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136 Chapters
If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square. In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at le…
The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of Bremen. At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and Germans are now among the lea…
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more…
Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were som…
To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it…
That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of ages before—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as wi…
Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail. Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Wha…
The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia. In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the lon…
The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations. Now, though such great bodies are at …
The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one, necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and b…
