The vernacular employed by Melville throughout Moby Dick never ceases to confound me. Whether it is the time-specificity of the vocabulary or a conscious effort on Melville's part to challenge readers, a word italicized and footnoted by the author seemed to give me the permission to be utterly confused...
Here is the italicized subject in context:
"...when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating tokens that they were not at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he is gallied.*"
Taken from: Moby Dick, pg. 344
Melville's footnote states that the word is to "frighten excessively, - to confound with fright." Not found in my Revices Tenth Edition of the OED - perhaps we need to take Melville's word that gally relates to "gallow" as found in Shakespeare - but was "plebianised" upon being brought onto the "New-England" rocks. One can only assume that the root for the verb 'to gally' is somehow related to the antiquated structures of corporal punishment.
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