1 I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn.
2 What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to say.
3 Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns.
4 I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific.
5 The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.
6 A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, TWO of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me.
7 Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal.
8 The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet.
9 It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn.
10 An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature.
11 Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through.
12 From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn's horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices.
13 Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast.
14 No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there.
15 This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.