“It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a sperm whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick.”
Thus Herman Melville wrote in 1851, in a book I bet you can guess the title of, making clear what Ahab and company pursued: a leviathan so cunning and cruel as to transcend flesh and blood, becoming “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung”…