Plot Summary
Chapter 27 of Moby-Dick continues the crew introductions begun in the previous chapter by turning from first mate Starbuck to the remaining mates and their harpooneers. introduces Stubb, the second mate, as a happy-go-lucky Cape Cod native whose calm indifference to danger borders on philosophical detachment. Stubb treats the most perilous whale hunts as casually as a journeyman at his trade, handling his lance "as a whistling tinker his hammer." His signature pipe, always between his lips, serves as both a character marker and a symbol of his cheerful fatalism.
Flask, the third mate from Martha's Vineyard, presents a different temperament entirely. Short, stout, and pugnacious, Flask takes whale-killing as a personal vendetta, as though the great Leviathans have "personally and hereditarily affronted him." His fearlessness stems not from philosophy but from ignorance—he reduces the whale to "a species of magnified mouse," stripping it of all sublimity. The crew nickname him King-Post after the stout timber that braces Arctic whaling ships.
Character Development
Ishmael then pairs each mate with his harpooneer in a knight-and-squire arrangement. Queequeg, already known to the reader, serves Starbuck. Tashtego, a pureblooded Gay Head Indian from Martha's Vineyard, serves Stubb—his ancestral skill as a hunter transferred from the forests to the sea. Daggoo, a towering African who voluntarily joined a whaling ship in his youth, serves Flask, and the comic contrast between the gigantic harpooneer and his diminutive mate is likened to a chess piece standing beside a fortress.
Themes and Motifs
The chapter develops the novel's theme of democratic diversity through the multinational composition of the Pequod's crew. Melville observes that while nearly all American whaling officers are native-born, the common sailors come "from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth." He coins the term "Isolatoes"—individuals living on "a separate continent" of their own—yet federated aboard a single ship. This microcosm of global labor mirrors the construction of American canals, railroads, and armies. The chapter closes with a haunting proleptic reference to Pip, the "poor Alabama boy" whose tragic fate aboard the Pequod is foreshadowed before he even properly appears.
Literary Devices
Melville employs the medieval chivalric metaphor of knights and squires to organize a democratic whale ship, creating ironic tension between aristocratic hierarchy and egalitarian labor. Extended similes define each character—Stubb as a journeyman joiner, Flask as a wrought nail, Daggoo as a fortress. The final paragraph's reference to an "Anacharsis Clootz deputation" (the Prussian baron who led a delegation of nationalities before the French National Assembly) elevates the crew into a symbol of universal humanity marching toward a shared, uncertain fate.