1 a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail.
2 This triune structure, as much as anything else, imparts power to the tail.
3 At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across.
4 It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale's majestic flukes.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales. 5 Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position.
6 At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in ... 7 Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail.
8 The reason why you don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries it coiled away in his pocket, I guess.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then ... 9 But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales. 10 Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail.
11 Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale. 12 The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 13 The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.
14 Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then ... 15 Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet.
16 They meant Queequeg's best happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a tail.
17 By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its broad flukes or lobes.
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