What substance does Tashtego retrieve from a sperm whale's head?

Tashtego retrieves spermaceti from the sperm whale’s head.

In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Tashtego cuts into the head of a captured sperm whale and draws out buckets of spermaceti. He is a harpooneer from Gay Head and serves in Stubb’s whaleboat, making the scene part of the novel’s detailed portrait of nineteenth-century whaling labor.

Spermaceti is a waxy substance held in the sperm whale’s spermaceti organ. Historic whalers prized it for candles, cosmetics, lubricants, and other products. It is often confused with blubber, which is the whale’s thick layer of body fat and is rendered into whale oil. Baleen belongs to baleen whales, while ambergris is a separate substance associated with the digestive tract of sperm whales.