[Moby Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville]@TWC D-Link book
Moby Dick; or The Whale

CHAPTER 32
14/23

It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as "whale oil," an inferior article in commerce.
Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale.

There is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously baptised.

What then is the whale, which I include in the second species of my Folios?
It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes.

It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor' West Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans.

But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books