Herman Melville, 'Moby-Dick', 1851:
Artist: Zachary Kanin, The New Yorker, October 2015
"BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER IV. (Killer).—Of this whale
little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the
professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say
that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage—a sort of Feegee
fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs there
like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The Killer is never
hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception might be taken to the
name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are
all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included."
"Io! Paean! Io! sing.
To the finny
people's king.
Not a mightier
whale than this
In the vast
Atlantic is;
Not a fatter fish
than he,
Flounders round
the Polar Sea."
—Charles Lamb's
Triumph of the Whale.
Captain Ahab: "Oh he's not a whale, he's the devil
himself!"
