Word: whaled
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...Literary Detective Vincent traces Melville's track, Melville thumbed through a compendium of sea catastrophes (given him by Hawthorne) and recalled the Essex disaster of 1820, in which a whaling ship had been sunk by a giant sperm whale in the Pacific. One report credited the tragedy to the whale "Mocha Dick," a white killer roaming murderously through the legends...
Here was a problem to intrigue the metaphysical-minded Melville: Was the white whale an agent of nature repelling man's attacks? Or was he perhaps a symbol of man's own rebellious instincts? Melville hardly cared. For him the whale came to represent whatever it is that drives men to self-destroying quests...
...tale of Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick. That Melville's influence can be dangerous is shown in this case by the fact that Nunn Ballew's chase of King Devil has little of the intensity of Ahab's passionate quest after the white whale. In the end, the hunting down of the great fox is only an interruption in the more interesting story of a family's fight to win back its place in the world...
...over their banks in Colorado, Wyoming and Kansas. Almost everywhere else the weather was hot; beer and bathing-suit sales boomed and female sunbathers went to the office looking as though they had been parboiled. The sun was almost the undoing of people near Wilmington, Del., where a dead whale washed ashore and stank up the countryside...
...constellation Cetus (the Whale), the twin stars will be known to astronomers as L 726-8 (L for Luyten, the figures to indicate position in the sky). Both stars are red and much cooler than the sun, which gives out 40,000 times as much light as one unit, 60,000 times as much as the other. The twins revolve around each other every 20 to 25 years, keeping about 275 million miles apart...