Скачать или смотреть Moby Dick: Chapter 71: The Jeroboam’s Story.

The Pequod meets the Jeroboam of Nantucket, a ship so ravaged by “malignant epidemic” that Captain Mayhew refuses to come aboard, keeping his boat a few yards off while the two vessels converse in a rising breeze. In that quarantined skiff rows the Jeroboam’s most unsettling passenger: a freckled, yellow-haired fanatic who proclaims himself the archangel Gabriel. Once a Shaker “prophet,” Gabriel now dominates the frightened crew, claiming authority over the very plague that afflicts them. He interrupts every mention of the White Whale with shrill warnings, insisting that Moby Dick is the Shaker God incarnate.

Mayhew relates how Gabriel foretold doom if the ship should ever attack the white whale—and how the chief mate, Harry Macey, ignored the prophecy. When Macey struck Moby Dick, the whale’s sudden upward lunge hurled him into the air and he vanished without a mark, an eerily bloodless death that sealed Gabriel’s influence. His disciples now treat him as both oracle and avenger, leaving the captain powerless.

Ahab listens grimly, unmoved by plague or prophecy, intent only on confirmation that the White Whale is near. When he learns a letter in the Pequod’s mailbag is addressed to the dead Macey, he tries to pass it across on a split spade-pole; but Gabriel seizes the missive, skewers it, and hurls it back like an omen, shouting that Ahab will soon follow the blasphemer below. The boat pulls away amid mounting waves, the letter mould-stained and undelivered, while the Pequod’s men mutter about fanaticism and fate.

This encounter layers obsessions atop obsessions: Gabriel’s apocalyptic delusion mirrors Ahab’s monomania, yet where Ahab seeks revenge on a tangible creature, Gabriel worships the same whale as divine retribution. The episode also exposes how disease and superstition breed authority at sea, how rumors become scripture, and how a single violent whale strike can birth a legend that warps an entire crew’s reality. In the uneasy wake of the Jeroboam, the Pequod sails on, its own captain deaf to every warning that now echoes in Gabriel’s vengeful cry.