- Mount Pisgah is in the Bible; that's the reference there.
- Melville gets silly and says to climb the rock, you should travel round the world and learn juggling.
- The point is that you can't really climb the rock. So this is a sort of imaginative vision.
- He says you can see the coast of South America, and other islands about.
- Has he mentioned it's very isolated yet? It's very isolated.
- He tells the story of a ship that tried to get from Peru to Chili which took four months to go a ten day trip because of nasty calms and currents.
- But the great explorer Juan Fernandez finally figured out that you need to put your ship farther out to sea rather than hugging the coast, and that works much better.
- Back to the rock and looking out; he describes some other islands.
- He describes the inhabitants of Albemarle, which include no people, and lots of lizards, snakes and spiders.
- It also has an inlet where sperm whales come.
- (Pause here to insert the entirety of Moby Dick. )
- There's an anecdote about William Cowley, an explorer who named an island after himself, calling it Cowley's Enchanted Isle.
- He called it an enchanted isle because it seemed to change shape and aspect. He called it Cowley's island because he was egotistical, presumably (Melville doesn't really say.)