The Affidavit — Moby-Dick

Ishmael refuses a neat proof and stacks cases a whaleman can vouch for, so a landsman will not dismiss the White Whale as a fable or, worse, an allegory. He has known three whales that escaped with a harpoon and were killed years later by the same hand, the old iron still marked with the same private cypher. In one case he was in the boat both times and recognised a mole under the eye after more than three years, during which the man wandered in Africa and the whale, he supposes, circled the globe.

Particular whales also keep names and a prestige of peril, so crews tip a hat and stay off. He calls Timor Tom, New Zealand Jack, Morquan of Japan, and the Chilean Don Miguel as well known to the fishery as Caesar to a scholar. Tom and Don Miguel were hunted down on purpose, as Captain Butler once went after Annawon. The deaths that would make this ordinary almost never reach a newspaper. On one Pacific voyage every ship they spoke had lost someone to a whale. Then he names hulls a sperm whale has stove on purpose: the Essex of Nantucket in 1820, Captain Pollard, whose mate Owen Chase wrote that the whale's two attacks looked like revenge; the Union off the Azores in 1807; and a commodore who mocked that strength at Oahu and soon after had his sloop-of-war knocked into port for repair.

A whale in Langsdorff lifted his uncle Captain D'Wolf's ship and sailed off unhurt. Lionel Wafer's dawn shock, blamed on an earthquake, may have been the same unseen bump. Struck whales have chased ships, towed hulls, and rallied into deliberate malice. Ishmael ends with Procopius, who recorded a monster in the Propontis that destroyed vessels for fifty years under Justinian. Ships pass the Dardanelles, so a sperm whale could, and the squid it eats can live where the right whale's food does not.