Moby-Dick; or, The Whale · Moby-Dick, ch. 40 · block 71

How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birth-mark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in the sky—lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.

Herman Melville · 1851
Project Gutenberg #15, credited to Eugene F. Irey; updated 10 June 2026. Based on the first American edition, Harper & Brothers, 1851, according to the source catalog.
Mapped print edition: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851; First American edition).
Passage ¶1099: pp. 193–194 (Scanned p. 193 · Scanned p. 194)
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Gloss address: 40.29 · chapter.paragraph · global ¶1099
Frozen text and counting rules: g1-582503627a093f94.
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