All 6 Uses of
fathom
in
Moby Dick
- Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.†
Chpt 31-33
- His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale.†
Chpt 40-42 *
- Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.†
Chpt 52-54
- The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.†
Chpt 55-57
- When the vast body had at last been stripped of its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.†
Chpt 100-102
- And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:— "Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eye!†
Chpt 112-114
Definition:
-
(fathom as in: can't fathom) to come to understand