Herman Melville

Moby-dick or, The whale Herman Melville

this title Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, the Pequod plays with the Jungfrau of Bremen. Both boats spotted whales simultaneously, and the Pequod won the contest. The three harpooners launch their harpoons and Flask delivers the killing blow with a spear. The corpse sinks and Queequeg barely escapes. The Pequod's next departure is with the French whaler Bouton de Rose, whose crew ignores the ambergris in the entrails of the diseased whale in their possession. Stubb dissuades them, but Ahab orders him to leave before he can retrieve more than a few handfuls. Days later, an encounter with a harpooned whale causes Pip, a small black cabin boy from Connecticut, to jump out of his whaling boat. You have to release the whale, because the line has Pip so tangled in it. Furious, Stubb orders Pip to stay in the whaling boat, but Pip then jumps in again and is left alone in the vast sea and has gone insane when he is picked up.