melanchthon (1497-1560), religious reformer and follower of Luther.

French linguist and archaeologist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Eighteenth-century English orientalist and translator.
^‡
Language of the ancient Chaldeans, or biblical Aramaic.

See note on p. 68.

They were trained to rescue travelers lost in the snow in the Swiss Alps.

The quotations are from the Bible (KJV), Job 41:7 and 26-29.

See note on p. 233; in his history of the Persian War the Greek historian Herodotus describes Xerxes’s huge army.

In Greek myth, Perseus rescued and married Andromeda; also see note on p. 158.

Pertaining to Noah’s Ark.

See the Bible, I Samuel 5:1-5.

Davy Crockett (1786-1836) and Kit Carson (1809-1868), American adventurers and folk heroes.

Usually
Shastra
; any one of the sacred writings of the Hindus.

A principal god of Hinduism first mentioned in the Vedas, the religion’s most ancient scriptures.

In Greek legend, he jumped into the sea when attacked and was carried to land by a dolphin.

John Harris published
Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca
. Or,
A Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels
(1705).

In 31 B.C. Cleopatra and Antony’s forces were defeated in a naval battle at Actium.

City in western Pennsylvania where the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) protested new excise taxes.

In Greek myth, the Titans were powerful giants who preceded the Olympian gods.

Johann Peter Eckermann (1792-1854); his
Conversations with Goethe
(1836-1848) was an important biographical source.
^‡
Michelangelo (1475-1564); the image of God the Father is in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

A story told in the essay “Apology for Raimond Sebond” by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and elsewhere.

That is, in the Inferno of Dante’s
The Divine Comedy
.

Stories told in the
Morals
of Plutarch (c. A.D. 46-c. 120).

Author’s note: Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a stream.

Fraternal organization with secret signs for mutual identification.
^‡
In the Bible, Exodus 33:23, God says this to Moses, who could not survive the full view of the Lord.

Pig iron used as ship’s ballast.

Author’s note: To
gally
, or
gallow
, is to frighten excessively,—to confound with fright. It is an old Saxon word. It occurs once in Shakspere:—

To common land usages, the word is now completely obsolete. When the polite landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is apt to set it down as one of the whaleman’s self-derived savageries. Much the same is it with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to the New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the best and furthest-descended English words—the etymological Howards and Percys—are now democratised, nay, plebeianised—so to speak—in the New World.

^†
In 327 B.C. Porus was defeated in battle by Alexander the Great.

Author’s note: The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute
more hominum
.