#mocha dick

[michael-rosskothen]

Emerging sperm whale and seagulls

[guy60660]

Randall Enos

[trivalentlinks]

saw that people are planning a moby dick version of dracula daily and i’ve never read moby dick and am really curious... but i have a concern that maybe someone who has read moby dick can address for me:

if i happen to love mocha dick, the white whale of the pacific, whom moby dick is believed to have been based on, and i un-ironically believe that mocha dick was an absolute sweetheart who did nothing wrong, will i be upset by the way he is portrayed in the book?

(like is moby dick the villain of the book? is the reader meant to see the people who killed him as the good guys? and if the answer to those two questions is yes, does he differ enough from mocha dick that it won’t feel like a hit piece/character assassination to someone who genuinely likes mocha dick?)

[weirdbooksifoundatwork]

First day back on the job!!

[dailybehbeh]

Behbeh

[jamearts]

Inktober 2018 - Day 12 by JAMEArts

In 1820, the whaleship Essex was sunken by a large whale near the Mocha island, Chile. The survivors were later saved in Valparaiso to tell about the infamous whale among whale hunters who keeps sinking their ships on this side of the Pacific Ocean in their attempt to catch the large beast. The Essex's tragedy inspired Herman Melville to write the famous tale of "Moby Dick"

[ettuturandot]

Mocha Dick.

[trivalentlinks]

Randomly started thinking about Mocha Dick, The White Whale of the Pacific, an albino sperm whale who lived off the coast of Chile in the 1800s and survived many, many attacks by whalers before being killed. 

According to the wikipedia article about him:

Mocha Dick was quite docile, sometimes swimming alongside the ship, but once attacked he retaliated with ferocity and cunning, and was widely feared by harpooners. When agitated he would sound and then breach so aggressively that his entire body would sometimes come completely out of the water.

In Reynolds' account, Mocha Dick was killed in 1838, after he appeared to come to the aid of a distraught cow whose calf had just been slain by the whalers. His body was 70 feet long and yielded 100 barrels of oil, along with some ambergris—a substance used in the making of perfumes and at times worth more per ounce than gold. He also had twenty harpoons in his body.

This wikipedia article makes me feel so much every time.

He was docile and friendly, and liked swimming alongside ships! He only retaliated when people attacked him, but then afterwards when he saw other ships, he would still be friendly.

He was super intelligent, he knew what he was doing, but he didn’t hold a grudge against humans, even when other humans had attacked him, and that’s just so much.

And then he died trying to comfort another whale whose baby had been killed by humans. Just a huge animal with an even larger heart.

I love him so much.

Sometimes I feel angry at an entire group of people with different politics from mine (politics that hurt me and people like me), as it’s hard not to do when reading the news these days, these years... but then I stop myself and think, would Mocha Dick be proud of me? How would Mocha Dick react?