by Philip Hoare
The forecastle was seldom a good place to be. One sailor claimed to have seen ‘Kentucky pig-sties not half so filthy, and in every respect preferable to this miserable hole’. Not only was it dark and odorous, but damp, too; in bad weather, crewmen might spend days on end wearing wet clothes. ‘Those who had been to sea before found this nothing new,’ wrote Nelson Cole Haley, aged just twelve years old when he ran away from his home in Maine. Now sixteen, Haley signed on for the Morgan’s voyage of 1849-53 as a boat-steerer.
Still, it was hard, even for them. After standing their watch, often wet through as soon as they came out of the forecastle, they had no chance to change clothing, if they had dry to put on, until they were relieved and went below. There twenty-five men lived in quarters so small that it was impossible for all of them to find standing room at one time…And this was not for one day or month, but was their only home for four years…
In the tropics, the unrelenting sun which sparked deadlights into life made duties even more difficult to bear. As the ship languished in dead calm, with no whales seen for weeks, lassitude overtook the company. The top deck was kept cool by watering, and its walking larder of pigs squealed with delight when buckets of sea water were thrown over them, too. Some men could shelter in the shade of the sails, but those aloft ‘had to take it straight up and down’, their eyes dazed by the cataractic sun reflecting off the sea. In the forecastle, the heat was worse. ‘The watch below lay in their berths trying to sleep, the perspiration streaming from their bodies, with nothing but the curtains drawn in front of their bunks for covering.’
Yet even on such a ship it was possible to keep secrets. One welcome relief for sailors was a gam, a meeting with another vessel when letters and news were exchanged and men could socialize. On one such gam with the Christopher Mitchell of Nantucket–the same ship whose previous captain, William Swain, had been lost to a whale, as his memorial in the Seamen’s Bethel testified–young Haley heard about one of her crew who, despite ‘showing no more fear of a whale than the bravest of green hands’, had faced jibes about his appearance. On falling ill in his bunk, was seen naked–and found to be a woman.
This anonymous Orlando told an extraordinary story. Her lover had promised marriage, only to run away to sea. Through the services of a New York detective, she discovered he had signed up to a whale-ship. Not knowing which one, she set off for New Bedford, where she bound her breasts with calico and, being tall and slim, ‘passed herself off as a green boy who wanted to go a-whaling’. After her confession, she broke down in tears, but was comforted by the captain, who found her rather attractive, once she had sewn herself a loose dress, and as sickness and shade returned to a more lady-like pallor. When the ship called at Lima, the woman was placed in the hands of the American consul; only when the Christopher Mitchell returned home did her story become public.
Such was the no-man’s-land of the whale-ship, where boys would be boys and girls would be boys, too. Life onboard was peculiar to itself and of itself: enclosed yet open, confined yet free, disciplined yet liberated. For months on end a ship’s crew knew only this world. Time was measured in the watches of the day and by the shadows of the masts; on the featureless ocean they might be anywhere on earth, living within wooden walls, a colony of men ruled over by erratic officers and determined by the wilful meanderings of whales. Yet for all the depredations, the romance remained. Why else would men volunteer for this life, if not for its sense of adventure? Hardly for the pay, or the conditions.
It was this containedness about which Melville wrote so well in his novels of the sea, especially in the two works that preceded Moby-Dick: Redburn, a fictionalized account of his first sea voyage to Liverpool; and White-Jacket, another slice of his life story whose subtitle proclaims ‘The World in a Man-of-War’. It is set on board a naval ship, a ‘bit of terra firma cut off from the main; it is a state in itself; and the captain is its king…Only the moon and stars are beyond his jurisdiction.’ Here men lived ‘in a space so contracted that they can hardly so much as move but they touch…the inmates of a frigate are thrown upon themselves and each other, and all their ponderings are introspective.’
Such intimacy permitted desires forbidden by the civilized world. Redburn extols the beauty of his English shipmate Harry, with dark curling hair and ‘silken muscles’, and a complexion as ‘feminine as a girl’s’; an equally handsome Italian boy plays his concertina with a suggestive enthusiasm almost embarrassing to read. The narrator of White-Jacket is more circumspect, although he notes that one midshipman is ‘apt to indulge at times in undignified familiarities with some of the men’. When they resist, he has them flogged–a scenario that would inspire Melville’s last work, Billy Budd, in which the villainous first mate, Claggart, becomes obsessed with the Handsome Sailor, Billy or Baby Budd, with fatal consequences for them both. In real life, other seamen found different outlets: Philip C. Van Buskirk, a contemporary of Melville’s, left a startlingly frank journal of his onboard addiction to self-abuse.
Ishmael himself is never more than ambiguous on such matters; but since nothing in his creator’s work is accidental (about the only thing his critics agree on), it is impossible not to see a pattern in Melville’s emblematic titles–
RED BURN
WHITE JACKET
MOBY DICK
BILLY BUDD
–books set in a world without women and in an age that had no name for love between men (although his peer, Walt Whitman, devised the term ‘adhesiveness’ for what he felt for his fellow man). From the fiery youth of Redburn to the masculine discipline of White-Jacket, from the phallic pallor of Moby-Dick to the virginal Billy Budd, Melville fictionalized his past and obscured his emotions in a matrix of literary intent.
The sea was the perfect arena for such arch invention. A fatherless middle-class boy had deliberately placed himself as far from land–and female influence–as it was possible to be, creating a new family, and a new identity for himself. Instead of his mother and his sisters, he answered to a captain and lived among men. Removed from the security of home, and freed from its confines, Melville was launched into the brutal reality of living with men united only in the common pursuit of a bloody business. He and his fellow sailors had cut all ties with civilization, sailing to islands where murderous natives with filed teeth threatened to eat their shipmates. They were boys in a boy’s own story, although they travelled on a vessel whose very ceilings kept them down, as if perpetually tugging their caps.
Descending below the waterline to the Morgan’s hold, I feel as though I were within the whale, contained within wooden ribs. In the dampness, I sense the pressure of water from without, even knowing this massive chamber is braced by sturdy knees cut from live oak, like flying buttresses on a great cathedral. The church-like air is illusory, for this maritime crypt was filled with barrels of oil, a visible measure of success, an ascending scale marked up the hull as a prisoner ticks off the days on his cell wall. It was in everyone’s interests–from the captain with his magnified lay, to the seaman’s humble fraction–to see this space diminish. Each barrel represented incremental profit; its absence, potential loss.
The Morgan’s timbers are still stained with decades of oil. Like the candle works of Nantucket, whose infused floorboards oozed when they were removed, the years have left this vessel saturated with the products of the animals she had processed. As a whale’s skeleton retains its sap, so these soaked knees and ribs became the bones of her prey, transforming this death ship–this whale widow-maker–into a simulacrum of the creatures she pursued. In 1941, when she was brought to Mystic for restoration, objects were found between the Morgan’s bilges: bits of clay pipe, coins, whale’s teeth, and strange shell-like bones–the inner ears of a whale–archæological relics that had rattled around for decades in the belly of the vessel. It was as if the ship had become a repository of herself.
Back in the staterooms, sitting at the captain’s table as the wind sways the ship to and fro on her moori
ngs, breaking the ice around the bows which promptly refreezes into abstract shards, I try to imagine life lived in this wooden box filled with more than forty men and boys and the rendered fat of tens of whales. Perhaps such conditions merely merged men into the visceral business in which they were engaged; perhaps they gave up their humanity for the duration, to wallow in whale oil for its own sake; to live and die for the whale.
Melville sailed on the Acushnet from New Bedford on Sunday, 3 January 1841. He may have been no greenhand–despite what it said on his shipping papers–but his earlier passage to Liverpool, carrying cotton rather than oil, bore little resemblance to the adventure that lay ahead of him.
Once at sea, the mates made their selection for the whaleboat crews. Mustered aft, men were interrogated about their experience as the mates checked their hands and feet and felt their muscles in an inspection that resembled a slave auction. Ships had three or four such crews, comprising the captain, or a mate, four foremast hands (as Melville was), and a harpooneer; fewer than five men might be left behind to run the vessel when the boats were lowered from the divots on which they hung on the ship’s side, ready for action. As with everything in whaling, periods of frenetic energy alternated with soporific inaction or numbing drudgery. Time itself was different at sea. Far from land, the levelling ocean flattened out the days to be recreated in nautical dispensations, reordered from noon to noon.
First part, noon to 8 pm
Middle part, 8 pm to 4 am
Latter part, 4 am to noon
Four hours on, four hours off, watch and watch regulated the crew’s life. When no whales were seen, the ship would sail in and out of as yet undetermined time zones. When the chase was on, time would accelerate, or even disappear. And all this–all these men, all their efforts, all their aspirations–existed for those few minutes when a whale might be won. All this human striving–from recruitment and requisition to searching and finding a distant disruption, followed by the frenetic hunt–all in order to fill wooden barrels that would ensure only a brief stay on land till the call to sea came again. As Ishmael says, the whole process was a remorseless cycle; a man might not be free of it till nature or the whale’s caprice released him. As surely as those shrouds held the mast to his ship, as surely as the line held the harpoon to the whale, so was the sailor tethered to his prey in an unerring deposition of faith.
‘Ah the world! Oh the world!’
Decks were scrubbed, men sent aloft for two-hour watches to look for whales. Until then, the ship and her crew lay in a kind of limbo. New recruits would practise in the boats, hardening muscles and honing co-ordination in a gymnasium of the sea. They rehearsed their techniques on passing porpoises or pilot whales, whose oil would occasionally be mixed with spermaceti to swell the profits of less honest whalers. For sixty-nine days the Acushnet sailed on a course now unknown to us, although it is probable that, like most New England whalers, she called at the Azores, seeking fresh provisions and new hands. Only then, as they sailed over the five-mile-deep chasms of the mid-Atlantic, would the hunt begin in earnest.
Sperm whales are not bound to seasonal migrations like the humpbacks; even so, they still roam tens of thousands of miles each year, often congregating in certain areas known as ‘grounds’ to the whalers. These were plotted on mariners’ charts, marked with whalish symbols like maps in a military campaign. A favourite ground was the equatorial region, the Line. Here, at the earth’s midriff, the whales seemed to gather as if in a preordained meeting with their fate.
The men had watched for weeks from the topgallant crosstrees, tiny figures swaying ninety feet in the air, everyone waiting for the magic words–
There she blows! T-h-e-r-e s-h-e b-l-o-w-s!
–at which the animals would appear, as if mystically summoned from the deep.
And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror.
Sometimes they saw twenty or thirty whales riding the waves like surfers, ‘tumbling about when the big seas would catch them and almost turn them over’, as the teenaged Haley recorded, with not a little admiration. ‘Sometimes one could be seen on the crest of a wave. As it broke he would shoot down its side with such a speed a streak of white could be seen in the wake he made through the water. When reaching the hollow between two seas he would lazily shove his spout holes above the water and blow out his spout, as much as to say, “See how that is done.”’ But even as the young whales were at their sport, the order was given to lower the boats. The Yankee whaleboat was ‘the most perfect water craft that has ever floated’: a sleek, sharp-pointed vessel thirty feet long, yet ‘so slight’, as Melville wrote, ‘that three men might walk off with it’. Double-ended for maximum manœuvrability, enabling it to be rowed in either direction, its cedar clinker-built sides and eighteen-foot oars were made to slip silently and swiftly through the water with its crew of six. ‘Buoyant and graceful in her movements,’ wrote Frederick Bennett, a British whaling surgeon, ‘she leaps from billow to billow, and appears rather to dance over the sea than to plough its bosom with her keel.’ At the rear, the mate gripped a great steering oar as he issued orders to men stripped for action; just as the boat’s rowlocks were muffled, so they went shoeless so as not to scare their prey. A sperm whale was as ready to rear as a startled deer–and a gallied whale was good to no one.
Their pursuit was impelled by each boat’s commander.
‘Do for heaven’s sake spring’, the mate implored in whispered tones, ‘The boat don’t move. You’re all asleep; see, see! There she lies; skote, skote! I love you, my dear fellows, yes, yes, I do; I’ll do anything for you, I’ll give you my heart’s blood to drink; only take me up to this whale only this time, for this once, pull.’
They were the words of an urgent lover, just as the harpoons were the darts of a deadly Cupid; exhortations alternating between passionate blasphemies and competitive imprecations.
‘ Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull my little ones,’ drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew…‘Why don’t you break your backbones, my boys…Why don’t you snap your oars, you rascals?…The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull…’
So the small, lethal boats sped through the water, fast and fragile, ready if necessary to be turned into matchwood in the affray. As they drew near their prey, the oars were put aside as they waited.
And waited.
Sperm whales spend most of their time below the surface, and can sound for ten minutes or an hour. An experienced whaler knew how long an animal would stay down by its size: for every foot of whale they must wait a minute more.
It was a fearful calculation: the longer they waited, the greater the monster they faced.
A mile below, the whale might be scooping up squid in the silent depths, unaware of the danger that lurked above, the shapes that sculled over the ceiling of its world. But the time came when it needed to replenish the oxygen in its blood, returning to the light and air. The irony was that the sign of its renewed life–its characteristic angled blow, easily spotted from miles away–was also the signal for its demise.
Now came the moment for which these men had broken their backs. It too came shrouded in silence. ‘Every breath was held; no one dared move a jot. The dropping of a pin in the boat might almost have been heard…Now we were within dart.’ It was a meditation on what was to come, on the enormous task in hand. In this stillness was invested all the might of the whale versus the ingenuity of man.
They relied on the animal’s design flaws: its blind spots, fore and aft. To approach a whale ‘on the eye’ was foolhardy; from its side it could see all that they were trying to do. So pulling head-on or behind, the boat crept as close as it dared. Through the surface they could see the fearsome flukes, three times the size of a man.
&n
bsp; How palpitating the hearts of the frightened oarsman at this interesting juncture! My young friends, just turn about and snatch a look at that whale. There he goes, surging through the brine which ripples about his vast head, as if it were the bow of a ship. Believe me, it’s quite as terrible as going into battle, to a raw recruit.
This was the ultimate test, when each man would be judged; the moment on which their fortunes relied. It was also remarkably, almost stupidly dangerous: to pit a man against an animal so far in excess of him in size and power that even in the twentieth century, when hunting bottle-nosed whales–notorious for their ability to sound abruptly and take down a line with unbelievable speed–Norwegian ships would send out only single men, considering the task too hazardous for husbands with families.
Fear met fear. A harpooneer expected to spear a living creature one hundred times his size. A gigantic mammal startled by the appearance of an object it had never seen before. Through its very bones, connected to the auditory canal deep within its head, and through its startled eyes, protected by a film of oil, the whale sensed danger in unidentified noise and movement. Panic was its first response.
Once alerted, the entire school could swim off, at speed, invariably to windward. ‘The slightest noise causes them to disappear with marvellous celerity,’ as Charles Nordhoff observed. Giant whales could vanish into thin air. ‘That’s magic,’ said Nordhoff’s shipmate as one whale sounded with barely a toss of its head, so suddenly that ‘it seemed just as though the vast mass had been suspended in space, and the suspensor had been suddenly cut asunder’. One minute a sixty-foot animal would be alongside them; the next, it had entirely vanished.