Moby-Dick Ch. 75: The Right Whale's Head (Contrasted View)

Herman Melville

The Right Whale's Head (Contrasted View)

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Summary

Ishmael walks across the deck to study the right whale's head while both heads still hang from the ship. From far away the sperm whale's head looks like a Roman war chariot. The right whale's head looks more like a huge shoe with a pointed toe. An old Dutch sailor once said it looked like a shoemaker's last. You could fit the old woman from the nursery rhyme and all her children inside it.

Up close the head looks different depending on where you stand. From on top, the two F-shaped blowholes make it look like a giant bass violin. The green barnacled crest on top is called a crown or bonnet. With crabs nesting on it, it looks like an oak tree with a bird's nest. The huge lower lip hangs down in a twenty-foot sulk. It can yield more than five hundred gallons of oil.

There is a split in the lip about a foot wide, like a hare-lip. You slide over it into the mouth. Inside it feels like an Indian wigwam or a great church organ with hundreds of bone pipes. These are the baleen plates, shaped like curved blinds. They hang from the upper jaw and strain water to catch small fish when the whale feeds. Marks on the bone may show the whale's age, like rings in a tree.

Old sailors gave these plates many names: whiskers, hog's bristles, or fins on the upper chop. The same material was used to stiffen ladies' dresses in Queen Anne's time. Later people used it less. Today we might think of umbrellas spread over the same kind of bone.

The tongue on the floor is soft like a Turkish rug. It tears easily when hoisted. This one might yield about six barrels of oil.

Ishmael sums up the differences. The right whale has no great well of sperm oil, no ivory teeth, and no long thin lower jaw like the sperm whale. It does have baleen blinds, a huge lower lip, and a tongue. The right whale has two blowholes. The sperm whale has only one.

Look your last at these two great heads while they still hang together. One will soon sink into the sea without a record. The other will follow soon after.

Ishmael reads their faces. The sperm whale looks calm and thoughtful, almost indifferent to death, like a philosopher. The right whale's lip is pressed against the ship's side as if bracing for the end with grim practical courage. Ishmael calls the sperm whale a Platonian and the right whale a Stoic.

In this chapter: Terms Characters Key Quotes Modern Story

Why This Matters

Reading Design as Philosophy

Rival forms encode different strategies and death postures. Ishmael walks the right head's shoe shape, baleen blinds, and organ mouth, then tags sperm brow Platonian calm versus right lip stoic resolution before both sink.

Before you pick a model, read what its shape says about how it faces loss.

Coming Up in Chapter 76

Next: The Battering-Ram. Before leaving the sperm whale head Ishmael demands you study its front as a physiologist and settle the battering-ram power lodged there, or remain an infidel to appalling recorded events.

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Original text

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Chapter 75

The Right Whale's Head (Contrasted View)

The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View. Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale’s head. As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker’s last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood,…

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Critical Thinking Exercise

10 minutes

Bench Two Heads

Pick two rivals you know. Which is shoe, which chariot? Which face is stoic?

Consider:

•Shape?
•Filter vs predator?
•Death face?

Journaling Prompt

Write about calm versus clenched leaders you have seen.

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The Right Whale's Head (Contrasted View)

Summary