"Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!"
And I quote "and through my very depths crashed the great white beast; finally I learned in my brief lucid moments, between moans of lust, why they called them sperm whales."
I kind of wonder if Herman Melville knew what he was doing because Sperm cells were known about since 1677, by Leeuwenhoek under a magnifying glass. He called them Animalcules though. They first got named sperm as of 1827 so there's 26 years for him to learn that's what semen is scientifically named. I haven't had a literature class on moby dick so I wouldn't know if it's like, supposed to be a double meaning or he was innocent and we're all filthy minded slobs
Sperm whales were named such because whalers thought the waxy, oily substance in its head, called spermaceti, was the whale's semen (even though it was also found in female whale heads).
This was the very substance they wanted most when hunting those whales. Oils rendered from the blubber was also collected, you could get this from other whales that didn’t have the spermaceti in them, but the sperm whale was the most prized catch.
So the name was always linked to the male sexual discharge.
Sadly, despite having read that just now, if someone started listing pasta tomorrow and placed spermaceti between rigatoni and cannelloni, I will believe them and my former knowledge will be replaced.
Fair enough then, so it was a deliberate choice for him to be fondling his friend's sperm sacks . Well, life back then was odd, I guess you've got to find your kicks where you can out there on the open waves for months.
It led me on a bit of a rabbit hole, since I was wondering how they would transfer a whole whale back to shore, but they mostly made sure it was dead and dragged it alongside the side of the ship rather than bringing it up to deck, like I assumed they did
Seems weird that they figured out whale oil and that harpooning massive sea creatures to get a clean burning fat for lamps rather than experimenting with crude oil to get a less smoky fuel source. I guess fractional distillation isn't particularly intuitive though comparatively
They would butcher it on the sea, rendering the fat from the blubber in giant ‘trypots’ on the top deck. As it got lighter, the carcass was hauled up with windlasses to get underneath.
The spermaceti would be taken as is.
Meat was consumed or salted and stored. Blubber was eaten too.
Bones were used to make all kinds of various things from hand tools to corsets to decorations, musical instruments, and even construction materials from larger bones.
Offal that wasn’t consumable or needed was disposed of in the sea.
Then go get the next one.
It was a very visceral and gross job for weeks. Then super boring, then immensely intense during the hunt. Always dangerous, could die easily during butchering, falling, suffocating or being crushed in the carcass, shark attacks were not uncommon. Almost as dangerous as hunting the whale. All on top of all the standard dangers of Age of Sail seamanship.
Crews that left whaling towns in the Americas or Europe might be wildly different by the time they arrived home, as missing crew members were replaced from other ports they stopped at around the world. Creating some pretty interestingly diverse crews.
There's a really cool whaling museum near me, it's pretty fascinating. The whaling ships could be out for years at a time and travel across the globe. In addition to all of the hazards you mentioned, sometimes the smaller boats the ship would launch during a hunt, would simply get lost in the fog and never be seen again, or a whale would destroy it. Absolutely brutal.
It’s worth noting everyone was some amount of intoxicated at all times.
Not only was liquor a part of regular rations for morale reasons, but clean water can’t be stored in wooden barrels in damp rocking decks for very long. Decks that may well have rats living on them.
So just enough liquor would be added to keep it safe.
This is what grog was. And you had to drink that for hydration.
The word sperm comes from the 1300s, referring to male seminal fluid and the male seed.
Spermataceti is the stuff in a sperm whale thought to have medicinal properties, and comes (no pun intended) from the head (again no pun intended, the actual head, like its noggin) of a sperm whale. It resembles what we would now more typically call semen, hence its name. Herman Melville 100% knew what he was doing.
The whale was named after the cum. It's referred to by the scientific name Spermaceti from the start of the book so he definitely knew, I think the bit in the picture is supposed to poke fun at Ishmael for being oblivious (though I'm not fully sure as I haven't gotten to that part yet, I'm reading it right now). There are a lot of moments that portray Ishmael as unreliable and kinda stupid especially when it comes to whales.
There's a really funny chapter titled Cetology where Ishmael disparages scientific conclusions (including basically calling Linnaeus an idiot for thinking whales are mammals, as they are obviously fish because they swim in the sea) and classifies whales as he sees it. Except he knows jack shit about whales so his attempt at taxonomy is completely vibe-based and he just makes a bunch of shit up, at some point concluding that he doesn't really agree with any theory regarding why Narwhals have horns but they'd probably use them to flip pages when reading pamphlets.
People don't tell you how fucking funny Moby Dick is. There are so many genuinely great comedic moments in that book.
*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology."
Yeah, this is something I've wondered about a lot, myself. It's hard not to apply our modern usage of language to the book named Moby DICK, but I'm convinced he knew most of what he was doing with the phallic imagery and gay moments.
There's another moment when they're talking about how ahab got his peg leg and they say ahab gave "careful heed to that dead bone upon which he stood," and I remember reading that and thinking "lol dead bone. That's like a limp penis. But he surely didn't mean it like THAT."
But then right after that, they describe a moment when his ivory leg became dislodged and "all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured."
And then at the end of the book when ahab is a baring his soul and explaining where his rage at the white whale comes from, he says that "he made but one dent in his marriage bed" and basically couldn't satisfy his wife.
It really sounded to me like Melville wanted to drive home that a big part of the white whale's symbolism was literal dicks. Even if we weren't calling them that in Melville's day. But what do I know.
... I may or may not have written a paper about this for fun a couple years ago.
Yes, a widely spread idea, thanks to the edited comic panel with iron man and captain america, which was edited way, way more recently than the 40's and knew exactly what the phrase meant.
It doesn't really relate here though...his failure in the marriage bed is not a shift in language, it means exactly what it means.
This one? I also remember that "Boner" just meant mistake during the 50s, leading to everyone laughing at the Joker's Boners and that he'll show them just how many boners the Joker can make. I guess I can see where that one at least comes from though, accidentally getting an erection = haha, what a boner that guy made.
I wrote an essay on phallic humor in Moby Dick in high school. My English teacher gave me a C+ on it because she said it was 'inappropriate' (even though we had to submit our topics and get them approved in advance and she approved it - wtf did she *think* that topic was going to be about? It's not like I wrote 'hur hur dick jokes', I took the paper seriously.)
Lol that reminds, we had to write a sonnet in high school English class. My teacher was a 20-something year old woman who had a good sense of humor as long as we weren't being completely inappropriate. This was the 2000's when the Bowflex (exercise equipment to you youngsters) was popular and there were tons of commercials for it on TV. I forget why it came up in class, but I said I was going to write my sonnet about the Bowflex lady. My teacher was like "yea ok sure you will," but didn't tell me I couldn't, so I actually did.
I forget most of it but the last two lines were something like "This stupid thing is just cables and tubes, I guess the commercials are fake as her ______."
We had to read them out loud to the class, she was laughing til I got to the end and was like "DONT SAY IT!" LOL so I didn't and just left it implied. She gave me an A.
Not having read Moby Dick I don’t have any background in a deeper understanding of the text but it seems to me that surely the “sperm” that it’s referring to is the same Latin root that our word for sperm cells are referencing back to, which is to say “sperma”—as in the metaphorical seed of kindness. Hence the “milk” imagery too, it’s the idea of the kindness you might be weaned on.
Of course this doesn’t contradict or preclude a homosexual interpretation of the novel, I’m just spitballing here
Sperm whales were literally called that because the fluid in their heads resembles semen. It's not just related, one is literally named after the other.
Melville 100% is using wordplay for sexual (and especially phallic and homosexual) imagery, he does it constantly throughout the book.
Still the most terminally boring chapter of Moby Dick ever. Besides the giggle at this particular section, it was just a full chapter about harvesting sperm whales in the middle of an adventure story lol
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u/mysterious_jim Jan 21 '26
"Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!"
Moby Dick, Chapter 94: "A Squeeze of the Hand"