June 13, 2019 - Chapter Twenty-three and Twenty-four

Chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” is among the more bizarre chapters of the novel, concerned with the character Bulkington mentioned perhaps twenty chapters earlier. Ishmael images that he can see Bulkington on the bridge of the Pequod but he is mistaken. He proclaims the chapter itself to be Bulkington’s “grave,” and then considers the relative safety of the shore vs. the danger and thrill of being at sea. The former is the “lee [land-side] shore” of the chapter’s title; the latter is where we spend the remainder of the novel.

In Chapter 24, “The Advocate,” which could be considered the first of the cetology chapters, Ishmael argues for the dignity of whaling as a profession, likening it to philosophy, politics, and higher pursuits. Whale oil lights the world, Ishmael tells us, and whaling opened much of the Indian and Pacific oceans to exploration. Whaling has kept the peace – which is an ironic statement considering the Civil War to come in a decade and the nearly endless war brought with the eclipsing by petroleum exploration of whaling.

The chapter closes with one of the more famous lines of the novel: “a whale-ship was my Yale college and my Harvard.”