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Moby Dick Chapter 58 Brit

#106: Mar. - May 2012 (Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Moby Dick Chapter 58 Brit

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http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/270 ... m#2HCH0058

A glorious languid sail through the Indian Ocean - surrounded by peaceful indolent right whales eating brit
Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.
Crozetts (obsolete) the Prince Edward Islands, 2000 miles south east of the southern tip of Africa, -46.91 ,37.74.
On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip. As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.
Melville digresses into a meditation on the power of the ocean
not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own off-spring ...the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
A Right Whale
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