All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

This line is the closing sentence of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851). It comes immediately after the Pequod has been destroyed in Captain Ahab’s final pursuit of the white whale and nearly the entire crew has perished. The narrator, Ishmael—who has survived by clinging to Queequeg’s coffin-turned-lifebuoy—recounts the aftermath as the sea closes over the wreck. Written in the mid-19th century amid American expansion and maritime commerce, the ending frames the catastrophe against an immense, impersonal natural timescale, emphasizing how quickly human endeavor is erased by the ocean.

Melville juxtaposes total human collapse with the sea’s indifferent continuity. The “great shroud” suggests both burial cloth and concealment: the ocean covers the evidence of ambition, obsession, and violence, turning history into silence. By invoking “five thousand years,” the sentence telescopes time, implying that the sea’s rhythms dwarf individual lives and even civilizations; the Pequod’s tragedy becomes one more brief disturbance on an ancient surface. The line also functions as a moral and metaphysical coda: Ahab’s will-to-dominate ends in annihilation, while nature (and perhaps fate) persists, untroubled, beyond human meaning-making.