Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick, 1851, and how a Hawaiian Missionary saved an American sailor from cannibals

American Minute ^ | August 1, 2020 | Bill Federer

[elcid1970]

Boy, have I been beaten up for putting the wrong actor in the whaler’s pulpit!

But I remember for a fact how easily he scaled that rope ladder to mount into the pulpit. Welles was 41 at the time and not yet obese.

That’s why I thought it might have been Charlton Heston.

[hanamizu]

That’s probably why I couldn’t get through the book. I just found it boring and uninteresting.

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I’ve read it twice. I worked on an albacore boat out of San Pedro. I know, it’s not the same as going round the Horn, but we did see whales, lots of whales, up close. Melville writes as if he saw some of the same things I saw.

You don’t say how long ago you tried the book. You might want to give it another try. English teachers do their best to ruin it by saying it’s a great allegory about the place of man and nature—and maybe it is. But Melville always denied the idea.