July 21, 2019 - Chapters Seventy-five and Seventy-six

After a description of the right whale’s head in the first of these two chapters, the narrator turns to discuss the “battering ram” of the sperm whale’s forehead, which rises like a “wholly vertical plane to the water.” Near the end of the second chapter, we’re told the sperm whale “stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific.” The isthmus here is that through which the Panama Canal was eventually dug, so the assumption is that, rather than rounding Cape Horn, the whale crossed this isthmus. Lest we think the idea for a Panama Canal came from Moby Dick, Wikipedia tells me that the initial idea of a canal comes from the early 16th century.