With the malleable way that Ishmael tells the story of Moby-Dick or The Whale, I’ve tried to pay particular attention to the moments when he shifts from addressing a general audience without pronouns to the moments when he addresses the specific “you.” Once again, he returned to this form of address, on the second paragraph of page 172:

“And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phædon instead of Bowditch his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber.”

There were a couple of terms that I needed to look into to better understand the passage, which were:

Phædon is a defense of the simplicity and immortality of the soul, according to Moses Mendelssohn’s book of the same name. He was a Jewish Philosopher in the 1700’s.

Bowditch – referencing a mathematician, astronomer, and navigator, Nathaniel Bowditch, who was prominent in the early 1800’s.

Unlike in Chapter 3, when he was taking “you” the audience on a tour of the Spouter-Inn, this time is more of a moment of him addressing a specific kind of “you” the audience – anyone who might someday own or operate a whaling vessel. The simplest way to boil down this passage is to say, “don’t hire people who think a lot to do jobs where they are required to pay close attention to their surroundings, they will become lost in thought and lose you considerable money in the process.” Perhaps the most interesting part of this is that, for all of his talk of needing to go to sea to lose his personal melancholy, he’s literally describing himself as the worst hire for this type of job.

Ishmael continues to be an unreliable narrator, a person that we should not consider an authority about whaling despite all of the research that he does and the knowledge he continues to impart on us. He is telling us that this is a job he should not have done – this was his first job on a whaling ship, he was inexperienced and barely able to succeed in joining the crew. At best, he’s an extra set of hands. For all his talk of country dandies, he is no better than the people he admonished.