The Moby-Dick Bible
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Literary Motifs › Whale Imagery

Whale Imagery

1 passage in the novel carry this mark, in the order they appear.

Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is far better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best. All Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved.

Chapter 56, Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes · verse 2

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