Moby-Dick: Chapter 101 Summary & Analysis

In another aside, Ishmael discusses the hospitality he once later received on the “Sammy,” long after his time with Ahab—it was off the “Patagonian coast,” and the crew of the Sammy was so generous with beef and alcohol that Ishmael remembers it to this day. During the course of his “researches” into whaling history, Ishmael has found that Dutch and English whalers used to bring along, in the 1700s, enormous quantities of meat, bread, and beer, perhaps to make the sailors’ lives easier, or perhaps because the profits from whaling were so large. Ishmael laments the fact that the Pequod was run not as a “party ship” but instead as a vessel singularly devoted to the pursuit of the White Whale.