Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the world’s oceans, between Asia and Australia and the Americas. In Moby-Dick it is the White Whale’s sea, praised in its own chapter just before the final hunt.
At a glance
| Source | Author | Role | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moby-Dick | Herman Melville | subject | ’This serene Pacific’: Ishmael greets the world’s midmost sea, while Ahab senses only the White Whale swimming in it. |
Sub-places
Moby-Dick — Herman Melville (1851)
Source: Exploration of Moby Dick · Moby Dick · Original · Readwise highlight
To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption.
- Role: subject
- In the book: In Chapter 111, emerging past the Bashee isles, Ishmael greets the Pacific as the answer to the long supplication of his youth. He calls it the midmost waters of the world, washing both new Californian towns and old Asiatic lands, a sea of drowned dreams that makes all coasts one bay. Ahab, indifferent to its beauty, thinks only that the White Whale must be swimming in it.
- Why it matters: A short lyric set-piece that frames the last stretch of the hunt; the place works as mood and destiny rather than a scene. The whole final third of the book is set on this ocean.