"He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad."

Pip falls overboard, is rescued, but sees god underwater, and goes mad.

"I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor."

Stop saying Whalers (and Whales) are smelly. Also, where do you think this stuff comes from? Someone has to dig it out of a dead whale carcass.

"His boat's crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters."

They meet another ship, play a little trick on the other captain, and get some precious, precious ambergris.

"But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers!"

In England, royalty would literally steal your whale after you did all the hard and life threatening work. The whale was brought on land and sailors would sit down with "rare tea with their wives, and good ale with their cronies", you know, as a reward, and some jerk would come and seize it.

"What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?"

Fisherman's rights to who killed what whale when. Gets a little colonizer at the end there.

"As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love."

Ishmael discuses the differences between the sexes of the whales.

"Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up."

The Pequod discovers a pod of whales in the pacific and go on a long hunt. Cows & calfs.

"Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will."

We're talking about the tail of the whale.