Chapter 66 Summary

As the sharks threaten to eat their prized hunt, the crew starts fighting them. Ishmael warns that it is unwise “to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures.” When a dead shark is pulled aboard, its deadly sharp teeth leave Queequeg with a terrible cut on his hand.

Chapters 67–68 Summary

The bloody business of “cutting-in” of the whale begins the next day. Ishmael describes the process of cutting the blubber from the carcass of the whale. As he describes the blubber, he argues that it is the skin of the whale. The blubber covers the whale like a blanket and keeps its warm in the cold sea.

Chapters 69–70 Summary

Once the cutting-in is completed, the carcass of the whale is released into the sea for its “funeral.” The only mourners will be sharks and vultures. The carcass is so huge and white, floating on the sea, that it is frequently mistaken as rocks and shoals, and thus entered the same on mariners’ charts as places to be avoided by sailors. Thus, even in death, a whale inspires fear.

The head of the sperm whale contains spermaceti, from which the finest oil is derived. So the whale must be beheaded to obtain it. Ishmael describes this difficult process, which is a “scientific anatomical feat.” Ahab delivers a grim monologue to the severed head of the whale, which is hung at the ship’s side, asking it rhetorically about the horrors it has seen at sea.

Chapter 71 Summary

A whaling ship called Jeroboam comes into view. An epidemic has broken out amongst its crew and gam cannot be initiated. However, they manage to communicate when the captain of the Jeroboam, Mayhew, gets on a small boat and rides up to the side of the Pequod to talk to Ahab. Along with Mayhew, there is another man—an intense, mesmerizing Shaker prophet who believes himself to be an incarnation of the archangel Gabriel and holds the crew of Jeroboam in his thrall. Captain Mayhew wanted to get rid of Gabriel at the next port, but the crew threatened to desert if he was put ashore.

Mayhew tells Arab about what he knows of Moby Dick. The Shaker had forbidden the crew from hunting the White Whale, stating that it is “the Shaker God incarnated,” but he is not obeyed. When a mate throws a lance at Moby Dick while hunting it, he is caught in the whale’s tail and is thrown overboard to his death. This fulfillment of Gabriel’s warning led the crew to become his disciples.

Gabriel warns Ahab ominously about his grim fate just like the Jeroboam’s mate.

Chapter 72 Summary

Ishmael goes back to the description of the cutting-in process and explains what the “monkey-rope” is. Ishmael describes Queequeg’s dangerous role in this process.

Chapter 73 Summary

Ahab orders Stubb and Flask to kill a right whale, which is not as valuable as the sperm whale. Stubb wants to know why Ahab would want the “foul lard” of the right whale since the Pequod is a sperm whale hunting ship. Flask responds that Fedallah says that a whaler with a sperm whale’s head on her starboard side and a right whale’s head on her larboard will never capsize. They both agree that Fedallah is a “devil in disguise.”

Chapters 66–73 Analysis

These chapters contrast the practical matters of whaling with a series of perceptual problems. The sharks that swarm around the boat seem to possess malevolent agency even after they are killed. Even in death a shark or whale continues to threaten humans.

The descriptions of the cutting-in process and blubber offer details about the whaling industry. Ishmael spares no detail of the gory process of hunting and then processing the whale’s body, a job which is risky and threatens the men’s life every day. He considers various features of the whale and portrays these as potential models for human life. He admires and envies the whale’s blubber, which envelops the beast.

These chapters again echo the tropes of male bonding and homoeroticism that were earlier explored in the chapters of Ishmael and Queequeg’s friendship. When the two men are bound together by the monkey-rope, as if like twins, or joined in a “wedding,” by using the vocabulary of love and marriage—the primary relationships in society—to describe the bonds between these men, Melville suggests that these pairings onboard are models of ideal partnership. When Ismael describes the bond as “till death do us part,” it reminds the reader of the sanctity of Christian marriage and how the relationship between these two men is strong as marriage. This all-male world is more egalitarian, more accepting, and even more loving than the heterosexual world back on land.

The meeting with Jeroboam offers Captain Ahab valuable information about Moby Dick, something that the encounter with Town-Ho failed to do. The appearance of the crazed prophet Gabriel is an extension of Ishmael’s observation about the mental state of Ahab and Fedallah—all these men claim to possess prophetic or occult knowledge, but each of them is also crazed. Gabriel’s warning also serves as an epic motif in keeping with epical prophecies and the destiny of man.