The Moby-Dick Bible
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Symbolism › Sea-Ivory

Sea-Ivory

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

Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw.

Chapter 16, The Ship · verse 8

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