"Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing."

We learn of the sailor's lore surrounding Moby Dick and also of how Ahab came to lose his leg and his return to Nantucket. 

"Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy"

The crew starts dancing, drinking, getting horny, and starting a race war. 

"Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!"

Stubb's thoughts. A true Melville-needed-an-editor chapter.

"And with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!"

Starbuck deep in thought.

"I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass."

Ahab's dark frame of mind. 

"Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the horn, and round the Norway maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up."

Ahab whips the crew into a frenzy. 

"At last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it."

Ishmael describes the sublime disassociation of being in the crow's nest. 

"Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished."

The crew eats and Ishmael observes how the old seafaring traditions and power structures play out over dinner. 

"Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!"

Ishmael talks about the harpooner and the dictator-like qualities of the captain of a whale ship. 

"For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included."

Ishmael (or Melville) describes all the different types of whales. It's a real page turner.