by Philip Hoare
Such scenes may be the stuff of horror movies; but in that as yet unphotographed or filmed contest of snapping beaks and tearing teeth–a voracious and infernal coupling–the gelatinous accumulation of ganglions and sinews can be scooped up in the whale’s own monstrous jaw and, as the animal’s arms writhe to evade its fate, it is swallowed alive. (The squid’s classical defence, the ink cloud, is useless in the face of a predator that can ‘see’ in the dark; although the pygmy sperm whale–a compact version of its cousin–excretes a thick reddish-brown liquid from its guts when startled, as if to emulate the method employed by the prey on which it dines.)
In a nearby jar lie lumps of squid flesh and beaks retrieved from the belly of a sperm whale by the Discovery expedition, as the label floating inside, inscribed in sepia, notes. In this underground laboratory, battling foes have been bottled for posterity. Hunted whales have even been found with squid still alive in their stomachs; confirmation of the existence of Architeuthis came when dying whales vomited up pieces of their arms and tentacles. Nor are they a rare meal for Physeter: ten per cent of the diet of sperm whales off the Azores consists of giant squid, and in the Antarctic, colossal squid–Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, with eyes as big as basketballs–are eaten by sperm whales, their only predators. The extraordinary nature of its quarry only underlines the abiding mystery of the hunter, feeding day and night, forever stoking the insatiable furnace of its metabolism.
Upstairs, corridors which only an hour before were filled with chattering school children have fallen quiet. I can hear the distant hum of a vacuum cleaner as I make my way past galleries of long-dead animals, past the blue whale and the dark skeletons hanging above it. Now, in the silence, they seem harmless and foreboding at the same time, resonant with what they once were. I leave by the main doors–only to find my way barred by the museum’s locked gates.
I have visions of spending the night inside the museum, with the dinosaurs and stuffed tigers with their yellowing teeth and glass eyes. I think of the corner of the grounds where, until just before the war, it rendered its own specimens in pits of silver sand. Here carcasses were prepared for articulation and display, lowered into the sand where rain would percolate through, speeding up a process of decay that might take two years or more. Photographs show sperm whales being hauled out of a kind of animal dry dock, although they look to me like bodies being pulled from blitzed buildings. Only when local residents complained about the smell was the practice put to an end. It is hard to believe–as I eventually find my way into the bright lights of Knightsbridge–that behind the gothic façade dead whales once lay, tended by a boiler-suited scientist, who looked more like a gardener engaged in double-digging a trench–only with a cigarette purposefully in his mouth, presumably to counter the stench of the rotting animal at his feet.
Other whales are inhabitants of the superficial waters, connected to the sun and the waves. The sperm whale is a denizen of the deep, spending half its life feeding on blind-eyed creatures of the abyss. Yet as dark as it is, Physeter once provided the essential element of light. For two centuries or more, that same hooded head provided luminescence for drawing rooms and street lamps from Kensington to Kentucky. The very unit of light, the lumen, was measured from a pure white spermaceti candle, one candlepower being equivalent to the burning of one hundred and twenty grains of wax per hour. As it did not freeze, sperm oil could be used in lamps during the winter, as well as a lubricant for watches and other fine instruments. The whale was itself a manufactory, of strange substances and of human fortunes.
The sperm whale’s head contains two reservoirs of fluid which sit in the semicircular basin of its skull. The uppermost is the spermaceti organ, or case, a long, barrel–or cone-shaped structure surrounded by a muscular sheath and containing a spongy network of tissues saturated with oil. This lies on top of the second chamber, the junk, divided from it by the right nasal passage, also filled with oil. It is this precious semi-liquid that defines the whale–still more its historical value–and yet which its terse-lipped owner declines to explain.
In the absence of any such elaboration, science steps in. Or at least, it tries to. One theory is that the whale’s head is an enormous buoyancy aid. The oil’s density and viscosity changes with temperature; thus, as the whale draws in cold water along its right nasal passage, it cools the oil which becomes heavier in the process (unlike water, which gets lighter as it freezes). Warming the organ with its body heat, the effect is that of wax in a lava lamp, allowing the whale to rise and fall at will. But this elegant hypothesis is disputed, and others consider that the oil’s primary function is to act as a focus for the whale’s powerful sound system. In effect, its ability to carry sound turns the animal’s head into a highly directional loudspeaker, allowing it to broadcast its presence.
Ishmael assigns a more sensual role to this magical liquid. In one of Moby-Dick’s most extraordinary chapters, ‘A Squeeze of the Hand’, he and his shipmates sit round a tub of spermaceti, squeezing lumps out of the cooling oil.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it…and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say…Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!
Tellingly, this is followed by the even odder account of ‘The Cassock’, in which Ishmael describes a ‘very strange, enigmatical object…that unaccountable cone…nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg’. Only the assiduous reader would realize that he is talking about the whale’s penis. In a bizarre ritual, the ‘mincer’ removes the giant foreskin, ‘as an African hunter would the pelt of a boa’, and turning it inside out, stretches it and hangs it up to dry. He then cuts two armholes in the ‘dark pelt’ and puts it on. ‘The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling,’ says Ishmael, ‘arrayed in decent black…what a candidate for an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!’ (Harold Beaver, a later editor of Moby-Dick, goes so far as to say that ‘this peculiar “mincer”…proves to be a mincing queer’ and ‘this “cassock,” turned inside out, spells “ass/cock” in the rigging’.)
Whether or not such a rite ever happened on board a whale-ship–and it may well be a figment of the author’s mischievous imagination–it is ‘the most amazing chapter in an amazing book’, wrote Howard P. Vincent, although he could not bear, in 1949, to discuss it further, beyond noting that ‘ninety per cent of Melville’s readers miss entirely the meaning of “The Cassock”’. Other writers were less coy about the sexual symbolism of the whale. D.H. Lawrence had already dubbed the sperm whale ‘the last phallic being’, and in 1938 W.H. Auden wrote of Ahab and ‘the rare ambiguous monster that had maimed his sex’–a reference to an incident in which the captain was found one night sprawled and insensible on the ground, ‘his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin’. It was as if, in this entirely masculine world, men must sexualize the whale to make it submit–just as they might be subsumed by it in turn. By the 1970s Harold Beaver was declaring the same animal ‘both bridal chamber and battering ram…a true amphibium, dual-sexed as Gabriel’s “Shaker God incarnated”’. The protean whale had become a phallus itself, but also a spermatozoid, gigantic and seminal at the same time.
Given such mysterious and symbolic attributes, such legendary enemies and such iconic status, it is little wonder that the sperm whale was a fated beast, condemned to be the quarry of man. The blue whale and the finback were too fast, the humpback unproductive. It was the sperm whale�
�immediately recognizable by its angled spout, by its predilection for lying at the surface and, most paradoxical of all, by its essentially shy nature–that offered itself up as a sacrifice for all other whales: a silent, honourable champion.
IV
A Filthy Enactment
Who aint a slave? Tell me that.
Loomings, Moby-Dick
Housed in its own vaulted, purpose-built hall is New Bedford’s grandest exhibit: a half-scale replica of a whale-ship. Even allowing for its reduced size, the confined lower decks of this vessel are intimidating. They resemble nothing so much as the slave ships of the age: the one designed to carry the harvest of dead whales; the other to convey living souls. In a nearby cabinet is a much smaller specimen: a framed daguerreotype of a handsome man with a sweep of sleek wavy hair, fine cheekbones and serious, querying eyes; he wears a dandy’s high-collared shirt and tie and an elegant dark coat. But this composed figure was the fomenter behind the campaign to abolish slavery–in a city that shackled men to the pursuit of the whale.
In 1838 Frederick Douglass, the son of an enslaved mother and a white father whose name he never knew, escaped from Baltimore dressed as a sailor. He arrived in New Bedford where, for four years, he lived and worked, rolling casks, stowing ships, sawing wood, sweeping chimneys and labouring at a blacksmith’s bellows till his hands were like horn. Ishmael claimed that ‘a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard’; for Douglass and his brethren, ‘the ship-yard…was our school-house’.
Like the rest of America, New Bedford is a place made up of other places. If more white Americans were descended from pickpockets and prostitutes than from the Pilgrim Fathers, then, as Ishmael informs us, ‘not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born’. While America’s railroads were built by Irish navvies, its dirty business of whaling was done by Africans and Indians or Azoreans and Cape Verdeans. The heroes of the harpoon were more likely to be men of colour than sons of the Mayflower.
By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, one in twenty New Bedfordians was black, a greater proportion than that of New York, Boston or Philadelphia. ‘In New Bedford,’ marvels Ishmael, ‘actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.’ The South End of town was known as Little Faial for its Azoreans; another downtown neighbourhood was named New Guinea after its inhabitants. On these shingled and clapboarded New England streets a dozen languages could be heard and dark figures seen, fellow countrymen of Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo, the Polynesian, American Indian and African-American harpooneers of the Pequod. Visiting in 1917, Mary Heaton Vorse saw an ‘illusion of the South’ about the port, with its ‘Bravas’ or Cape Verdeans and entire neighbourhoods in which white people were the foreigners; where children stared back, and ‘a splendid Negress with thin Arab features…checked her stride to wonder about us’.
Black sailors were engaged by owners who did not ask questions, or whose Quaker beliefs opposed slavery. Some rose to become captains or mates. Others succeeded in supply industries: Samuel Temple of New Bedford invented the toggle-iron harpoon, with its ingeniously hinged head. But below deck, bunks were still segregated and conditions were such that by the end of the century only men of colour could be persuaded to sign up; hence the preponderance of black faces in photographs of whaling crews. Charles Chace, one of New Bedford’s last whaling captains, kept two loaded pistols in his cabin in case of trouble–so his descendant told me–and when his Cape Verdeans were discharged with a suit of clothes and a ten-dollar bill, many gave up their African names and, like slaves, adopted their master’s, for the sake of conformity with their new home.
New Bedford owed at least part of its success to its communications with the rest of America; the same year that Frederick Douglass arrived, the city was connected by rail to the New England network. But for Douglass and for Henry ‘Box’ Brown–who was smuggled out of the South in a crate, emerging at the other end as a human jack-in-the-box–New Bedford was a vital stop on another network: the Underground Railroad, an invisible system secretly helping thousands of slaves to escape to the North and Canada. A port was the perfect place for such illicit trade; and whaling offered a tradition of disguise as well as employment. For Douglass and his fellow fugitives, New Bedford’s transience itself was a kind of liberty: ‘No coloured man is really free in a slaveholding state…but here in New Bedford, it was my good fortune to see a pretty near approach to freedom on the part of the coloured people.’
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whaling and slavery co-existed as lucrative, exploitative, transoceanic industries; while whale-ships sought to disguise themselves as men o’ war in order to forestall pirates (and sometimes harboured fugitive slaves themselves), slave ships seeking to evade Unionist blockades during the Civil War would masquerade as whale-ships. It was no coincidence that in 1850, as Melville began to write Moby-Dick, the issue of slavery was coming to a head. The stresses that would eventually sunder a nation also gave Melville’s book its symbolic charge.
That year, a new Fugitive Slave Law gave owners extraordinary powers to pursue their ‘property’ over state limits. To America’s great philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, it was a ‘filthy enactment’. Meanwhile, his Concord neighbour, Bronson Alcott–whose utopian, strictly vegan commune, Fruitlands, just outside Boston, was an early example of ethical living where the wearing of cotton was forbidden because it exploited slaves and where oil lamps were proscribed because they were the result of the death of whales–hid fugitives in a modern version of a Reformation priest-hole.
War between the states seemed imminent; and as the North and South argued over the right, or otherwise, to maintain their fellow man in chains, Melville turned the crisis into an elegant, cetological analogy.
Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by endless subdivisions based on the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.
Elsewhere, Ishmael describes a whale of ‘an Ethiopian hue’, hunted until its heart burst; while the whiteness of Moby Dick itself seemed a reflection on America’s preoccupation with colour. Determined to protect his fellow fugitives from ‘the bloodthirsty kidnapper’, Frederick Douglass began an unprecedented campaign, the first black man in America publicly to oppose such injustice. Historians like to imagine that Douglass and Melville saw each other in New Bedford’s narrow streets; in the same year that Melville sailed from the port, Douglass was ‘discovered’ lecturing on abolitionism in the Nantucket Athenæum. Four years later, the publication of his memoir, the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, attracted violent opposition. Some even questioned the author’s authenticity, turning on his fierce beauty–not quite black, not quite white–calling Douglass a ‘negro imposter’ and ‘only half a nigger’ (to which he retorted, ‘And so half-brother to yourselves’). In May 1850, Douglass’s appearances in the New York Society Library–the same building in which Melville was even then researching his story of the White Whale–were disrupted by ‘Captain’ Isaiah Rynders and his Law and Order Party, a gang that attacked abolitionists, foreigners and blacks, encouraged by one newspaper which demanded its readers
STRIKE THE VILLAIN DEAD.
When Douglass strolled up Broadway with his two English friends, Julia and Elizabeth Griffiths, passers-by uttered exclamations ‘as if startled by some terrible sight’. Worse still, when walking near the Battery, the trio were set upon by five or six men shouting foul language; Douglass was hit in the face, and the women struck on the head. It was a scene that had its counterpart in Melville’s autobiographical Redburn, published the previous year, in which the young sailor sees his ship’s black
steward walking the Liverpool streets ‘arm-in-arm with a good-looking English woman’, and remarks: ‘In New York, such a couple would have been mobbed in three minutes; and the steward would have been lucky to escape with whole limbs.’
Douglass reacted to these assaults in his essay, ‘Colorphobia in New York!’, and later became Abraham Lincoln’s adviser on slavery during the bitter war that followed. Melville, whose father had been a friend of the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe, would invest Moby-Dick with the same blackness and whiteness, the same deceptively simple quandary. Strangely intertwined in history, slavery and whaling were both expressions of antebellum America; both doomed by their reliance on unsustainable resources, human and cetacean.
By the time Melville arrived, New Bedford was experiencing an unparalleled boom. In the 1840s, three hundred whale-ships–more than half of the American fleet–sailed from the port, often returning with two or three thousand barrels of oil and profits running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many New England boys, fired up by the heroism and glory it offered, volunteered for the chase. While their peers went to California in search of gold or the Dakota plains for buffalo, they found another wilderness: whaling was the Wild West of the sea.