For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly
way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference,
many of them adventurously pushing their quest along
solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth
or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail
of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage;
the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these,
with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed
the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special
individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly
to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered,
at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian,
a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale,
after doing great mischief to his assailants, has completely
escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption,
I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than
Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been
marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity,
cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was,
that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick;
such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe
the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils
of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.
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