"I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!" We like a tidy ship and then we goon on each other.
"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. There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes." We sleep in the dark.
"Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly." We learn of the fire and the pots that burn whale blubber and how they open up a gate to hell and madness.
"Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office." The clothes of the butcher of whale blubber. A clergyman of and by the sailors.
"In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti." Squeezing sperm oil, detailing parts of the whale. Stop laughing you pervert.
"He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad." Pip falls overboard, is rescued, but sees god underwater, and goes mad.
"I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor." Stop saying Whalers (and Whales) are smelly. Also, where do you think this stuff comes from? Someone has to dig it out of a dead whale carcass.
"His boat's crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters." They meet another ship, play a little trick on the other captain, and get some precious, precious ambergris.
"But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers!" In England, royalty would literally steal your whale after you did all the hard and life threatening work. The whale was brought on land and sailors would sit down with "rare tea with their wives, and good ale with their cronies", you know, as a reward, and some jerk would come and seize it.
"What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?" Fisherman's rights to who killed what whale when. Gets a little colonizer at the end there.
"As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love." Ishmael discuses the differences between the sexes of the whales.
"Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up." The Pequod discovers a pod of whales in the pacific and go on a long hunt. Cows & calfs.
"Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will." We're talking about the tail of the whale.
"And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts." Ishmael considers the spout of the whale and its larger meaning.
"The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the monster die." Description of another weapons used to kill whales.
"Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless." We're still talking about Jonah.
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." A literary comparison of whaling heroes and myths.
"For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all." The Pequod meets a German ship at the same time a whale is spotted. A hunts ensues and the whales is killed but is too heavy and sinks. The whale is old and an easy target. Cruelty is on display.
"I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul." Ishmael talks whale phrenology.
"As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled." We discuss the pseudo science of Physiognomist or Phrenologist, which Ishmael also calls pseudo science and says he doesn't quite understand but tries anyway.