Moby Dick Mondays – Week 9

Ti of the blog Book Chatter is sponsoring a challenge/readalong to read the classic Moby Dick. On Mondays, we’ll be posting about our progress. I am listening to the unabridged audiodisks for this book, which my husband listened to and loved.

Our narrator Ishmael next describes in detail a couple of “gams” – but not in the way you might think! A gam in this context is “a social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships. The ships exchange greetings, and visit with each other’s crews.

Grable's Gams were insured for $1 mil by Lloyds of London

The more significant of the two “gams” was the meeting with the Town-Ho, manned almost wholly by Polynesians, which “gave us strong news of Moby Dick.” In fact, one of the crew had been eaten by Moby.

Ishmael observes that most representations of whales are inaccurate, because they have been made from stranded whales, wrecked and broken. The only way to really know what the whale looks like is to see him “in his full majesty and significance” out at sea “in unfathomable waters.”

Sure enough, the time finally arrives, or so they thought. The ship was on her way northeastward towards the island of Java. On a “transparent blue morning,” Daggo called out:

“There! There again! There she breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”

Ahab gave the order and the four boats were swiftly on the water. And then a vast pulpy mass rose, “furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.”

Giant Squid, courtesy of the National Geographic Society

Starbuck, aghast, said he would rather have seen Moby Dick, for this was “the great live Squid, which they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.” Ismael avered that “one and all declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean.” Ahab, however, was unimpressed. He turned his boat, headed back for the Pequod, and the rest of the crew followed him.

But it is believed that sperm whales feed on squids. And Queequeg prognosticated: “When you see him ‘quid’ [squid] … you see him ‘parm’ [sperm] whale.” [Close with music from “The Twilight Zone.”]