Posted on 08/02/2020 6:32:31 PM PDT by Perseverando
"There she blows!" cried the lookout, sighting the great white whale, Moby Dick.
The classic book, Moby Dick, was written by New England author Herman Melville, published in 1851.
In the novel, Captain Ahab, driven by revenge, sailed the seas to capture this great white whale who had bitten off his leg in a previous encounter.
The crew of Captain Ahab's ship, the Pequod, included:
Ishmael, the teller of the tale, which begins the line: "Call me Ishmael"-the name of Abraham's son who was sent away;
Chief Mate Starbuck, a Quaker from Nantucket, for whom the Seattle-based coffee franchise took its name;
Second Mate Stubb;
Captain Boomer;
Harpooneer Tashtego, a native American of the Wampanoag Tribe; and
Harpooneer Queequeg, a tattooed Polynesian from a mysterious cannibal island in the South Pacific.
"Tattoo" originated from "tatau" or "tatu," which were body markings originally associated with natives, aborigines, cannibals and headhunters of Southeast Asian islands, such as:
Polynesia, Micronesia, Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, New Zealand, New Guinea, Malagasy, and the Marquesas Islands.
"Tattoo" was first mentioned by naturalist Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain James Cook on the ship HMS Endeavour as he explored the Pacific, 1768-1771:
"I shall now mention the way they mark themselves indelibly, each of them is so marked by their humour or disposition."
Sailors brought tattoos to port cities around the world, where, for a century, they were associated with salty sailors, rough working men, slaves, convicts, and circus sideshows.
In the 1956 film Moby Dick, actor Gregory Peck played Captain Ahab.
Ahab finally caught up with Moby Dick in the Pacific
(Excerpt) Read more at myemail.constantcontact.com ...
Took me years to read the book, one chapter a night.
I now got the audio book on my mp3 player, trying to do an hour a night. I think I’m up to chapter 35, and the harpooneers just left the dining table, much to the relief of the steward/cabin boy.
Of the many fascinating and magically written scenarios by Melville and “observed” by the school teacher was the behavior of whales. The passages about mothers and children are moving, as are the passages about the righteous anger of whales.
[from IMDB]:
"Ishmael: Ehhhh, you can't fool us; it's the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he's got a great secret in him.
Elijah: I have, lad, I have. At sea one day, you'll smell land where there'll be no land, and on that day Ahab will go to his grave, but he'll rise again within the hour. He will rise and beckon. Then all - all save one shall follow. (Slinking away with a smile on his face) Mornin', lads... mornin'. May the heavens bless you."
I am surprised how many here know the story of the Essex
I forget the boy’s name too but it was quite moving.
Ishmael had a deep and natural empathy for the various people he encountered, even the obnoxious ones. That was an essential part of Moby Dick, more important in its way than revenge.
The drowning of the cabin boy was foreshadowed by the earlier scenario where Queequeg saves the insulting hayseed country boy from Vermont and quietly goes back to smoking his pipe.
Melville truly was a Fellini type artist, as Bartleby and Billy Budd show.
Billy Budd? another fine novel
Was it Stubbs who said, “If God had wanted to be a fish, He’d be a whale, son, He’d be a whale!!”
And didn’t Charlton Heston portray the preacher in the whalers’ chapel who climbed a rope ladder into the pulpit shaped like a bowsprit?
Eh?
While he may have coined the word tattooing was known if not commonly practiced in Europe as they were banned by the Second Council of Nicaea a thousand years before.
It is the custom of the Coptic Christians in Egypt to tattoo a cross on their right wrist as a sign of their belief.
That's probably why I couldn't get through the book. I just found it boring and uninteresting. I'm a voracious reader, but Moby Dick quickly fell off my reading bucket list.
No, the preacher Reverend Mapple was played by Orson Welles.
Think the cabin boy was Pip
Someone even did an opera of Billy Budd, I heard it on my local university's classical station. It wasn't pleasant at all...
That sounds right, thank you.
Billy Budd was unfinished when Melville died, and not published until some 33 years afterward.
If we’re talking about the version with Richard Basehart as Ishmael, the preacher was played by Orson Welles.
No, that was Orson Welles.
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