Plot Summary
Chapter 105 of Moby-Dick pauses the narrative to pose two sweeping questions about the whale as a species: has the whale diminished in size over the ages, and will it be hunted to extinction? , through his narrator Ishmael, engages with the natural history, classical authorities, and practical whaling knowledge of his day to answer both questions with a resounding no.
Ishmael begins by observing that fossil evidence from the Tertiary geological period shows ancient whales were actually smaller than their modern descendants. The largest pre-Adamite whale skeleton yet discovered—the Alabama specimen mentioned in the previous chapter—measured less than seventy feet, whereas modern Sperm Whales have been captured at nearly one hundred feet. Turning to the written record, Ishmael dismisses the exaggerated accounts of Pliny, Aldrovandus, and Lacépède, who described whales spanning acres of bulk or measuring hundreds of feet. No experienced whaleman, Ishmael insists, would credit such stories. He bolsters his argument by analogy: Egyptian mummies are no taller than modern men, and the cattle on ancient Nineveh tablets are no larger than the prize stock of Smithfield—so why should the whale alone have degenerated?
The Extinction Question
The chapter’s second half takes up a more urgent question: whether the relentless global whale hunt will exterminate the species entirely. Ishmael acknowledges the alarming precedent of the American buffalo, whose vast herds had been decimated in a single generation. However, he argues that the analogy breaks down because whaling is far less efficient than buffalo hunting—forty men in a ship working four years might take only forty whales, whereas the same number of mounted hunters could slay forty thousand buffalo. Moreover, the whales have not declined in number but simply consolidated from scattered pods into enormous, widely separated herds.
Themes and Analysis
Ishmael identifies two ultimate refuges that will forever protect whale-bone whales: the polar seas, where ice barriers make pursuit impossible and whales "bid defiance to all pursuit from man." He further reasons that because whales live for a century or more, several adult generations overlap at any given time, providing an immense population buffer. The chapter concludes with one of the novel’s most celebrated passages, declaring the whale "immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality." The Leviathan swam the seas before the continents rose, despised Noah’s Ark during the Flood, and will survive any future deluge.
Read in hindsight, Ishmael’s optimism is deeply ironic. The industrialization of whaling in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought several whale species to the brink of extinction, proving that technology could overcome the very obstacles Ishmael trusted as permanent safeguards. The chapter thus functions as an unintentional case study in the limits of human foresight regarding environmental destruction, making it one of the most discussed passages in ecocritical readings of the novel.