Reading Moby-Dick Aloud
Newsletter 4 to Chapter 10
Reading Moby-Dick Aloud Banyule Melbourne
Read Week Four
February 23rd
At this read the group went back and read the Extracts aloud. Interesting some of them hadn’t even notice these existed and some of the editions of the book had been sold without these included. Not a proper copy we decided.
The introduction to these extracts caused many chuckles among readers as once again Melville shone as a humorist.Having hunted through “long Vaticans and street stalls of the earth” the Sub-Sub has put together this collection of extracts.
Melville, himself says “these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own”.
We then picked out our ‘favourite” and shared both their origin and the extract.
Here are some we visited
“Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that we were forced to proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship among them.”
Schouten’s Sixth Circumnavigation.
We discovered Willem Schouten (born 1567) discovered a new route, the Drake Passage, around the southern tip of South America, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific. We thought the sheer numbers of whales he expected to see on this his sixth voyage attested to the size of the whale population at the time.
Another extract we chose had a similar theme: the abundance of whales before whaling became commonplace.
“We saw an abundance of large whales, there being more in these southern seas, as I may say by a hundred to one; that we have to the northward of us” - Captain Crowley’s Voyage around the globe (1729). This book is still available ( at a vey large sum) from antiquarian book sellers.
The extract from Thomas Beale in his book History of the Sperm Whale (1839) referred to the fact that people had not taken the opportunity to observe whales in their natural habitat when they were at their most abundant. We were little taken with Beale himself having discovered that he led an interesting life. He was once an opium dealer, kept a magnificent garden filled with interesting species and maintained good relations with the rich. He was declared bankrupt in 1816 but still managed to keep many of his influential friends. The body of Thomas was found washed ashore at Casilha Bay, near Macau in January 1841, after he allegedly committed suicide. Thomas Beale is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of East Asian turtle, Sacalia bealei.
And one last one
“No, Sir, ’tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his sprout; he threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at. He’s a raal oil-butt, that fellow!” —Cooper’s Pilot. Our reader, who also studies italian noted that the Italian word for rainbow is arcobaleno..the arch of the whale. An interesting connection. There are connections to whales everywhere!
With the short time left we returned to our reading of Chapter 9 The Sermon, I will post a closer discussion of that chapter when I return. The Newsletter will take a break for a week returning about March 13th while the writer attends The Adelaide Writer’s Festival. No Moby Dick on the agenda there. I looked hard!