What is this book anyway? 

"All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life."

Ishmael describes the horrors and subtleties of the whale-line. 

"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!"

A squid is mistaken for Moby Dick. 

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?"

Ishmael pontificates on the cruel and unpredictable nature of  land, life, and the sea.

Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me.

Ishmael talks about other images of whales. 

From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies.

Ishmael reviews different art and artists who have tried to capture whales in pictures.  

"Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan."

Ishmael tells us how everyone does the Whale wrong. 

"The next instant the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale."

In which Herman Melville needs an editor. Haha. Just kidding. A story heard from a person, who then repeated the story in his sleep and Ishmael overhears it, in which, a mutiny occurs on another ship named The Town-Ho, and after that some people get killed by Moby Dick and basically the head mutineer, a BA guy from Buffalo, New York escapes to France. Also, it's told to a bunch of random guys in Lima, Peru. 

"In the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows."

Ishmael tells us about the Gam, a tradition where sailors trade information and chit chat.  

"Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific Ocean!"

The Pequod passes another ship, The Albatross and they attempt to brief conversation but nature seems to have other plans.