“On such a day – very much such a sweetness as this – I struck my first whale – a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty, forty, forty years ago! – ago! Forty years of continual whaling! Forty years of privation, and peril, and stormtime! Forty years on this pitiless sea! For forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horror of the deep!”, with these words captain Ahab, the protagonist of Moby Dick, the masterpiece of the American literature by Herman Melville, recalls the epic of whaling in which he was involved as well as many other men in the 1800s, especially Americans. Moby Dick, the white whale, was a sperm whale. Continue reading →