Why Read Moby-Dick?

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  The crew of a typical whaleship was made up of men from all over the world. In addition to white sailors from America and Europe, there were Native Americans, African Americans, Azoreans, Cape Verdeans, and South Sea Islanders. The harpooneers aboard the Pequod include Queequeg, from the Polynesian island of Kokovoko (“It is not down in any map,” Ishmael tells us; “true places never are”); Daggoo, the “imperial negro” from Africa; Tashtego, a Wampanoag from Martha’s Vineyard; and Fedallah, the mysterious fire worshipper dressed in a Chinese-style jacket. What distinguishes the thirty crew members of the Pequod, Ishmael notes, is that almost all of them, including the officers, many of whom hail from Nantucket, are islanders, what he calls “Isolatoes . . . each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel . . .”

  This demographic diversity was not typical of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, when to be an American was to be white and, if not already rich, on the way to wealth as the nation proudly took its place as a global power. A century and a half later, we have a very different perspective on the role of other peoples and cultures in America’s rise. As Ishmael notes, the white American “liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.” Because of his exposure to these various peoples aboard a whaleship, Melville was one of the few authors of his time to have firsthand experience with where the future lay for America in a demographic sense, and his portrayal of working people is never stereotypical or condescending.

  Melville was well aware of the great gift he had been given when he shipped out on a whaler. His contemporaries didn’t recognize it, but he knew that his experiences in the Pacific had better served his artistic purposes than any education he might have received at a traditional university. Whatever future reputation he might enjoy would depend on his exposure to whaling: “[I]f hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone,” Ishmael tells us, “if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”

  Melville’s time aboard a whaler also left him with an appreciation for the liberating power of democracy, what Ishmael calls the “democratic dignity” that distinguished America (with, of course, the notable exception of Southern slavery) from just about every other country in the mid-nineteenth century. In the dangerous work environment of the whale fishery it didn’t matter what your race or background was; what mattered was whether you could do your job. At one point the Pequod’s third mate, Flask, climbs onto the shoulders of his towering black harpooneer Daggoo so he can get a better view of a pod of whales. “[T]he sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious,” Ishmael observes, “for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.” In this single image, Melville has managed to illustrate what he calls elsewhere the “divine equality” of humanity even as he provides a scathing critique of slavery. Flask may outrank Daggoo, but it is the African harpooneer who literally carries the third mate on his shoulders.

  Democracy in principle, Ishmael maintains, “radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute!” This is not to say, however, that democracy is problem-free. “[T]ake high abstracted man alone,” Ishmael says, “and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates.” For in every age, there will be a threat to the principle of “divine equality,” and his name is Ahab.

  7

  Ahab

  He doesn’t appear until almost a quarter of the way into the book, in chapter 28. Like that of the shark in the movie Jaws, his entrance is all the more powerful because of the delay.

  Ishmael has just reported on deck for the forenoon watch when he glances aft and sees the Pequod’s commander for the first time. Like America in 1850, Ahab is a man divided, seared and parboiled by the conflagration raging inside him. “He looked,” Ishmael tells us, “like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them.... Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.”

  With his whalebone leg planted in an auger hole in the quarterdeck and grasping a shroud in one of his hands, Ahab scans the ocean ahead. “There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.” There is also a sad grandeur about the man. Ishmael calls him “moody stricken Ahab . . . with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.”

  Gradually, we learn Ahab’s backstory. In the days and weeks after losing his leg to the White Whale during his previous voyage, he found his agonies, both physical and mental, unbearable, and his mates had no choice but to “lace him fast, . . . raving in his hammock.” As the ship pounded through a succession of terrible gales and Ahab swung back and forth, writhing and screaming within his makeshift straitjacket, a terrible transformation took place within him: “[H]is torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfus-ing, made him mad.”

  In his madness, Ahab came to see Moby Dick as more than a mere whale; he was “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.... [A]ll evil, to crazy Ahab, [was] visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.” Once back on Nantucket, Ahab seemed to have fully recovered his senses. In truth, “his hidden self, raved on,” and he resolved to set out on another voyage and kill the White Whale.

  To assist him in his deranged quest, Ahab decided to enlist his own whaleboat crew made up of four oarsmen from Manila (“a race,” Ishmael claims, “notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and . . . supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents . . . of the devil”) and the harpooneer Fedallah, “tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from [his] steel-like lips.” Hidden in the Pequod’s hold, Fedallah and his four oarsmen are not revealed to the rest of the ship’s crew until the first whale is sighted long after they’ve left Nantucket.

  I must admit that it wasn’t until my most recent reading of Moby-Dick that I came to appreciate the importance of Fedallah. He and his men from Manila are much more than infernal window dressing. They are essential to what makes Ahab Ahab because no leader, no matter how deranged, is without his inner circle of advisers, the handlers who keep him on task.

  We never find out the details of how Ahab first met Fedallah, but we do learn that something unspeakably strange happened to the Pequod’s captain prior to the ship’s departure from Nantucket. Ishmael reports that he was found lying on the ground, with his whalebone leg “violently displaced” and driven “stake-wise” into his groin. The victim of an apparent accident, Ahab in his agonizing helplessness has yet another debilitating injury to blame on Moby Dick. Whether or not this humiliating mishap convinced him that he needed supernatural support, one thing does become clear: no crew member aboard the Pequod is more important to Ahab than the turbaned soothsayer Fedallah.

  8

  The Anatomy of a Demagogue

  To be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to mak
e the darkness work for him. Ishmael says it best: “For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” In chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” Melville shows us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the seductive power of a great and demented man.

  At the beginning of the chapter, Ahab seethes with barely contained energy as he paces back and forth across the deck, the point of his whalebone leg leaving the wood “dented, like geological stones.” Stubb, the second mate, observes that “the chick that’s in him pecks the shell.” And then it begins, Ahab’s version of a command performance. Until this point, he has not revealed the secret purpose of the voyage. What he wants to do is illegal. He has not been hired by the Pequod’s owners to revenge himself on a white whale. However, if he can win the crew and his pliable second and third mates to his purpose, perhaps he can bulldoze the first mate, Starbuck, into accepting the inevitable.

  He orders Starbuck to “send everybody aft.” Once the crew has been gathered before him, he continues to pace back and forth. Only after their curiosity has been suitably aroused does he begin by asking an unexpected question. “What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?” “Sing out for him!” is the immediate reply.

  For a demagogue, it’s the oldest trick in the book. With each question and response, the crowd cannot help but be wooed to the speaker’s enthusiastic purpose. “[M]ariners began to gaze curiously at each other,” Ishmael relates, “as if marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.” This is the dynamic of the political rally, the kind of rhetorically fueled gathering that Melville’s older brother Gansevoort, a low-level Democratic Party operative, helped organize during his abbreviated political career. It is also the dynamic of the revival meetings of the Second Great Awakening, which swept across America during the first half of the nineteenth century and which contributed, in turn, to the growing evangelical fervor of the abolitionist movement in the years prior to the Civil War.

  Now that Ahab has the ship’s crew in his power, he brings out a prop: a gold doubloon. He then orders Starbuck to give him a hammer, and as he prepares to nail the coin to the mast, he tells them that the first person to see “a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw” will get the coin. The crowd goes wild. “ ‘ Huzza! huzza!’ cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.”

  The harpooneers, it turns out, have all, at one time or another, seen this notorious whale. “ Death and devils!” Ahab exults. “[M]en, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!”

  At that moment, Starbuck puts two and two together. “Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?”

  Ahab had apparently hoped to leave out this particular detail. “Who told thee that?” he spits out. But after a brief pause he decides that instead of denying the truth, he’ll make the truth work for him. “Aye, Starbuck,” he acknowledges, “aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now.” And then he does what only the best politician can do; he sheds a tear. “‘Aye, aye,’ he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose . . . ; ‘Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.’ ”

  This is the pivotal moment. But Ahab needn’t have worried. “ ‘Aye, aye!’ shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: ‘A sharp eye for the White Whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!’”

  “God bless ye,” Ahab says with a “half sob and half shout,” before ordering the steward to serve the men some grog. He then turns to the first mate. “But what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?”

  Starbuck responds by asking what Ahab’s vengeance will get “in our Nantucket market.” It’s then, to borrow from the movie This Is Spinal Tap, that Ahab dials his charisma to eleven. “But come closer, Starbuck,” he says, “thou requirest a little lower layer.” It’s not about the money, he explains; this is personal. Thumping his chest, he cries out, “[M]y vengeance will fetch a great premium here!”

  Starbuck is quite rightly appalled. “To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab,” he sputters, “seems blasphemous.” This prompts Ahab to reveal the logic, such as it is, behind his campaign against the White Whale. According to Ahab, Moby Dick is not just a sperm whale; he is the tool of an unseen and decidedly evil power. “All visible objects . . . ,” Ahab insists, “are but as pasteboard masks.” By killing Moby Dick, he will punch through the mask and get at the root cause of all his unhappiness and pain. He then compares the world to a jail cell. “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.” Unlocking the secrets of the universe by killing a whale doesn’t make much sense, but what good is rationality to a man possessed by such a terrifying and all-devouring rage? “He tasks me; he heaps me,” Ahab cries. “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

  He then directs Starbuck’s attention to the rest of the crew, all of whom are “one and all with Ahab.” And besides, he continues, what’s so terrible about pursuing a white whale; isn’t whale killing what it’s all about? “ ’ Tis but to help strike a fin,” he insists, “no wondrous feat for Starbuck.”

  Ahab finally appeals to Starbuck’s not inconsiderable vanity as a whaleman. “From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back?” When the first mate does not immediately respond, Ahab knows he has him. “Starbuck now is mine,” he exults. What Ahab does not hear as he savors “his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence” is Starbuck’s murmured “God keep me!—keep us all!” as well as the flap of the sails as the wind suddenly vanishes and, most disturbing of all, “the low laugh from the hold” of Fedallah.

  Once the grog has been passed around and the harpooneers have sworn their allegiance with a toast drunk from their harpoon sockets, Ahab retires to his cabin, where he watches the sun set outside the stern windows and reflects on what transpired on the quarterdeck. “’Twas not so hard a task,” he soliloquizes. “I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve.... What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!”

  9

  Hawthorne

  So where did it come from, this darkness, this witchy voodoo of the void? As it turns out, Melville’s incomparable ability to humanize evil came from a most unlikely, late-breaking source: a shy, soft-spoken writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom Melville didn’t meet until he was almost done with the first draft. The story of their friendship and especially the letters from Melville that it produced are reason enough to read Moby-Dick, a novel that is as much about the microclimates of intimate human relations as it is about the great, uncontrollable gales that push and pull all of us.

  In the late summer of 1850, Melville thought he was finished with his whaling novel, a book that apparently hadn’t a whiff of Ahab in it. In early August, Melville’s guest in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Evert Duyckinck, reported to his wife that his host was “mostly done” with “a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery.” Then,
on August 5, Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  At forty-six, Hawthorne was fifteen years Melville’s senior. He’d recently completed The Scarlet Letter and was now working on The House of the Seven Gables in a rented farmhouse in nearby Lenox, where he lived with his wife, Sophia, and their two children, Julian and Una. During a picnic atop Monument Mountain, the two writers had a chance to talk for the first time. Soon after, Melville read Hawthorne’s story collection Mosses from an Old Manse. A week later, Melville gave Duyckinck the essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” for publication in the Literary World.

  At that time, Hawthorne enjoyed a reputation as a mild-mannered recluse penning well-crafted stories about New England’s quaint colonial past. This, Melville insisted, was missing the point. Instead of a “harmless” stylist, Hawthorne was an unappreciated genius possessed by “this great power of blackness.” Hidden beneath his stories’ lapidarian surfaces were truths so profound and disturbing that they ranked with anything written in the English language.