Call Me Ishmael

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When the boats are lowered, the imagery serves to dwarf everything but Ahab's will in the presence of Moby Dick. Melville found the bulk of his data on whales and whaling in five books, the most important of which was by the English ship's surgeon Thomas Beale, Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839), a book of reputed authority which Melville bought on July 10, 1850. During a mid-ocean "gam" (rendezvous at sea between ships), he met Chase's son William, who lent him his father's book.

About 1,500 copies were sold within 11 days, and then sales slowed down to less than 300 the next year. The true story that inspired is also excellent by the way…it’s difficult to imagine that Sperm Whales were up to 100 feet long before Man exterminated most of them. Rounding off what American readers were told about the British reception, in January Harper's Monthly Magazine attempted some damage control, and wrote that the book had "excited a general interest" among the London magazines.Her "prophetic" fate is "a message of warning to all who follow, articulated by Gabriel and vindicated by the Samuel Enderby, the Rachel, the Delight, and at last the Pequod". Ishmael deploys among other genres and styles, a sermon, a dream, a comic set-piece, a midnight ballet, a meditation, an emblematic reading. Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly plural, such as allurings, coincidings, and leewardings. Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick a doubloon, a gold coin, which he nails to the mast.

In 1849 Melville purchased an edition of Shakespeare’s plays that differed from any he had seen before. I believe there was already a tree whose fruit our unhappy parents tasted, though in the same chapter, when God forbids it, 'tis positivley said, the plants of the field were not yet growne.Five previously unknown men appear on deck and are revealed to be a special crew selected by Ahab and explain the shadowy figures seen boarding the ship. At the end of May 1851, Melville delivered the bulk of his manuscript to Harper's for plating and printing of proof sheets. The attack on The Whale by the Spectator was reprinted in the December New York International Magazine, which inaugurated the influence of another unfavorable review. The second mate, John Hall, is identified as Stubb in an annotation in the book's copy of crew member Henry Hubbard, who also is identified as the model for Pip: John Backus, a little black man added to the crew during the voyage.