Almost as soon as the Acushnet set sail, Melville began to hear stories about the Essex, a Nantucket whaleship that had been sunk more than two decades before by an infuriated sperm whale about a thousand miles west of the Galápagos Islands. Seven months after departing from Fairhaven, the Acushnet was approaching the very latitude in the South Pacific on which the Essex had gone down when the lookout sighted another whaleship. It turned out to be the Lima from Nantucket. During what was known as a gam, a meeting of two or more whaleships at sea, the crews were given the opportunity to mingle and talk, and Melville was introduced to the son of Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex and the author of a narrative about the disaster.
Chase’s son offered to lend Melville his copy of his father’s book. That night Melville read the story of how an eighty-five-foot bull sperm whale crushed the bow of the Essex into splintered fragments and how after taking to three twenty-five-foot whaleboats, the twenty-man crew discussed what to do next. Given the direction of the wind, the obvious next move was to sail to the islands to the west, the closest being the Marquesas. But Chase and his shipmates had heard rumors of cannibals on those islands. Better to sail to a civilized port on the western coast of South America, even if it was against the wind and more than three thousand miles away.
Three months later, when just five survivors were plucked from two sun-scorched, barnacle-encrusted whaleboats, they were no longer the same men who’d refused to sail to an island of hypothetical savages. They had become what they most feared. As made plain by the human bones found in the hands of two of the survivors, they were cannibals. Melville later wrote, “The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.”
Almost a year later, Melville first glimpsed the islands that the crew of the Essex had chosen to spurn. On June 23, 1842, the Acushnet arrived at Nuku Hiva, part of the Marquesas group. Melville and the rest of the crew stared at the green spectacular peaks as swimming native women surrounded the ship. According to Melville’s later, inevitably fictionalized account of his adventures, the whaleship’s deck quickly became crowded with these beautiful young girls, who offered themselves to the sailors for bits of cloth. Not long after, Melville decided he would do exactly the opposite of what Owen Chase and the other crew members of the Essex had done. He would desert the ship that had been his home for the last nineteen months and live among the so-called cannibals.
Nine years later he published Moby-Dick, a novel that begins with the protagonist, Ishmael, finding himself, to his initial horror, sharing a bed with a tattooed cannibal named Queequeg. In a winningly comic distillation of the experience that had forever changed Melville’s life in the Marquesas, Ishmael comes to the realization that artificial distinctions between civilization and savagery are beside the point. “What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” This startling insight was revolutionary in 1851 and is still wickedly fresh to us today, more than 150 years later, as globalization makes encounters with foreign cultures an almost daily occurrence.
But Melville was not able to laugh away the lessons of the Essex. Despite its comic beginning, Moby-Dick quickly moves into darker and more harrowing metaphysical territory, and it is the moral isolation of the Essex crew members, afloat upon the wide and immense sea in their tiny whaleboats, that underlies the fated voyage of the Pequod. In the chapter “The Lee Shore,” Ishmael speaks of one Bulkington, a sailor for whom the land has proved “scorching to his feet” and who heads out once again after just completing a previous whaling voyage. It is only amid the terrifying vastness of the sea that man can confront the ultimate truths of his existence: “[A]ll deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea. . . . [I]n landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God. . . . Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain?” For Melville, and for any thinking human being, this is more than a rhetorical question.
3
Desperado Philosophy
He tells us to call him Ishmael, but who is the narrator of
Moby-Dick? For one thing, he has known depression, “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” But he is also a person of genuine enthusiasms. Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, he is wonderfully engaging, a vulnerable wiseass who invites us to join him on a quest to murder the blues by shipping out on a whaleship.
Ishmael is no tourist. As a common seaman, he gets paid for his adventures. “[B]eing paid,” he rhapsodizes, “what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”
Getting paid is certainly a bonus, but Ishmael isn’t doing this for the money. He’s in pursuit of an almost Platonic ideal, what he calls “the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself.” “Such a portentous and mysterious monster,” he continues, “roused all my curiosity.” But he’s also looking for the clarifying jolt that comes with doing something dangerous. “I love to sail forbidden seas,” he tells us, “and land on barbarous coasts.” The best way to satisfy this “everlasting itch for things remote,” he decides, is to head for Nantucket, the birthplace of American whaling. “[T]here was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island,” he says, “which amazingly pleased me.”
Not even a sobering visit to the Seamen’s Bethel in New Bedford, where he studies the marble tablets memorializing those lost at sea, is enough to make him rethink his decision to ship out on a Nantucket vessel. “Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?”
A reckless, rapturous sense of his soul’s imperishability overtakes Ishmael. “Methinks my body is but the lees [the sediment left in wine] of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.” Let God, fate, or what have you do as it sees fit. In the end, Ishmael will prevail. “And therefore three cheers for Nantucket,” he exults, “and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.”
Later in the book, after he is almost killed when his whaleboat is smacked by a whale before being swamped in a squall, Ishmael decides it might be a good idea, after all, to write his will. And it is here, in chapter 49, “The Hyena,” that he hits upon the approach to life that will act as the emotional and philosophical center of the novel. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life,” he tells us, “when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”
Ishmael describes this approach to life as a “free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy.” In the chapters to come, Ahab will drag him (and all of us) into the howling depths of the human psyche. In the beginning, however, before Ahab takes hold, we are in the presence of a soul so buoyant, so mischievous, so wise, and so much fun that even after the worst happens at the end of the novel, we can take consolation in knowing that at least Ishmael has found a way to survive. Like Melville, who is one of our country’s greatest literary survivors, Ishmael is still left to tell the tale, and we had better listen to every word.
4
Nantucket
When Melville wrote Moby-Dick, New Bedford, not
Nantucket, was the most important whaling port in America. But Ishmael is not interested in the biggest whaling port; he wants to go to the first, to the “great original,” the sandy island almost thirty miles out to sea where it all began.
Melville drew upon his own personal e
xperiences in his novels, but he was also a great pillager of other writers’ prose. During the composition of Moby-Dick he acquired a virtual library of whaling-related books, and passages from these works inevitably made their way into his novel. The writing process for Melville was as much about responding to and incorporating the works of others as it was about relying on his own experiences. And since Melville seems never to have visited Nantucket before writing Moby-Dick, he was free to create an imagined rather than an actual island, an animated, often antic state of mind that exemplified America’s grasping push for more. And since Nantucket in 1850 was already past its prime, there is a nostalgic quality to his five-paragraph evocation of the island in chapter 14. Instead of writing history, Melville is forging an American mythology.
Nantucket, Ishmael proclaims, is “a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.” He then proceeds to spin off joke after joke about how sandy and sterile the island is. There are so few trees on Nantucket that islanders carry around scraps of wood “like bits of the true cross in Rome.” They plant toadstools to provide themselves with some shade. In order to wade through all the sand, they wear the gritty equivalent of snowshoes. The sea is so omnipresent “that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering.”
After devoting the two subsequent paragraphs to a distillation of the island’s history, taking us from the oral traditions of the first Native inhabitants through to the islanders’ current pursuit of “[t]hat Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon,” he establishes Nantucket as a nodal point of global, God-ordained ambition. “And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.”
The Nantucketer does not just sail across the ocean; he lives upon it in his quest for the sperm whale. “There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.” These are not people of the real world; these are the argonauts of their day, superheroes impervious to the worst that God has heaped upon humanity. Then there is the chapter’s beautiful, carefully modulated final sentence: “With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.” And so it ends, this little sidebar of miraculous prose, one of many that Melville scatters like speed bumps throughout the book as he purposely slows the pace of his mighty novel to a magisterial crawl.
5
Chowder
The Nantucket of chapter 14 is a euphoric whirlwind. The “real” Nantucket, at least the town in which Ishmael and Queequeg soon find themselves, is anything but boisterous and fun. It is a shadow land made of Melville’s worst nightmares, the breeding ground of the ominous cloud out of which Ahab will eventually stump forth on his whalebone leg.
Before we get into all that, however, we must linger over one of the more tangible gifts Melville provides in Moby-Dick: his recipe for clam chowder. Ishmael and Queequeg have just found their way to the Try Pots Inn, named for the huge iron cauldrons in which the whale’s blubber was boiled into oil. There they enjoy bowl after bowl of Mrs. Hussey’s chowder. “Oh, sweet friends!” Ishmael crows with delight. “[H]earken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.” Remember this, all ye modern-day chowder makers, forgo the cloying chunks of needless potato and go with the biscuit bits!
Even before they enter the Try Pots, Ishmael has begun to wonder what he’s gotten himself into. The inn’s sign, made from a sawed-off topmast, reminds him of a gallows. Then there’s the name of the man who recommended this establishment, I. A. Coffin. He cannot help but suspect that these are “oblique hints touching Tophet.” While leading them to their room, Mrs. Hussey tells the story of “young Stiggs,” the whaleman who, after returning from a four-year voyage with only three barrels of oil, stabbed himself to death with his own harpoon. “[E]ver since then,” Mrs. Hussey explains, “I allow no boarders to take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms a-night.”
The next day, Ishmael leaves Queequeg in their room praying to his tiny wooden idol, Yojo. When he returns that evening, he finds the door locked. Queequeg does not answer his increasingly anxious knocks, and Ishmael, aided and abetted by Mrs. Hussey, begins to fear the worst. Queequeg has killed himself. “It’s unfort’nate Stiggs done over again . . . ,” Mrs. Hussey wails. “God pity his poor mother!” In desperation, Ishmael shoulders open the door, only to find Queequeg still squatting trancelike before his wooden idol.
A similar drama was enacted every day in the Melville household during the composition of Moby-Dick. Locked in his room, Melville routinely ignored attempts by his family members to offer him some lunch. In the years to come, his very Mrs. Hussey–like mother feared that her son’s commitment to writing was not good for his sanity, a concern Ishmael echoes soon after discovering Queequeg: “I began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his head.” These are sentiments to which the parent (or spouse) of any writer can relate.
6
The Pequod
Time passes, fashions come and go, and the past becomes its own hermetically sealed world. It’s easy to laugh at those people under figurative glass, or, even worse, to revere them as exempt from the complexities of our own age. Baloney. Life is life, and the world Melville describes in Moby-Dick is as cutting-edge, confused, and out-there as anything we can dream up in our own time. Take, for example, the square-rigged, bluff-bowed whaleship.
Simple and cheap to build, it lasted for decades and could sail around the world without using a jot of carbon-based fuel. It was home to a crew of between twenty and thirty-five sailors who regularly pursued the largest game the world has ever known. If the whalemen were lucky enough to kill one of these creatures, the deck of the ship became a slippery slaughterhouse as the gigantic corpse was hacked into pieces for processing. With the firing up of the chimneylike tryworks, the ship was transformed into a refinery, and the greasy, foul-smelling whale blubber became oil. The sale of this yellowish fluid, stored in wooden casks and used to light the streets of major cities and lubricate the machines of the emerging Industrial Age, made the predominantly Quaker whaling merchants of Nantucket some of the richest men in America and the world.
The Pequod, the ship that Ishmael chooses for himself and Queequeg, is one of these remarkable, incredibly complex machines, but she is also something more. Just as Nantucket is largely a rhetorical construct, so is the Pequod not of this world. She is the mythic incarnation of America: a country blessed by God and by free enterprise that nonetheless embraces the barbarity it supposedly supplanted. The Pequod (named for the once-defeated Indian tribe that now owns a highly profitable casino in Connecticut—how Melville would have loved that turn of events!) is an old ship, and she wears her history visibly: “Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.... She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long shar
p teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.... A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”
On the Pequod’s weather- and oil-stained deck, her two owners, the Quaker merchants Peleg and Bildad, sheltered in a wigwam made of whalebone, sign on crew members for as little money as possible. Like the United States, a nation devoted to freedom for all that also sanctioned slavery, these two Quaker whalemen—in particular, the pious Bildad—have found a way to accommodate two seemingly irreconcilable principles. “[T]hough a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he . . . spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore.” A “Quaker with a vengeance,” he also has no qualms about exploiting the whalemen under his employ. Bildad, Ishmael opines, “had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.”
The compartmentalization of spiritual and worldly concerns is a temptation in every era. In Melville’s day, it was most apparent with the issue of slavery, and Bildad, the Bible-reading Quaker whaleman, illustrates the truth of Frederick Douglass’s observation that the most brutal slaveholders were always the most devout. “For a pious man,” Ishmael says, “especially for a Quaker, [Bildad] was certainly rather hardhearted, to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them.”
Melville’s years on a whaleship gave him a firsthand appreciation for the backbreaking reality of physical labor. Politicians might speak patriotically about the principles of liberty and freedom, but it was repetitious, soul-crushing work—a form of bodily punishment to which most white Americans refused to submit—that was responsible for the country’s prosperity. Once a whale was killed, it took an entire day to process it, a task only to be repeated when another whale was sighted. “Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing!” Ishmael laments. “Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!— the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.”