# bib

id: chapter-012
title: chapter-012
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1571
sentence: 67
flesch: 73
cache: cache/chapter-012.txt
txt: txt/chapter-012.txt
summary:
  Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. He would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.


id: chapter-006
title: chapter-006
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1673
sentence: 55
flesch: 68
cache: cache/chapter-006.txt
txt: txt/chapter-006.txt
summary:
  Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. At that time in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands.


id: chapter-007
title: chapter-007
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 757
sentence: 28
flesch: 74
cache: cache/chapter-007.txt
txt: txt/chapter-007.txt
summary:
  But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone. They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.


id: chapter-013
title: chapter-013
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 736
sentence: 23
flesch: 67
cache: cache/chapter-013.txt
txt: txt/chapter-013.txt
summary:
  For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. NIGHTGOWN We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.


id: chapter-039
title: chapter-039
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 527
sentence: 48
flesch: 96
cache: cache/chapter-039.txt
txt: txt/chapter-039.txt
summary:
  Good night--good night! Tis split, too--that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!


id: chapter-005
title: chapter-005
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 5979
sentence: 246
flesch: 77
cache: cache/chapter-005.txt
txt: txt/chapter-005.txt
summary:
  This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me--but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators? Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale's mouth--the bar--when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round.


id: chapter-011
title: chapter-011
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3631
sentence: 166
flesch: 79
cache: cache/chapter-011.txt
txt: txt/chapter-011.txt
summary:
  And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him.


id: chapter-010
title: chapter-010
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 970
sentence: 30
flesch: 64
cache: cache/chapter-010.txt
txt: txt/chapter-010.txt
summary:
  At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom--the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February's snow. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailorlike but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.


id: chapter-004
title: chapter-004
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1449
sentence: 59
flesch: 76
cache: cache/chapter-004.txt
txt: txt/chapter-004.txt
summary:
  Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original--the Tyre of this Carthage;--the place where the first dead American whale was stranded.


id: chapter-038
title: chapter-038
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2846
sentence: 184
flesch: 86
cache: cache/chapter-038.txt
txt: txt/chapter-038.txt
summary:
  Captain Ahab, said Tashtego, that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick. And has he a curious spout, too, said Daggoo, very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab? And he have one, two, tree--


id: chapter-014
title: chapter-014
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 891
sentence: 35
flesch: 73
cache: cache/chapter-014.txt
txt: txt/chapter-014.txt
summary:
  Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. BIOGRAPHICAL Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South.


id: chapter-028
title: chapter-028
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1236
sentence: 43
flesch: 66
cache: cache/chapter-028.txt
txt: txt/chapter-028.txt
summary:
  Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew.


id: chapter-029
title: chapter-029
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1704
sentence: 57
flesch: 67
cache: cache/chapter-029.txt
txt: txt/chapter-029.txt
summary:
  And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers.


id: chapter-015
title: chapter-015
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1726
sentence: 67
flesch: 74
cache: cache/chapter-015.txt
txt: txt/chapter-015.txt
summary:
  From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person whom I now companied with.


id: chapter-001
title: chapter-001
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 195
sentence: 29
flesch: 87
cache: cache/chapter-001.txt
txt: txt/chapter-001.txt
summary:
  ETYMOLOGY While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true. * * Sw. and Dan. hval.


id: chapter-017
title: chapter-017
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1213
sentence: 45
flesch: 72
cache: cache/chapter-017.txt
txt: txt/chapter-017.txt
summary:
  And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin.


id: chapter-003
title: chapter-003
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2241
sentence: 101
flesch: 76
cache: cache/chapter-003.txt
txt: txt/chapter-003.txt
summary:
  With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle.


id: chapter-002
title: chapter-002
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3523
sentence: 242
flesch: 83
cache: cache/chapter-002.txt
txt: txt/chapter-002.txt
summary:
  And God created great whales. If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great whales.


id: chapter-016
title: chapter-016
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 765
sentence: 27
flesch: 70
cache: cache/chapter-016.txt
txt: txt/chapter-016.txt
summary:
  Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snowshoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself.


id: chapter-059
title: chapter-059
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 980
sentence: 32
flesch: 66
cache: cache/chapter-059.txt
txt: txt/chapter-059.txt
summary:
  Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds.


id: chapter-071
title: chapter-071
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 447
sentence: 24
flesch: 79
cache: cache/chapter-071.txt
txt: txt/chapter-071.txt
summary:
  Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din.


id: chapter-065
title: chapter-065
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 478
sentence: 17
flesch: 60
cache: cache/chapter-065.txt
txt: txt/chapter-065.txt
summary:
  Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. Tumbled into the water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently practicable.


id: chapter-105
title: chapter-105
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 941
sentence: 37
flesch: 75
cache: cache/chapter-105.txt
txt: txt/chapter-105.txt
summary:
  According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants. In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length compared with the living body.


id: chapter-111
title: chapter-111
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 936
sentence: 47
flesch: 79
cache: cache/chapter-111.txt
txt: txt/chapter-111.txt
summary:
  Begone! Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab? Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.--On deck!


id: chapter-110
title: chapter-110
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1639
sentence: 115
flesch: 93
cache: cache/chapter-110.txt
txt: txt/chapter-110.txt
summary:
  Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. They soak water, they do; and of course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (sneezes) with washes and lotions, just like live legs.


id: chapter-104
title: chapter-104
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1581
sentence: 66
flesch: 72
cache: cache/chapter-104.txt
txt: txt/chapter-104.txt
summary:
  There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances.


id: chapter-138
title: chapter-138
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 277
sentence: 14
flesch: 84
cache: cache/chapter-138.txt
txt: txt/chapter-138.txt
summary:
  It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side.


id: chapter-064
title: chapter-064
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 577
sentence: 17
flesch: 64
cache: cache/chapter-064.txt
txt: txt/chapter-064.txt
summary:
  But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started--what that is none know Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale starts to run, the boat-header and harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else.


id: chapter-070
title: chapter-070
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1214
sentence: 49
flesch: 70
cache: cache/chapter-070.txt
txt: txt/chapter-070.txt
summary:
  It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say.


id: chapter-058
title: chapter-058
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1332
sentence: 42
flesch: 63
cache: cache/chapter-058.txt
txt: txt/chapter-058.txt
summary:
  The other engraving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving chase to whales in the distance. In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, &c.


id: chapter-066
title: chapter-066
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3067
sentence: 137
flesch: 82
cache: cache/chapter-066.txt
txt: txt/chapter-066.txt
summary:
  Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else.


id: chapter-072
title: chapter-072
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 894
sentence: 37
flesch: 75
cache: cache/chapter-072.txt
txt: txt/chapter-072.txt
summary:
  The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship's side--about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. Remember, also, that the surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discolored, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea.


id: chapter-099
title: chapter-099
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 250
sentence: 11
flesch: 76
cache: cache/chapter-099.txt
txt: txt/chapter-099.txt
summary:
  But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. THE LAMP Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors.


id: chapter-112
title: chapter-112
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2280
sentence: 83
flesch: 74
cache: cache/chapter-112.txt
txt: txt/chapter-112.txt
summary:
  So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but--as we have elsewhere seen--mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. So that--let us say it again--no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest, and the ocean's invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher towards his destined heaven.


id: chapter-106
title: chapter-106
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1446
sentence: 53
flesch: 63
cache: cache/chapter-106.txt
txt: txt/chapter-106.txt
summary:
  When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebr, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.


id: chapter-107
title: chapter-107
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1587
sentence: 41
flesch: 55
cache: cache/chapter-107.txt
txt: txt/chapter-107.txt
summary:
  Though so short a period ago--not a good life-time--the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. For Pliny tells us of whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length--Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!


id: chapter-113
title: chapter-113
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 431
sentence: 14
flesch: 66
cache: cache/chapter-113.txt
txt: txt/chapter-113.txt
summary:
  The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. THE PACIFIC When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.


id: chapter-098
title: chapter-098
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1848
sentence: 84
flesch: 77
cache: cache/chapter-098.txt
txt: txt/chapter-098.txt
summary:
  As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.


id: chapter-073
title: chapter-073
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2306
sentence: 95
flesch: 69
cache: cache/chapter-073.txt
txt: txt/chapter-073.txt
summary:
  THE JEROBOAM'S STORY Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock. Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.


id: chapter-067
title: chapter-067
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1007
sentence: 41
flesch: 74
cache: cache/chapter-067.txt
txt: txt/chapter-067.txt
summary:
  The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious.


id: chapter-063
title: chapter-063
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2003
sentence: 84
flesch: 77
cache: cache/chapter-063.txt
txt: txt/chapter-063.txt
summary:
  But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.


id: chapter-077
title: chapter-077
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1258
sentence: 51
flesch: 78
cache: cache/chapter-077.txt
txt: txt/chapter-077.txt
summary:
  The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whale-bone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning these blinds.


id: chapter-088
title: chapter-088
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1866
sentence: 68
flesch: 68
cache: cache/chapter-088.txt
txt: txt/chapter-088.txt
summary:
  Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. The compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness.


id: chapter-117
title: chapter-117
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 910
sentence: 32
flesch: 71
cache: cache/chapter-117.txt
txt: txt/chapter-117.txt
summary:
  As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single fish. And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding Bachelor; but the Bachelor's men never heeding their gaze for the lively revelry they were in.


id: chapter-103
title: chapter-103
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1782
sentence: 68
flesch: 73
cache: cache/chapter-103.txt
txt: txt/chapter-103.txt
summary:
  Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open.


id: chapter-102
title: chapter-102
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2768
sentence: 107
flesch: 78
cache: cache/chapter-102.txt
txt: txt/chapter-102.txt
summary:
  Which way heading? Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's, cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; this man's blood--bring the thermometer;--it's at the boiling point!--his pulse makes these planks beat!--sir!--taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell's flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh--clear along the whole length of my arm--came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;--and that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain--Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon: Bunger, my lad,--the captain).


id: chapter-116
title: chapter-116
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 653
sentence: 23
flesch: 71
cache: cache/chapter-116.txt
txt: txt/chapter-116.txt
summary:
  oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,--in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.


id: chapter-089
title: chapter-089
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 4799
sentence: 148
flesch: 64
cache: cache/chapter-089.txt
txt: txt/chapter-089.txt
summary:
  The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying in the Fishery,--the more whales the less fish. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of Sunda and Malacca.


id: chapter-076
title: chapter-076
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1670
sentence: 58
flesch: 69
cache: cache/chapter-076.txt
txt: txt/chapter-076.txt
summary:
  It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion.


id: chapter-062
title: chapter-062
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1499
sentence: 35
flesch: 55
cache: cache/chapter-062.txt
txt: txt/chapter-062.txt
summary:
  Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an sthetics in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. All men live enveloped in whale-lines.


id: chapter-074
title: chapter-074
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1675
sentence: 78
flesch: 77
cache: cache/chapter-074.txt
txt: txt/chapter-074.txt
summary:
  I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and the ship--where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and swaying of both. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there with that great iron hook--poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.


id: chapter-060
title: chapter-060
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1015
sentence: 29
flesch: 63
cache: cache/chapter-060.txt
txt: txt/chapter-060.txt
summary:
  But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment's consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it. BRIT Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds.


id: chapter-048
title: chapter-048
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1009
sentence: 28
flesch: 49
cache: cache/chapter-048.txt
txt: txt/chapter-048.txt
summary:
  Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash--aye, cash.


id: chapter-100
title: chapter-100
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1037
sentence: 32
flesch: 69
cache: cache/chapter-100.txt
txt: txt/chapter-100.txt
summary:
  One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening. STOWING DOWN AND CLEARING UP Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;--but


id: chapter-114
title: chapter-114
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 956
sentence: 32
flesch: 62
cache: cache/chapter-114.txt
txt: txt/chapter-114.txt
summary:
  But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest. The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!


id: chapter-128
title: chapter-128
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1428
sentence: 72
flesch: 85
cache: cache/chapter-128.txt
txt: txt/chapter-128.txt
summary:
  We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs.


id: chapter-129
title: chapter-129
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 742
sentence: 76
flesch: 96
cache: cache/chapter-129.txt
txt: txt/chapter-129.txt
summary:
  But art thou not also the undertaker? Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into something else. Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like--that's all, sir.


id: chapter-115
title: chapter-115
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1253
sentence: 63
flesch: 86
cache: cache/chapter-115.txt
txt: txt/chapter-115.txt
summary:
  Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work. Would'st thou brand me, Perth? wincing for a moment with the pain; have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then? Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab.


id: chapter-101
title: chapter-101
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2525
sentence: 150
flesch: 88
cache: cache/chapter-101.txt
txt: txt/chapter-101.txt
summary:
  There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket. That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanack below calls ditto.


id: chapter-049
title: chapter-049
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 943
sentence: 38
flesch: 73
cache: cache/chapter-049.txt
txt: txt/chapter-049.txt
summary:
  There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance--aye, chance, free will, and necessity--no wise incompatible--all interweavingly working together.


id: chapter-061
title: chapter-061
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 935
sentence: 35
flesch: 70
cache: cache/chapter-061.txt
txt: txt/chapter-061.txt
summary:
  For though other species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.


id: chapter-075
title: chapter-075
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2238
sentence: 84
flesch: 80
cache: cache/chapter-075.txt
txt: txt/chapter-075.txt
summary:
  Tell me that, Mr. Flask? How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb? Do you see that mainmast there? Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been stowed away on board ship?


id: chapter-078
title: chapter-078
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 880
sentence: 29
flesch: 60
cache: cache/chapter-078.txt
txt: txt/chapter-078.txt
summary:
  But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelop; considering the unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is--by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect.


id: chapter-050
title: chapter-050
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 4035
sentence: 188
flesch: 80
cache: cache/chapter-050.txt
txt: txt/chapter-050.txt
summary:
  Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship nor boat to be seen.


id: chapter-044
title: chapter-044
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3667
sentence: 101
flesch: 57
cache: cache/chapter-044.txt
txt: txt/chapter-044.txt
summary:
  Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title Lord of the White Elephants above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Csarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness--as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him


id: chapter-093
title: chapter-093
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2593
sentence: 99
flesch: 76
cache: cache/chapter-093.txt
txt: txt/chapter-093.txt
summary:
  Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales?


id: chapter-087
title: chapter-087
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2090
sentence: 72
flesch: 67
cache: cache/chapter-087.txt
txt: txt/chapter-087.txt
summary:
  Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal, and as that long canal--like the grand Erie Canal--is furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air?


id: chapter-118
title: chapter-118
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 524
sentence: 20
flesch: 73
cache: cache/chapter-118.txt
txt: txt/chapter-118.txt
summary:
  It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.


id: chapter-124
title: chapter-124
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 55
sentence: 8
flesch: 101
cache: cache/chapter-124.txt
txt: txt/chapter-124.txt
summary:
  We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. MIDNIGHT ALOFT--THUNDER AND LIGHTNING The Main-top-sail yard.--Tashtego passing new lashings around it.


id: chapter-130
title: chapter-130
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1438
sentence: 51
flesch: 74
cache: cache/chapter-130.txt
txt: txt/chapter-130.txt
summary:
  The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats--ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction--the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab--though but a child, and nestling safely at home now--a child of your old age too--


id: chapter-131
title: chapter-131
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 594
sentence: 51
flesch: 100
cache: cache/chapter-131.txt
txt: txt/chapter-131.txt
summary:
  They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady.


id: chapter-125
title: chapter-125
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1250
sentence: 71
flesch: 87
cache: cache/chapter-125.txt
txt: txt/chapter-125.txt
summary:
  The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb--one engaged forward and the other aft--the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.


id: chapter-119
title: chapter-119
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 478
sentence: 23
flesch: 89
cache: cache/chapter-119.txt
txt: txt/chapter-119.txt
summary:
  Take another pledge, old man, said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom,--Hemp only can kill thee. The gallows, ye mean.--I am immortal then, on land and on sea, cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;--Immortal on land and on sea! Both were silent again, as one man.


id: chapter-086
title: chapter-086
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 819
sentence: 34
flesch: 69
cache: cache/chapter-086.txt
txt: txt/chapter-086.txt
summary:
  Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium. It is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme headway.


id: chapter-092
title: chapter-092
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1066
sentence: 44
flesch: 72
cache: cache/chapter-092.txt
txt: txt/chapter-092.txt
summary:
  In his treatise on Queen-Gold, or Queen-pinmoney, an old King's Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone. Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices.


id: chapter-045
title: chapter-045
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 318
sentence: 24
flesch: 95
cache: cache/chapter-045.txt
txt: txt/chapter-045.txt
summary:
  It's the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye--nothing else. Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears.


id: chapter-051
title: chapter-051
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 848
sentence: 28
flesch: 67
cache: cache/chapter-051.txt
txt: txt/chapter-051.txt
summary:
  Queequeg, said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen? Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen.


id: chapter-079
title: chapter-079
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 652
sentence: 21
flesch: 59
cache: cache/chapter-079.txt
txt: txt/chapter-079.txt
summary:
  Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and--in this particular instance--almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.


id: chapter-047
title: chapter-047
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3577
sentence: 114
flesch: 62
cache: cache/chapter-047.txt
txt: txt/chapter-047.txt
summary:
  THE AFFIDAVIT So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earliest part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair. One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales.


id: chapter-053
title: chapter-053
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1531
sentence: 49
flesch: 67
cache: cache/chapter-053.txt
txt: txt/chapter-053.txt
summary:
  These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.


id: chapter-084
title: chapter-084
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1167
sentence: 31
flesch: 59
cache: cache/chapter-084.txt
txt: txt/chapter-084.txt
summary:
  Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other.


id: chapter-090
title: chapter-090
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1203
sentence: 43
flesch: 62
cache: cache/chapter-090.txt
txt: txt/chapter-090.txt
summary:
  His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardor of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.


id: chapter-133
title: chapter-133
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 434
sentence: 21
flesch: 86
cache: cache/chapter-133.txt
txt: txt/chapter-133.txt
summary:
  As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief. THE PEQUOD MEETS THE DELIGHT The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight, was descried.


id: chapter-127
title: chapter-127
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1145
sentence: 98
flesch: 95
cache: cache/chapter-127.txt
txt: txt/chapter-127.txt
summary:
  But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log and line. The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.


id: chapter-126
title: chapter-126
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1229
sentence: 54
flesch: 76
cache: cache/chapter-126.txt
txt: txt/chapter-126.txt
summary:
  Men, said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.


id: chapter-132
title: chapter-132
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1716
sentence: 47
flesch: 63
cache: cache/chapter-132.txt
txt: txt/chapter-132.txt
summary:
  For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew.


id: chapter-091
title: chapter-091
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1447
sentence: 58
flesch: 69
cache: cache/chapter-091.txt
txt: txt/chapter-091.txt
summary:
  What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? FAST-FISH AND LOOSE-FISH


id: chapter-085
title: chapter-085
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 793
sentence: 29
flesch: 65
cache: cache/chapter-085.txt
txt: txt/chapter-085.txt
summary:
  It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three days' journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general miracle.


id: chapter-052
title: chapter-052
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1034
sentence: 24
flesch: 51
cache: cache/chapter-052.txt
txt: txt/chapter-052.txt
summary:
  Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt--above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent--those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.


id: chapter-046
title: chapter-046
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2067
sentence: 53
flesch: 54
cache: cache/chapter-046.txt
txt: txt/chapter-046.txt
summary:
  At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again.


id: chapter-042
title: chapter-042
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1633
sentence: 224
flesch: 100
cache: cache/chapter-042.txt
txt: txt/chapter-042.txt
summary:
  the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell they'll go lunging presently. DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! (Leaps to his feet.) PORTUGUESE SAILOR.


id: chapter-056
title: chapter-056
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 8093
sentence: 302
flesch: 73
cache: cache/chapter-056.txt
txt: txt/chapter-056.txt
summary:
  'I am bound to Tahiti for more men.' 'Very good. I tell ye what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it!


id: chapter-081
title: chapter-081
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 951
sentence: 44
flesch: 73
cache: cache/chapter-081.txt
txt: txt/chapter-081.txt
summary:
  Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.


id: chapter-095
title: chapter-095
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1651
sentence: 65
flesch: 72
cache: cache/chapter-095.txt
txt: txt/chapter-095.txt
summary:
  But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation.


id: chapter-136
title: chapter-136
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3350
sentence: 142
flesch: 79
cache: cache/chapter-136.txt
txt: txt/chapter-136.txt
summary:
  Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being. but for one single instant show thyself, cried Starbuck; never, never wilt thou capture him, old man--In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness.


id: chapter-122
title: chapter-122
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 192
sentence: 21
flesch: 101
cache: cache/chapter-122.txt
txt: txt/chapter-122.txt
summary:
  Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud.


id: chapter-123
title: chapter-123
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 652
sentence: 46
flesch: 92
cache: cache/chapter-123.txt
txt: txt/chapter-123.txt
summary:
  Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,--aye, man, and all of us,--were in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. MIDNIGHT--THE FORECASTLE BULWARKS Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the anchors there hanging.


id: chapter-137
title: chapter-137
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 4596
sentence: 258
flesch: 87
cache: cache/chapter-137.txt
txt: txt/chapter-137.txt
summary:
  Oh, my captain, my captain!--noble heart--go not--go not!--see, it's a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then! Lower away!--cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!


id: chapter-094
title: chapter-094
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 985
sentence: 33
flesch: 66
cache: cache/chapter-094.txt
txt: txt/chapter-094.txt
summary:
  The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose. Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course.


id: chapter-080
title: chapter-080
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1676
sentence: 53
flesch: 68
cache: cache/chapter-080.txt
txt: txt/chapter-080.txt
summary:
  We thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky part about him; and Then, hand-over-hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he lands on the summit of the head.


id: chapter-057
title: chapter-057
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1925
sentence: 71
flesch: 65
cache: cache/chapter-057.txt
txt: txt/chapter-057.txt
summary:
  It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.


id: chapter-043
title: chapter-043
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3809
sentence: 99
flesch: 54
cache: cache/chapter-043.txt
txt: txt/chapter-043.txt
summary:
  For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man.


id: chapter-055
title: chapter-055
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1660
sentence: 52
flesch: 62
cache: cache/chapter-055.txt
txt: txt/chapter-055.txt
summary:
  Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs.


id: chapter-041
title: chapter-041
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 282
sentence: 23
flesch: 95
cache: cache/chapter-041.txt
txt: txt/chapter-041.txt
summary:
  Crying its eyes out?--Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate's pennant, and so am I--fa, la! lirra, skirra! Fa, la! lirra, skirra!


id: chapter-069
title: chapter-069
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 746
sentence: 19
flesch: 61
cache: cache/chapter-069.txt
txt: txt/chapter-069.txt
summary:
  And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general friction. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the scarf, simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard.


id: chapter-096
title: chapter-096
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1295
sentence: 55
flesch: 71
cache: cache/chapter-096.txt
txt: txt/chapter-096.txt
summary:
  Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.


id: chapter-082
title: chapter-082
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 918
sentence: 36
flesch: 67
cache: cache/chapter-082.txt
txt: txt/chapter-082.txt
summary:
  If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebr to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. But in life--as we have elsewhere seen--this inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm.


id: chapter-121
title: chapter-121
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2580
sentence: 124
flesch: 84
cache: cache/chapter-121.txt
txt: txt/chapter-121.txt
summary:
  Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:-- All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. the boat! cried Starbuck, look at thy boat, old man! Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat's bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire.


id: chapter-135
title: chapter-135
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3615
sentence: 151
flesch: 77
cache: cache/chapter-135.txt
txt: txt/chapter-135.txt
summary:
  Boats, boats! Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails set--all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out, said Tashtego.


id: chapter-109
title: chapter-109
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1069
sentence: 32
flesch: 57
cache: cache/chapter-109.txt
txt: txt/chapter-109.txt
summary:
  For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:--repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it.


id: chapter-108
title: chapter-108
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 945
sentence: 23
flesch: 50
cache: cache/chapter-108.txt
txt: txt/chapter-108.txt
summary:
  But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;--he called the carpenter. 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.


id: chapter-120
title: chapter-120
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 913
sentence: 38
flesch: 78
cache: cache/chapter-120.txt
txt: txt/chapter-120.txt
summary:
  These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun! The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab, coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship's prow for the equator.


id: chapter-083
title: chapter-083
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 4440
sentence: 181
flesch: 76
cache: cache/chapter-083.txt
txt: txt/chapter-083.txt
summary:
  His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.


id: chapter-097
title: chapter-097
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 505
sentence: 16
flesch: 63
cache: cache/chapter-097.txt
txt: txt/chapter-097.txt
summary:
  Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, king Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the first book of Kings. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.


id: chapter-068
title: chapter-068
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 641
sentence: 19
flesch: 63
cache: cache/chapter-068.txt
txt: txt/chapter-068.txt
summary:
  Queequeg no care what god made him shark, said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin. But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning.


id: chapter-040
title: chapter-040
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 399
sentence: 38
flesch: 96
cache: cache/chapter-040.txt
txt: txt/chapter-040.txt
summary:
  Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures!


id: chapter-054
title: chapter-054
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 728
sentence: 29
flesch: 77
cache: cache/chapter-054.txt
txt: txt/chapter-054.txt
summary:
  As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries--a whaler at sea, and long absent from home. and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to----


id: chapter-033
title: chapter-033
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 885
sentence: 67
flesch: 98
cache: cache/chapter-033.txt
txt: txt/chapter-033.txt
summary:
  In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Seeing he wasn't going to stop saying over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again.


id: chapter-027
title: chapter-027
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 289
sentence: 16
flesch: 78
cache: cache/chapter-027.txt
txt: txt/chapter-027.txt
summary:
  Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is used at coronations?


id: chapter-026
title: chapter-026
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1680
sentence: 74
flesch: 69
cache: cache/chapter-026.txt
txt: txt/chapter-026.txt
summary:
  THE ADVOCATE As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration!


id: chapter-032
title: chapter-032
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 294
sentence: 17
flesch: 88
cache: cache/chapter-032.txt
txt: txt/chapter-032.txt
summary:
  Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring,--aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. THE PIPE When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe.


id: chapter-018
title: chapter-018
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 5595
sentence: 228
flesch: 76
cache: cache/chapter-018.txt
txt: txt/chapter-018.txt
summary:
  It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.


id: chapter-024
title: chapter-024
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1669
sentence: 73
flesch: 79
cache: cache/chapter-024.txt
txt: txt/chapter-024.txt
summary:
  For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage--beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,--poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land, looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say, Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity.


id: chapter-030
title: chapter-030
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1422
sentence: 43
flesch: 62
cache: cache/chapter-030.txt
txt: txt/chapter-030.txt
summary:
  AHAB For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.


id: chapter-031
title: chapter-031
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1246
sentence: 58
flesch: 85
cache: cache/chapter-031.txt
txt: txt/chapter-031.txt
summary:
  For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the odd second mate, came up from below, and with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel.


id: chapter-025
title: chapter-025
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 378
sentence: 19
flesch: 78
cache: cache/chapter-025.txt
txt: txt/chapter-025.txt
summary:
  THE LEE SHORE Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington!


id: chapter-019
title: chapter-019
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2330
sentence: 101
flesch: 78
cache: cache/chapter-019.txt
txt: txt/chapter-019.txt
summary:
  At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones. THE RAMADAN As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.


id: chapter-021
title: chapter-021
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1244
sentence: 60
flesch: 85
cache: cache/chapter-021.txt
txt: txt/chapter-021.txt
summary:
  What are you jabbering about, shipmate? said I. He's got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps, abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the word he. Ye said true--ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder yet, have ye? Who's Old Thunder? said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of his manner. Captain Ahab.


id: chapter-035
title: chapter-035
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 986
sentence: 24
flesch: 44
cache: cache/chapter-035.txt
txt: txt/chapter-035.txt
summary:
  Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away. For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base.


id: chapter-009
title: chapter-009
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 953
sentence: 47
flesch: 75
cache: cache/chapter-009.txt
txt: txt/chapter-009.txt
summary:
  Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh. Forming one of the boats' crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA, Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839.


id: chapter-008
title: chapter-008
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 835
sentence: 43
flesch: 78
cache: cache/chapter-008.txt
txt: txt/chapter-008.txt
summary:
  There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. THE STREET If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.


id: chapter-034
title: chapter-034
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 5190
sentence: 283
flesch: 75
cache: cache/chapter-034.txt
txt: txt/chapter-034.txt
summary:
  This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,--the Greenland whale is deposed,--the great sperm whale now reigneth! Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales.


id: chapter-020
title: chapter-020
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1390
sentence: 68
flesch: 82
cache: cache/chapter-020.txt
txt: txt/chapter-020.txt
summary:
  HIS MARK As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced their papers. What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg? said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.


id: chapter-036
title: chapter-036
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2252
sentence: 80
flesch: 68
cache: cache/chapter-036.txt
txt: txt/chapter-036.txt
summary:
  Besides, if it were so that any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab. The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see whether it be all right with that important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid Dinner, Mr. Flask, follows after his predecessors.


id: chapter-022
title: chapter-022
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 938
sentence: 31
flesch: 69
cache: cache/chapter-022.txt
txt: txt/chapter-022.txt
summary:
  Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare captain and duplicate ship. But it seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail for several days.


id: chapter-023
title: chapter-023
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 1101
sentence: 67
flesch: 85
cache: cache/chapter-023.txt
txt: txt/chapter-023.txt
summary:
  Queequeg, don't sit there, said I. Oh! perry dood seat, said Queequeg, my country way; won't hurt him face. Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves.


id: chapter-037
title: chapter-037
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2635
sentence: 63
flesch: 54
cache: cache/chapter-037.txt
txt: txt/chapter-037.txt
summary:
  Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird's nest within three or four perches of the pole. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.


