Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Like a cowboy or a jockey, the experienced whaler was physically tailored for the job–or perhaps his job moulded him. ‘He is a rather slender, middle-sized man, with a very sallow cheek, and hands tanned of a deep and enduring saffron color,’ wrote Charles Nordhoff, who sailed from New Bedford soon after Melville, ‘…very round-shouldered, the effect possibly of much pulling at his oar.’ A vagabond cast in ‘this shabby part of a whaling voyage’–as Ishmael puts it–the well-travelled whaler bore

  a singular air of shabbiness…His shoes are rough and foxy, and the strings trail upon the ground, as he walks. His trowsers fail to connect, by several inches, showing a margin of coarse, grey woollen sock, intervening between their bottoms, and his shoes. A portion of his red flannel drawers is visible, above the waistband of his pantaloons; while a rusty black handkerchief at the throat, fastened by a large ring, made of the tooth of a sperm whale, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, keeps together a shirt bosom…innocent of a single button.

  The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner–an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth. Whale oil and whalebone were commodities for the Machine Age, and owners and captains adopted the same punitive practices employed in mills and factories, reducing pay and provisions to pursue a better profit.

  When you’re fast to a whale, running risk to your life

  You’re shingling his houses and dressing his wife.

  It was to this often iniquitous trade that innocent young men found themselves signed up, almost unwittingly. Engaged in New York, they were shipped to New Bedford, the price of their passage deducted from the seventy-five dollars they had been promised. Sometimes the ‘landsharks’ got them drunk and virtually press-ganged their victims, who woke to find themselves aboard an outgoing ship, unable to get off.

  At worst, whalers were treated like migrant workers, little better than bonded labourers. Nordhoff spent months ‘in all the filth, moral and physical, of a whale-ship’, and returned feeling that he had thrown away two years of his life: whaling, he declared, ‘was an enormous, filthy humbug’. One young whaler came home after a five-year voyage to discover that while his friends had made their fortunes in the gold fields, he had earned just $400, half of which he owed in outfitter’s bills.

  To Ishmael, New Bedford was a ‘queer place’, a city that wore ‘a garb of strangeness’. It certainly mystified Nordhoff when he first arrived. This whaling metropolis reached out from a corner of New England to light the world, yet it was remarkably still. ‘One would never guess that he stood within the bounds of a city which ranks in commercial importance the seventh seaport in the Union, and whose ships float upon every ocean.’ The reason for this complicit silence was the confinement of the port’s commerce to a relatively small downtown area, as if it were keen to restrict its vulgar, even disreputable transactions to a whalish ghetto.

  New Bedford is still a blue-collar place, a working port; perhaps that is why I like it so well: it reminds me of my home town. It still conducts its business from the same buildings used by the whaling trade; newspapers are published and radio stations broadcast in Portuguese; and in the north end of town, Antonio’s restaurant sells salt cod and shrimp fritters to descendants of whalers and mill-workers on a Friday night. As the customers sit drinking at the bar, with an icy wind blowing down the street outside, it isn’t hard to imagine a modern-day Ishmael walking in the door; or even his creator.

  When he arrived in New Bedford on that bleak December day in 1840, Melville saw the city rising ‘in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air’, endlessly unravelling in a panorama of activity. The port was alive to the business of the whale. Scores of ships lay in dock, preparing for long voyages, taking on supplies in holds which, as they emptied, would be filled by the fruit of their hunt. It was an efficient exchange: if ‘greasy luck’ was with the Acushnet, she would never need ballast. Flat-pack barrels–loose staves to be assembled by onboard coopers–provided further storage. Other ships were drying their sails like cormorants’ out-held wings, their cargo unloaded by men back from tropical seas; they were easy to spot, for their sunburn glowed next to the pale faces of those who had wintered at home.

  The wharfside was a centre of industry, like the whales never still by day or night, piled high with ‘huge hills and mountains of casks on casks’ while ‘the world-wandering whale-ships lay silent and safely moored at last’. Here Ishmael listens to carpenters and coopers at work, ‘blended noises of fires and forged to melt the pitch’. It is a Sisyphean sign, both quickening and deadening: ‘that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.’ This was a task as dreary as a container ship sailing predetermined distances, bringing stuff in, taking stuff out, heavy with oil and whalebone and human effort.

  Nordhoff too saw wharves laden with ‘harpoons, lances, boatspades, and other implements for dealing death to leviathan’. Beyond lay the inns and offices, chandlers and sail lofts, smithies and dining rooms, banks and brokers, all trading on the whale, directing every effort down to the river and the ocean beyond in an unremitting, profitable pursuit. Clapboarded and shingled, walled in wood like ships themselves, the five blocks tethered off Water Street–‘New Bedford’s Wall Street’–were said to be the busiest in New England. This main thoroughfare, running uphill from the waterside, was devoted to the outfitters’ shops and suppliers, while its side streets were home to boarding houses kept by whaling widows ‘for numerous youthful aspirants to spouting honors’. For other honours, they could visit a waterborne brothel, anchored offshore.

  Removed from this gritty business were the grand mansions of County Street, New Bedford’s most prestigious address. These houses still occupy block after block in every permutation of architectural style, their details picked out in contrasting colours, each wildly different, yet each the product of factories that turned out decorative trim by the yard. Like the millionaires’ ‘summer cottages’ in nearby Newport, Rhode Island, they vie with each other for extravagance. Most magnificent of all is the house built in 1834 for the whaling Quaker, William Rotch Junior, whose grandfather Joseph came from Nantucket to found New Bedford’s industry.

  Occupying a block of its own, this elaborate pile, with its verandahs and parterres, its reception rooms and bedrooms, seems incompatible with its owner’s austere face, long silver hair and plain black coat. Nevertheless, William Rotch presided over the world’s greatest whaling fleet from the glazed lantern that sits on the roof like a lighthouse, looking down on the waterfront and the source of his wealth. On a darkening winter’s afternoon, I climbed to this eyrie through the attic-like servants’ quarters, the sodium lights of the port already twinkling in the distance. ‘Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford,’ Ishmael declares. ‘Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?’ His answer lay with ‘the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion…Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged hither from the bottom of the sea.’ For every stoop and pillar on County Street, a whale died; each extravagance was bought at the cost of a cetacean. Oil for marble, baleen for wood, this was the rate of exchange from sea to shore.

  And down at the quayside late at night, where the fishing fleet lies tethered to rusty piles, hulls bumping gently and engines purring, I wonder how it must have been for these young men to ship out from this port, to leave these homely waters for uncertain seas. A sense of utter abandonment to fate, disconnecting from America, seeking escape wandering the oceans, orphans in search of a new home among a family of men, yet enslaved to the movements of the whale, man and animal forever linked.

 
; The next morning, as I leave, snow starts to fall, turning the mural over the highway into an impressionist canvas, flecked with white. As the traffic picks up speed, I look over my shoulder. The painted whales are fading from view, losing their shapes. A hundred yards more and they are gone, vanishing with the city into the flurrying swirl, to be replaced by the concrete clamour of the road ahead.

  V

  Far Away Land

  Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse…a mere hillock, and elbow of land; all beach, without a background…What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood!

  Nantucket, Moby-Dick

  Off-season Hyannis is deserted, closed for the winter. This morning’s storm has cancelled ferry sailings; the evening’s schedule may be called off as well, the seas too high for a safe crossing. It seems that, like Ishmael, I will be frustrated in my attempt to make Nantucket tonight. It is the coldest weather of the year, and the wind is picking up. In the ferry office, the woman delivers the expected news. But what about the plane? she says. There’s fifteen minutes to the last flight.

  On the darkened runway, the light aircraft rumbles along until its wings seem to stretch and straighten. Soon the sodium flares of the town fall away, to be replaced by the silver-black waves far below. I’m sitting in the co-pilot’s seat; the young pilot wears a baseball cap, and the cockpit smells of his sandwiches. The dual controls tick and turn in my lap. Through the windscreen I see a shape on the horizon, bracketed by flashing lighthouses. A clutter of stars bursts around Orion. Twenty minutes later we are falling through the clouds, twin beams meeting in the mist, guiding us down. With a bump the tyres bite tarmac, and as we few passengers step out onto the airstrip, Flint the boxer dog scents home.

  When Ishmael and Queequeg arrive in Nantucket, by schooner from New Bedford, they put up at another inn while they search for a suitable whale-ship. As they do so, Ishmael takes the opportunity to delineate the island in great detail, from its remarkable history down to its clam chowder–even though his creator had never actually been there. Such was Nantucket’s fame: it already lived in the American imagination, a name that summed up the pioneering, heroic spirit of the new republic. Early cartographers even saw the shape of a whale in its harbour, as if its myth were incarnate in the island’s very geography. But like its neighbour, Cape Cod, Nantucket was both part of America, and set apart from it at the same time.

  The word is Native American, Nattick, meaning far away land; and from far away, its wharves once stank so much that visitors could smell the island before they saw it. Now they bob with expensive boats gleaming with brass and veneer. The town’s Main Street is unevenly paved with hefty stone setts, undulating as if to shrug itself of unwanted visitors. Smart shops and old-fashioned drugstores with high counters serving sodas and sandwiches give way to sandy lanes lined with clapboard homes. Many have doorknockers and weathervanes in the shape of whales, ‘but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with “Hands off!” as Ishmael complains, ‘you cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.’ Nearby is the Athenæum where, in 1841, Frederick Douglass spoke to a mixed-race audience at the island’s first anti-slavery convention; a second meeting the following year ended in a riot. It would be hard to imagine such insurrection here nowadays.

  The higher up the hill you go, the more the houses increase in size. Unlike New Bedford’s showy homes, however, they announce their wealth quite quietly. Three identical buildings, built in the 1830s by Joseph Starbuck for his three sons, were the first brick houses on the island; they speak of a fantastical New England. Even a century ago Mary Heaton Vorse saw Nantucket as ‘some beautiful old woman sitting dreaming in a garden…proud of her faded and excellent beauty’; its summer visitors already outnumbered year-rounders, and ‘no immigrants swarmed through the wide houses of the old whaling captains, as in New Bedford’.

  Nowadays, an island which furnished the world with the names of Macy, Folger and Starbuck rejects commerce. There are no supermarkets selling cheap postcards, no homeboys’ stores with piles of jeans. It all adds up to a faintly unreal perfection. The cold light turns each streetscape into an exquisite composition of towers and trees laid bare by an acid-blue sky. Colours shade into each other; flat grey shingle and dusty green lichen; roots disrupt brick pavements with slow-motion earthquakes.

  These lanes also lead back to one place. New Bedford’s mansions were dragged up from the ocean; these houses were landed at the harbour in barrels; came totalled in copperplate figures in bound books; were marked in ivory teeth over years spent on the other side of the world. They may look innocent, but they too were built by heathens and monsters.

  In Nantucket’s refurbished whaling museum, the bones of a sperm whale look across to a wall arrayed with harpoons and lances like medieval hardware in the Tower of London. Upstairs, the galleries are filled with the more delicate by-products of this bloody business. Standing on plate-glass shelves are fine examples of scrimshaw, a craft which in itself was an expression of an industry of excess.

  On long voyages, the large crews required to hunt whales were idle for much of the time. To occupy hands that might be otherwise engaged, they were given whale teeth on which to record images of their fancy or everyday life. Soaked in brine to preserve their suppleness and polished with sharkskin, the teeth–which could be up to ten inches long–were etched with needles or knives, creating patterns to be inked with soot from the ship’s try-pots. Some were little more than graffiti; others were traced with illustrations snipped from Victorian periodicals, or imaginary classical scenes. Often, they portrayed the ships themselves.

  Decorated with bosomy women or fey-looking youths or feats of whaling endeavour, these were folk artefacts of an industrial age. Ishmael compared their ‘maziness of design…full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness’, to engravings by ‘that fine old savage, Albert Durer’. Tactile lumps of creamy-smooth ivory once gripped in a seaman’s fist, they are imbued with a sensual, primitive significance akin to tattooing, ‘or pricking, as it is called in a man-of-war’. As their designs resembled tattoos on a sailor’s biceps, so tattooing instruments, themselves distinctly tribal, were made with whale-ivory handles, while other sailors assembled ‘little boxes of dentistical-looking implements’, custom-made for scrimshanding. They were direct records of the whalers’ experiences and desires, journals for illiterate men. Some were decorated with pornographic cartoons, or were carved into phalluses.

  The most artful pieces mark the pomp of whaling; the peak years of scrimshaw were those of the great voyages to the South Seas in the 1830s and 1840s, when whale bone was also turned into delicate ‘flights’–trellis-like structures for winding yarn–or carved into pastry-cutters to be sold in fancy-goods stores or given to loved ones. But as history moved on, these macabre objects languished in attics, unloved, unvalued; only in the late twentieth century were they seen anew, and one man in particular was responsible for their revival: John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  The Kennedys are synonymous with the Cape and its islands, an American aristocracy convened around the family compound at Hyannis. Even before he became thirty-fifth President of the United States, John F. Kennedy had moved to declare the Outer Cape’s beaches from Eastham to Provincetown as National Seashore, sacrosanct from urbanization. And it was as an extension of his love of maritime New England that Kennedy began to collect scrimshaw. Soon his collection stood at thirty-four whale teeth, favourite examples of which he kept on his Oval Office desk, to be turned in the same hand that held the world in its balance.

  In 1963 the First Lady ordered a special Christmas gift for her husband–a whale tooth engraved with the presidential seal. He would never receive it. Shortly before he died, the President threw a private dinner for Greta Garbo at the White House, when he ga
ve the actress a piece of scrimshaw. ‘I might believe it a dream,’ Garbo wrote to Mrs Kennedy afterwards, ‘if I did not have in my possession the President’s “tooth” before me.’ Two weeks later, on the night before his funeral, his widow placed her husband’s Christmas present in his coffin. It was a potent act: the king of Camelot interred with the talisman of a heroic age; a relic invested with the power of its original owner. It was a ritual as charged as Ishmael’s claim that the British monarch was anointed with whale oil–

  Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

  –while the President’s amulet was ready for the moment when this Arthur was needed anew; as if he might yet scan the Atlantic horizon with his pale blue eyes, waiting for the whales to reappear. It was on Nantucket that modern whaling began; on its narrow shoulders lies the glory. In 1659 nine new citizens acquired the rights to the island, Quakers such as Thomas Macy, Tristram Coffin and Christopher Hussey who had suffered Puritan persecution in New England. For an island that ‘seemed to have been inhabited merely to prove what mankind can do’, whaling came as a kind of destiny, as told in Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket, and quoted by Moby-Dick’s sub-sub-librarian:

  In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed; there–pointing to the sea–is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.

  For centuries Nattick Indians had foraged for whales in these plentiful waters. The new Nantucketers learned from their techniques. At first, land masts with crude ladders were used to spot right whales on their migration north. Harpooned and towed back to the beach, their two-foot-thick blubber yielded more oil than any other whale, and their baleen was taller and finer–the same ‘limber black bone’ from which Captain Peleg’s wigwam is constructed on the deck of the Pequod.