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MOBY DICK; OR 
appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by 
his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, 
leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden 
gleamings. Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable 
hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale 
with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, 
according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in 
his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of 
dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his ex- 
ulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had 
several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down 
upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in 
consternation to their ship. 
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though sim- 
ilar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual 
in the fishery; yet in most instances, such seemed the White Whale’s 
infernal forethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that 
he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an un- 
intelligent agent. 
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds 
of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of 
chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of tom comrades, they swam out 
of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene; ex- 
asperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. 
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both, whirling 
in the eddies ; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, 
had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly 
seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. 
That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his 
sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away 
Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned 
Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more 
seeing malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since 
that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness 
against the whale, all the more fell, for that in his frantic morbidness 
he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but 
all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale 
