Monday, December 17 th

1. Monday, December 17th Get out your Chapter 7 – 9 worksheet from Friday. Take about five minutes to complete on your own.

2. Chapters 7 – 9 • Now, check with your seat partner for about five minutes, comparing your answers. • We’ll then talk it out as a class.

3. Chapters 12 - 16 Presentations by Kelly & Lucy / Tyler & Dan

4. Chapters 12 – 16 “Quiz” **Do not write anything in the boxes until the end** You and your partner will be assigned a topic from Chapters 12 – 16. Reading over the passage, and talking together, you will figure out the author’s purpose. (REMEMBER: NOT THE SAME AS PLOT SUMMARY) After 5 – 10 minutes together, you will go around the room and chat with groups that had the other topics. You will tell them about your topic. Once you’ve chatted, you’ll come back to your seat and write one perfect sentence which sums up Melville’s purpose regarding Queequeg, Nantucket, and Ahab. Feel free to you use your book the entire time. Sometimes no one has better ideas than you do . . . Keep that in mind; although, collaboration can also lead to enlightenment. Just sayin’!

5. Chapter 12: “Biographical” Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

6. Chapter 13: “Wheelbarrow” Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.

7. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive. Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself—"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians."

9. Chapter 14: “Nantucket” With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

11. Chapter 15: “Chowder”

12. Chapter 16: “The Ship” You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know; -- squared-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts -- cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale -- her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.

13. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

15. He's a queer man, Captain Ahab -- so some think -- but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. he's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; he's Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!’

16. Peleg on Ahab: “I know what he is -- a good man -- not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man -- something like me -- only there's a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of moody -- desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee -- and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife -- not three voyages wedded -- a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!‘”