Introduction
Ahab, captain of a whaling ship, has been pursuing a huge albino sperm whale he calls Moby Dick, with an ever more deranged hatred. At last he has come to close quarters: he has boarded a small a boat, harpoon at the ready, and rowed out to face the object of his obsession while sharks circle in a frenzy of anticipation. Suddenly, the whale charges headlong — not at Ahab’s boat, but at the ship.
RETRIBUTION, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooners aloft shook on their bull-like necks.* Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.*
“The ship! The hearse! — the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat; “its wood could only be American!”*
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.
“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego!* let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed* prow, — death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains?*
* A truck, in this sense, is a small wooden cap at the top of a masthead, with holes for the halyards (ropes) used for raising or lowering signal flags.
* A flume is an artificial water-channel designed to transport objects such as logs by gravity.
* Not a bizarre moment of patriotic pride (he was a native of Natucket in Massachusetts) but a reference to a prophecy that Ahab could die on this voyage only in the presence of two hearses: “the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in America.” The whale is the first hearse, not made by man’s hand; the wooden whaling ship is the second.
* A native American from the northwest of Martha’s Vineyard, who worked as a harpooner on Ahab’s ship alongside another native American named Queequeg, and Daggoo the African. All hands aboard the Pequod were lost except for Ishmael, the supposed narrator of Moby Dick.
* That is, turned toward the Pole Star up above, by which mariners were accustomed to steer.
* Conventionally, a sea-captain will ‘go down with his ship’ in the event of shipwreck. Ahab regrets that this honour will be denied him, but he sees going down with Moby Dick as a greater.
Précis
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) reaches its climax as the great white whale rams Ahab’s ship, leaving the captain exposed in his little whaling-boat. Ahab regrets that he cannot go down with his ship as convention demands, but in his mental exaltation he sees everything coming together to fulfil a prophecy of his own heroic death. (56 / 60 words)
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) reaches its climax as the great white whale rams Ahab’s ship, leaving the captain exposed in his little whaling-boat. Ahab regrets that he cannot go down with his ship as convention demands, but in his mental exaltation he sees everything coming together to fulfil a prophecy of his own heroic death.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 60 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 50 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: despite, if, just, must, otherwise, ought, since, until.
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