July 12, 2019 - Chapters Sixty and Sixty-one

The two chapters for today are both quite short. The second chapter, “Stubb Kills a Whale,” is self-explanatory. The whale isn’t Moby Dick, although there is a suspicion at first that it is. It is, notably, the first whale killed in the novel.

The first chapter, “The Line,” is a dissertation on the line used to harpoon a whale. It’s made of hemp, which is racialized by Ishmael as “a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.” Circassian here likely stands in for “Caucasian.” The line, it turns out, can be quite dangerous, “As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off” and “were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea” -- foreshadowing again, here with the line playing the role of Chekhov’s gun.

On a final note, Ishmael references the Burghers of Calais in this selection. The sculpture by Rodin (below) is more famous today but did not exist when Melville wrote the novel. The story of the burghers can be read here.