1.

Ahab stabs Moby Dick with a knife, loses his leg, and spends the next forty years planning his return — not with the owners' blessing, not with a crew that understands, but with a Spanish gold coin nailed to the mast and a harpoon tempered in the blood of his pagan harpooneers.

2.

Three white death-tablets on the wall

• New Bedford, a whaling town built entirely on sperm oil — "One and all, these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans"
• In the Whaleman's Chapel, sailors and widows sit among marble memorials to men towed out of sight by whales or killed in the bows of their boats
• The chaplain, Father Mapple, climbs the pulpit like a crow's-nest, preaches the book of Jonah to men whose dead are placelessly perished without a grave

3.

"The universe is finished"

• Ishmael arrives Saturday night in December with "little or no money in my purse" — a schoolmaster who fled to sea to drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation
• He is assigned a bed with a harpooneer he has never met; the landlord, Peter Coffin, says he "pays reg'lar" — nothing else
• The harpooneer, Queequeg, enters holding a New Zealand head, sets up a hunch-backed wooden idol, kindles a sacrificial fire, and then springs into bed with a tomahawk between his teeth
• Ishmael is terrified, then thinks: "The man's a human being just as I am. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." He sleeps better than he ever has in his life.

4.

"Ego non baptizo te"

• On the ship's quarter-deck, Ahab nails a doubloon to the mast and offers it to whoever first raises the white whale with the wrinkled brow and the three holes in his starboard fluke
• Starbuck asks how many barrels of vengeance he expects to sell in the Nantucket market; Ahab says: "All visible objects are but as pasteboard masks"
• The three pagan harpooneers — Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo — prick their own flesh and temper the harpoon in blood, blood, blood
• Ahab baptizes it: "Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" — I do not baptize thee in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil

5.

The Captain who cannot be seen

• For days Ahab remains in his cabin; when he finally appears, he looks "like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them"
• His ivory leg is fashioned from sperm whale jawbone and braced in an auger hole drilled into the deck; he walks it through the dark cabin at night, sounding like a coffin-tap
• He is a Quaker by birth, an emperor by obsession — "all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad"

6.

A harpoon in the hump

• The Pequod crosses four cruising grounds with no sign of Moby Dick; the crew hunts other whales and fills the hold with oil
• They encounter the Bachelor, a homeward-bound ship so stuffed with sperm oil that harpooneers have caulked their chests and the cook has filled his coffee-pot
• Ahab asks the Bachelor's captain: "Hast seen the White Whale?" The answer comes cheerfully: "No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all"
• Moby Dick surfaces on the first day of the chase and then sounds — the crew spends all night filing lances and sharpening irons by lantern light

7.

Daggoo's shoulders, Flask's feet

• The second day Moby Dick breaches, his entire bulk exploding into the air "like a glacier"
• He crosses and recrosses, tangling slack lines around the boats until harpoons and lances are corkscrewed together; Ahab seizes a boat-knife, cuts the snarl free, and drops the steel into the sea
• He charges Ahab's boat head-on, sends it turning over and over into the air; Ahab's ivory leg snaps off, leaving one short sharp splinter
• Fedallah is missing — caught among the tangles of Ahab's line, dragging under the surface like a dead man

8.

"Thou hast outraged, not insulted me"

• Starbuck goes to Ahab's cabin at night to report fair wind — he sees the loaded muskets shining in the rack
• "He would have shot me once" — the same gun Ahab pointed at him when Starbuck protested the hunt
• He places the musket against Ahab's door: "On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again."
• He hears Ahab call out in his sleep: "Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!" — and slowly he returns the musket to the rack

9.

A coffin made into a life-buoy

• A man at the mast-head is swallowed by the sea; the life-buoy is shrunken by the sun and follows him down
• Queequeg hints about his coffin — the Carpenter rigs it with thirty Turk's-headed life-lines and hangs it from the stern
• Ahab sees it and says: "Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I'll think of that. But no."
• Three days pass; no whale is raised; Ahab rigs a hempen basket and is hoisted to the main-mast head himself — a red-billed sea-hawk snatches his hat and drops it into the sea

10.

"The second hearse!"

• Day three dawns fair and fresh; Ahab stands in his basket at the main-mast head, searching the horizon — he sees the spout, then the hump like a snow-hill
• Starbuck weeps; they shake hands; starbuck's tears are the glue; Ahab throws the arm away — "Lower away!"
• Moby Dick smashes the ship's starboard bow — "The ship! The hearse! — the second hearse!" — and dives beneath the sinking hull
• The harpoon line runs foul; Ahab bends to clear it; the flying turn catches him round the neck and shoots him out of the boat

11.

A red arm, a hammer

• Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo still maintain their sinking lookouts on the masts, eyes fixed on the sea
• Concentric circles seize the lone boat, spinning it into the vortex — the smallest chip of the Pequod disappears
• At the very last, Tashtego's mast-head hammer remains suspended in the open air, a sky-hawk folded in Ahab's flag between the hammer and the wood
• "The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."

12.

"Only found another orphan"

• Ishmael was dropped astern when the boat was stove; he was drawn into the closing vortex, revolved like Ixion, and the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea and floated beside him
• "The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks"
• On the second day a sail draws near — the Rachel, "weeping for her children, because they were not," in her retracing search after her missing children
• "She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not."

1.