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In a discovery that has sent ripples through the academic world, a team of cryptographers and literary scholars at Yale University have cracked a sophisticated cipher embedded in the margin notes of Herman Melville's personal copy of Moby-Dick, revealing what appears to be detailed instructions for locating an unpublished final chapter.

The leather-bound volume, long held in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, was known to contain Melville's handwritten annotations. However, researchers had always dismissed certain repetitive markings as mere doodles or signs of the author's restless mind during his troubled later years.

Dr. Helena Marchetti, who led the investigation, explained that the breakthrough came when a graduate student noticed the markings formed a pattern consistent with 19th-century maritime signal codes. "Once we applied the proper cipher key—which Melville had cleverly hidden within a seemingly innocuous letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne—the margins began to speak," Dr. Marchetti said.

The decoded message references a manuscript deposited with a whaling captain in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1852, one year after Moby-Dick's original publication. According to the cipher, this lost chapter presents an alternative conclusion in which Captain Ahab survives his encounter with the white whale, living out his days as a changed man on a remote Pacific island.

Historians are now racing to trace the lineage of the mysterious captain's descendants, hoping the manuscript may have been preserved as a family heirloom. The New Bedford Whaling Museum has already received dozens of inquiries from families claiming ancestral connections.

"If authentic, this would fundamentally alter our understanding of Melville's artistic vision," noted Professor James Whitmore of Harvard's English Department. "The published ending, with its themes of obsession and destruction, defined American literature. An alternative ending suggests Melville himself may have wrestled with whether redemption was possible for Ahab."

The discovery has reignited interest in Melville's work, with bookstores reporting a significant uptick in Moby-Dick sales. The full findings will be published in next month's issue of American Literary History.