Moby-Dick (Third Edition) (Norton Critical Editions): 0 by Herman Melville

Author:Herman Melville
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

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1.  For these exaggerated reports of the size of whales Melville plundered the Penny Cyclopædia article “Whales.”

2.  London livestock market.

3.  Cattle described in Genesis 41.1–36.

4.  In Ch. 87.

5.  Garcia ab Horton, Portuguese historian of Goa in India, as cited in Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), 6.6.

6.  Carthaginian general (247–185 B.C.E.), who crossed the Alps with elephants in an effort to defeat Rome. Semiramis was the legendary queen of Assyria and builder of Babylon. Porus was an Indian prince defeated by Alexander the Great in 327 B.C.E. (see also Ch. 87).

7.  Early name for Australia.

8.  Palaces in Paris, London, and Moscow, respectively.

CHAPTER 106

AHAB’S LEG

The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart1 of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.

And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.

Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have

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