The Whale's Body Set Adrift
Chapter 69 of Moby-Dick by opens with the command to haul in the chains and let the whale's carcass go astern. The vast tackles have completed their work of stripping the blubber, and the peeled white body of the beheaded whale is released into the sea. Though changed in color to a ghostly white, the carcass has "not perceptibly lost anything in bulk" and remains colossal. Ishmael watches as the headless body slowly floats away from the Pequod, the surrounding water torn and splashed by insatiate sharks while rapacious flights of screaming sea fowl descend from above, their beaks compared to "insulting poniards."
A Doleful and Mocking Funeral
Ishmael reflects on the grim irony of the scene unfolding before him, calling it "a most doleful and most mocking funeral." The sea-vultures appear dressed in "pious mourning" and the air-sharks are "punctiliously in black or speckled," as if attending a solemn ceremony. Yet Ishmael notes the bitter hypocrisy: in life, few of these creatures would have helped the whale had it needed assistance, but "upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce." He exclaims against the "horrible vulturism of earth" from which not even the mightiest whale is free, drawing a parallel between the natural scavengers and the opportunistic behavior found throughout human society.
The Vengeful Ghost That Haunts the Sea
The chapter takes a philosophical turn as Ishmael reveals that the whale's influence does not end with its physical death. A "vengeful ghost survives and hovers over" the desecrated body. When a timid man-of-war or blundering discovery vessel spots the white mass floating in the sun from a distance, the swarming birds obscured by distance, frightened sailors mark the location in their logs as "shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabout: beware!" For years afterward, ships shun that place, "leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held." The whale's corpse thus becomes a phantom hazard on nautical charts, feared long after it has dissolved.
Orthodoxy, Tradition, and Powerless Panic
Ishmael uses the whale's ghostly afterlife to deliver a pointed critique of tradition and superstition. The false warning entered in one ship's log is blindly repeated by others, illustrating "your law of precedents" and "your utility of traditions," beliefs "never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air." He concludes that while in life the great whale's body may have been "a real terror to his foes," in death "his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world." The chapter closes with a provocative question to the reader about belief in ghosts, referencing the famous Cock-Lane ghost and suggesting that even the deepest thinkers are susceptible to unfounded fears. In barely more than a page, Melville transforms a routine whaling operation into a meditation on death, superstition, and the persistence of irrational belief.