Quotes About Whaling

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere.

Soon ranging up by his flask, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up from another fling.

CHAPTER 64 Stubb's Supper

I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

go on a whaling voyage; this

at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads.

Prokristapána, za každý galon spáleného velrybího tuku byla pÃ…â"¢ece prolita víc než jedna kapka lidské krve.

Cada ballenera lleva un buen número de cartas para varias naves: entregarlas a los destinatarios depende del mero azar de encontrarlos en los cuatro océanos. Así, muchas cartas nunca llegan a destino, y otras sólo son recibidas cuando ya han cumplido dos o tres años.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.

Pete Bethune is a hero in New Zealand. He's a hero worldwide to people who want to see the end of whaling.

The sperm whales' network of female-based family units resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.

If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history.

streets of whaling ports such as New Bedford, Massachusetts, were lined with the opulent mansions of whaling merchants and crowded with bands of destitute sailors. The sailors were little more than sharecroppers on ships.

the chapters on whaling in MOBY DICK can be omitted by all but the most punishment-loving readers.

in the winter of 1902 a dysentery epidemic brought by a sailor on the whaling ship Active killed 51 out of the 56 Sadlermiut Eskimos, a very isolated band of people living on Southampton Island in the Canadian Arctic.

Everything we get from whales can be obtained without cruelty. Causing suffering to innocent beings without an extremely weighty reason for doing so is wrong, and hence whaling is unethical.

Whaling should stop because it brings needless suffering to social, intelligent animals capable of enjoying their own lives. But against the Japanese charge of cultural bias, Western nations will have little defense until they do much more about the needless animal suffering in their own countries.

A whaleman was not paid a wage but a "lay," which was a share of the outcome of the voyage, calculated after the ship had arrived home. First, the oil was gauged, and then it was valued, according to the prevailing market. After that, the costs of the voyage, plus the owners' half of the profits, were subtracted from the gross amount, and the remainder shared out according to the whalemen's lays.

When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.

The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?

Ninety-eight percent of the blue whales killed globally after the ban in 1966 were killed by Soviet whalers," wrote a historian, "as were 92 percent of the 1,201 humpbacks killed commercially between 1967 and 1978."99

The sperm whales' network of female-based family unit resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.

The whaleman's rule of thumb was that, before diving, a whale blew once for each minute it would spend underwater. Whalemen also knew that while underwater the whale continued at the same speed and in the same direction as it had been traveling before the dive. Thus, an experienced whaleman could calculate with remarkable precision where a submerged whale was likely to reappear.