yes, in the book, you would read a couple sentences like these, and go, "superfluous," as in, "surface over a flowing"—he's hitting on themes of land and sea—and then you'd go, "picture he's painting," wait, I remember the painting in the tavern that opens the novel, it's all about representation and ambiguity—and you'd go "sunk in," sunk to the bottom like Ahab, and "huge dusty map"—yes, cartography, representation, the way these ships navigated.
it's like the book is this marine microcosmos. the ship, the great ark, which in miniature recapitulates larger ecologies.