Plot Summary
Chapter 64 of Moby-Dick opens with the crew of the Pequod laboriously towing Stubb's freshly killed whale back to the ship in the calm darkness. Eighteen men strain for hours against the enormous mass, a scene compares to Chinese laborers hauling a junk along the Grand Canal. When the whale is finally secured alongside, Captain Ahab briefly inspects the carcass, but his mood is one of dissatisfaction: another dead whale brings him no closer to Moby Dick. He retires below without returning until morning, ceding the deck to the exuberant Stubb.
Character Development
While the melancholy Ahab broods, Stubb indulges his love of whale meat, ordering harpooner Daggoo to cut a steak from the whale's tail. Around midnight he feasts at the capstan-head by lantern light. The scene then turns comic as Stubb summons the elderly Black cook, Fleece, and orders him to preach a sermon to the thousands of sharks noisily feasting on the whale's carcass. Fleece, roused from sleep and hobbling on bad knees, reluctantly complies. Stubb then subjects the cook to an extended, teasing interrogation about his age (about ninety), his birthplace (a ferry-boat on the Roanoke), his cooking abilities, and his religious beliefs, all while cheerfully devouring the steak he claims is overdone.
Themes and Motifs
Fleece's sermon to the sharks is the chapter's thematic centerpiece. He urges the sharks to govern their voracious natures, arguing that "all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned." He insists that no shark has more right to the whale than another and that those with bigger mouths should share with the "small fry." This sermon on self-governance, charity, and the impossibility of reforming appetite mirrors the broader human drama aboard the Pequod. Stubb mockingly praises this as "Christianity," yet he himself feasts with equal abandon, a parallel the narrator underscores by noting that Stubb "heeded not the mumblings of the banquet" just as the sharks ignored his own eating.
Literary Devices
Melville deploys sustained parallelism between Stubb and the sharks: both feast simultaneously on the same whale, and neither heeds the other. The chapter's darkest passage extends this mirroring to warfare and the slave trade, where sharks follow ships "systematically trotting alongside" to devour the dead. Fleece's dialect sermon functions as both comic relief and social satire, echoing and inverting Father Mapple's earlier sermon. The closing line—Fleece muttering that Stubb is "more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself"—delivers the chapter's sharpest irony, collapsing the distinction between human appetite and animal voracity.