{"id":"01KFNR8714N6N5BDFE99G25B12","cid":"bafkreih2f5p5wjokvciqbsrolozat2jjqz4zvfsdfpg5zzyp2wjajr7u4a","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":3312,"extracted_at":"2026-01-23T15:41:01.908Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 1","source_file":"01KFNR0Z394A878Y5AQ63MQEM2","start_line":3256,"text":"Pequod. _Devil-Dam_, I do not know the origin of; _Tit-bit_ is obvious;\r\n_Pequod_, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated\r\ntribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes. I\r\npeered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the\r\nTit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for\r\na moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.\r\n\r\nYou may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I\r\nknow;—square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box\r\ngalliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a\r\nrare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old\r\nschool, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed\r\nlook about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and\r\ncalms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a\r\nFrench grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her\r\nvenerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of\r\nJapan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts\r\nstood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her\r\nancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped\r\nflag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these\r\nher old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining\r\nto the wild business that for more than half a century she had\r\nfollowed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he\r\ncommanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one\r\nof the principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term\r\nof his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and\r\ninlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device,\r\nunmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved buckler or\r\nbedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his\r\nneck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of\r\ntrophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased\r\nbones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were\r\ngarnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the\r\nsperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews\r\nand tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood,\r\nbut deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile\r\nwheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller\r\nwas in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her\r\nhereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest,\r\nfelt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching\r\nits jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things\r\nare touched with that.\r\n\r\nNow when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having\r\nauthority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at\r\nfirst I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of\r\ntent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It\r\nseemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical\r\nshape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber\r\nblack bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the\r\nright-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of\r\nthese slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at\r\nthe apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved\r\nto and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem’s head. A\r\ntriangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the\r\ninsider commanded a complete view forward.\r\n\r","title":"Chunk 1"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KFNR847Z5PK5KBJXR1EFBJCD","peer_label":"16","peer_type":"chapter","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KFNR847Z5PK5KBJXR1EFBJCD","peer_label":"16","peer_type":"chapter","predicate":"partOf"},{"peer":"01KFNR81RMVAX2BBMMBW51V97D","peer_label":"Moby Dick; Or, The Whale","peer_type":"novel","predicate":"partOf"},{"peer":"01KFNR0H0Q791Y1SMZWEQ09FGV","peer_label":"Moby Dick","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KFNR86TKGTNFTK3Z0M8PHXEQ","peer_label":"Chunk 2","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"},{"peer":"01KFNR86TKG70N4XAXBCS4V071","peer_label":"Chunk 0","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"prev"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-23T15:41:02.555Z","ts":"2026-01-23T15:41:15.003Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}