Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Evidently fascinated with such stories, Orwell elaborated on the theme in a famous literary essay written just as the Second World War broke out. Inside the Whale saw something strangely appealing in the idea:

  the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought…The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality…Even the whale’s own movements would probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility.

  Allegory or tall tale, such notions merely lend more mystery to the whale; an animal so strange and savage and innocent, so monumental in man’s imagination now reduced to bits on the deck of a ship.

  So the process continued. The jaw was wrenched from its cartilaginous hinges, the conical teeth yanked out as if by some cetacean dentist. One whale could yield forty or fifty fist-sized pieces of sea-ivory, issued to sailors for scrimshanding, work for idle days when whales were few. Some teeth might be swapped for supplies; they were highly valued in Fiji, where the captain of the Morgan exchanged sperm whale teeth for food far in excess of their value on the streets of New Bedford, where, as young Haley noted, they’d fetch a dollar fifty at the most.

  By now the deck was awash with oil, one great slick sliding rink; men might slip off and into shark-infested waters. Life was tentative: others could be crushed by lumps of whale, or splashed with boiling oil, or sliced by flenshing knives. Compared to such perilous butchery, the sorting of spermaceti was a popular chore. Collected into tubs, sailors squeezed the lumps from the oil which coagulated as it cooled away from the heat of the body. Some climbed into the tubs themselves like grape-tramplers, pulling out the fibrous integuments which would mar the superior quality of the product.

  ‘No king of earth, even Solomon in all his glory, could command such a bath,’ wrote one whaler. ‘I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs, as I stroked the precious ointment from the skin.’ The task imparted a feminine air to otherwise grisly and dangerous duties; for the narrator of Moby-Dick, it induced an erotic reverie as his fingers began to ‘serpentine and spiralize’ like eels and he was lulled by the scent and sensuality. In the easily stirred Ishmael, such ‘sweet and unctuous duty’ becomes a kind of Blakean transcendence, and ‘in thoughts of the visions of the night’, he sees ‘long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti’.

  Elsewhere, a hellish scene held sway. As the try-pots were heated, the flames were fed with slivers of blubber called ‘cracklings’; thus the whale cooked itself. Naturally, such an irony did not escape Ishmael. ‘Like a plethoric burning martyr, or self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies its own fuel and burns by his own body’ And as darkness fell, the flickering red light turned it all into an infernal vision akin to Loutherbourg’s painting of the ironworks at Coalbrookedale, satanic womb of the Industrial Revolution; or something more apocalyptic:

  the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.

  Notions of horror mar these honest acts of industry in our eyes. What did Melville feel at the time, as he watched, and took part in such scenes conducted far from civilized gaze? Words had the power to conqueror memory; but they were useless in the catching and rendering of whales, save to supply captions to Victorian engravings: ‘There she blows!’, ‘Whereaway?’ , ‘She has fire in the chimney!’ After it was all done, the ship was scrubbed; in another example of cetacean self-sufficiency, unrefined sperm oil possessed ‘a singularly cleaning virtue’, and ‘the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil’. But no sooner was the place clean and its crew with it, ‘the poor fellows just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks’, than the lookouts would shout,

  There she blows!

  and they would ‘fly away to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again’.

  Ah the world. Oh the world.

  VII

  The Divine Magnet

  To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

  The Fossil Whale, Moby-Dick

  Having been halfway round the world, Melville returned to his family in sleepy Lansingburgh in October 1844. He was only twenty-five, yet he had seen more in three years than most people would in a lifetime. He had been away for so long and so far from home that he’d almost forgotten who he was, or who he was supposed to be: hero, or outcast? Encouraged by his sisters, he wrote down the stories he told them of his adventures in the South Seas where, with his ‘remarkably prepossessing’ friend Toby Greene, a black-eyed, curly-haired boy of seventeen, he had deserted the Acushnet and lived among naked savages.

  Typee–the word means man-eater, although Melville feared having his face tattooed with the devil’s blue more than being consumed by his hosts–was a sensation among the men of an American renaissance keen to distinguish itself from British literature. It was a sensual, sometimes idyllic account of life among the natives of the Marquesas Islands, as well as being a critique of the western influences beginning to taint their paradise. Walt Whitman saw it as a ‘strange, graceful, most readable book…to hold in one’s hand and pore dreamily over of a summer’s day’, while Nathaniel Hawthorne admired its ‘freedom of view’ and tolerance of ‘morals that may be little in accordance with our own; a spirit proper enough to a young and adventurous sailor’. It turned Melville into America’s first literary sex symbol–an almost disreputable figure.

  A year later, as if licensed by his literary success, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of his father’s friend, Lemuel Shaw, a wealthy Boston judge. The couple settled at 103 Fourth Avenue, New York, where Melville became part of the circle known as Young America which revolved around the editor Evert Duyckinck and his house on Clinton Street. But the sequels he wrote to Typee–Omoo, Mardi and Redburn–did not fare as well, being judged degraded, immoral, even grotesque, and late in 1849 Melville left his young wife and baby son, Malcolm, for England, where he hoped to sell his latest book, White-Jacket, and, perhaps, finance further travels. He sailed from a wet and rainy New York that October on the liner Southampton, and two weeks later arrived at Deal, from where he made his way to London and a fourth-floor room off the Strand, ‘at a guinea & a half per week. Very cheap.’

  Not many people walk down Craven Street now, even though it lies off one of London’s busiest thoroughfares. Hidden behind Charing Cross Station, its blackened brick Georgian houses seem remaindered from the modern city. Number 25 is at the end of the terrace, with a wide bow window at the side. At the top of its winding, uneven staircase are attic rooms, usually the preserve of servants. Their view is restricted now, but before the Thames was embanked and houses still ran down to the river, Melville could look out of his room onto an imperial waterway coursed by boats and barges.

  London was rising in a slew of stone and brick, of movement and noise. Nearby were the recently built Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, while the new Palace of Westminster, still under construction, loomed over the water; the sun seldom shone on its intricate façade, obscured as it was by the fog that both cloaked and sustained the city. Stepping out from his boarding house and into the Strand, the American wore a new green coat, the source of ‘mysterious hints dropped’ on board the Southampton. He looked recognizably other, a Yankee in the court of Queen Victoria.

  In his travel journal, one of the few documents that details his life, Melville recorded the ‘dark & cozy’ inns of the City, the Cock Tavern, the Mitre, the
Blue Posts, and the Edinburgh Castle, where he drank Scotch ale and ate chops and pancakes–Herman had bad manners, and often spoke with his mouth full–talking metaphysics with Adler, a German scholar whom he had met on the voyage over. He saw the sights, visited the galleries and even attended a public execution; Dickens was among the same crowd. He also touted White-Jacket round the publishers, with little success. But as he roamed London, other ideas were forming in his head.

  ‘Vagabonding’ through alleys and ‘anti-lanes’ from the new Blackwall Tunnel to Greenwich and back to Tower Hill, Melville passed the place where a well-known beggar, a former sailor with one leg, wore a painted board displaying the circumstances of his loss. The scene was an echo of the unfortunates in Liverpool, only here the picture was more terrifying: ‘There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale’. London itself was a whaling port. The south-eastern docks at Rotherhithe were home to whale-ships and processing plants, while famous entrepreneurs of the trade ran their businesses from the more genteel address of the nearby Elephant and Castle.

  Whales were on Melville’s mind; sometimes it seemed they were swimming down the city’s streets. The visceral butchery of Fleet Market reminded him of a blubber room; returning home at two in the morning from a ‘snug’ evening with some young Londoners, he ‘turned flukes’ in Oxford Street. It was as if the imperial metropolis were rousing the spirit of Moby Dick. In his attic room, high above the gas lamps shining on the midnight streets, Melville mourned his elder brother, who had worked and died in this city. ‘No doubt, two years ago, or three, Gansevoort was writing here in London, about the same hour as this–alone in his chamber, in profound silence…’ That night he was plagued by ‘one continuous nightmare till daylight’. He blamed it on strong coffee and tea; but perhaps whalish monsters were stirring in his dreams.

  After a brief trip to the Continent–his intention to travel to the Holy Land circumscribed by London’s refusal to pay more than a reduced sum for his book–a homesick Melville sailed from Portsmouth to New York, where he set to work on a new novel–an unashamedly commercial venture. It was to be ‘a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries’, he told his English publisher, Richard Bentley. In what may have been an almost desperate move, Melville turned to his whaling experiences to capitalize on a new commercial empire at home, one that combined the American talents for heroism and consumerism.

  New York was more prosperous and bustling than ever, a rival to London’s imperial sway. The profits from whales funnelled through this city, too. It was a place of import and export, its masts and piers reaching out to other lands, even as it sent its equal sons and equal daughters around the world. Close to Wall Street, where his brothers worked, was Nassau Street and its publishing and newspaper offices, Manhattan’s equivalent of Fleet Street and the Strand. Nearby were the luxurious new Astor House Hotel, and the Shakespeare Tavern where writers such as Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe drank. Around the corner was Barnum’s American Museum which, that summer, was decorated with a huge canvas banner advertising the whale that lay within.

  As much as Moby-Dick was a product of Melville’s adventures at sea, it was also born of the city; its opening scenes state as much, set as they are on the quayside at the end of Pearl Street. In a strange, allusive manner, New York itself became the White Whale, just as Joseph Conrad would see Brussels as a whited sepulchre built on human bones, and as Gansevoort Melville had seen London as the modern Babylon. Even the island of Manhattan was whale-shaped, a pallid behemoth, both fascinating and appalling. Here, on what purported to be dry land, Melville’s desires were ambivalent. Expounded in his book, they represented both liberation and dread, deep longings and profound fears. And symbolic above them all was the whale: the leviathan that had risen from the deep to take hold of his imaginings.

  In his years at sea, Melville heard tales of lethal encounters between man and whale. Now, as Yankee whaling reached its peak, these incidents seemed to be becoming ominously more frequent. The whales were fighting back, breaking bones and boats, drowning men, turning on their assailants with a vengeful intelligence. On 15 August 1841, for instance, soon after the Acushnet left port, another New Bedford vessel, the Coral, encountered a school of sperm whales one hundred miles south of the Galápagos. The captain, James H. Sherman, recorded that having struck one whale, the beast rounded on the whaleboat that pursued it, ‘and chewed her in many Hundred Pieces’.

  ‘Spouting good blood while Eating the Boats’, the animal set off, followed by its hunters, but as they drew close and the mate was about to lance it, the whale ‘turned upon him and Eat his Boat up also’. In the chaos, the captain dived in to save a drowning crewman, and brought him back to the boat; but the whale had not finished with them. In its flurry, it turned on its side, its jaw lunging at the captain. Only then did Sherman manage to ‘hove an Iron into him…and in a few moments he was in the Agonies of Death and Breathed his Last’.

  As he began to research his story, Melville found other accounts of avenging whales. The Union, a Nantucket ship, was lost off the Azores in 1807 after an attack by a whale, while a Russian vessel was raised three feet out of the water by ‘an uncommon large whale…larger than the ship itself’. Nor were sperm whales the only cetaceans able to stove a ship. Grey whales were called devil fish for their propensity to turn on their hunters, and fin whales, too, were known to charge and sink a vessel. Even smaller whales could be dangerous: at least one sailor was killed by a blackfish during Melville’s years of whaling.

  But it was the otherwise placid sperm whale that could do the most damage. In 1834 Ralph Waldo Emerson was riding in a stagecoach when he had heard a sailor talk of a white whale called Old Tom which attacked with its jaw, ‘& crushed the boats to small chips…A vessel was fitted out at New Bedford, he said, to take him.’ Gathering up these stories, Ishmael speaks of a confederacy of dæmonic whales which gained ‘an ocean-wide renown’, a veritable champions’ league: Timor Jack, ‘scarred like an iceberg’, a fearsome fighter who was only caught when a barrel lashed to the end of a harpoon with which he was tapped on the shoulder, distracted his attention while ‘means were found of giving him his death wound’; New Zealand Tom, which destroyed nine boats before breakfast and was ‘terror of all cruisers…in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land!’; and Don Miguel, another grizzled battler, ‘marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphs upon the back!’

  Of all such whales, the most vivid–because it came as a firsthand testimony–and the most infamous was the one that sank the Essex, an account of which was published in 1821 by the ship’s mate, Owen Chase. His title summed up the story sensationally, if not succinctly:

  NARRATIVE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY AND DISTRESSING SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE-SHIP ESSEX, OF NANTUCKET: WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERMACETI-WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN.

  In his book (which to Melville bore ‘obvious tokens’ of having been dictated), the aptly named Chase describes how a bull sperm whale, apparently enraged by attacks on his fellow whales, came at the Essex at ‘twice his ordinary speed’, with ‘tenfold fury’ and ‘vengeance in his aspect’, his tail thrashing and his head halfway out of the water–a truly terrifying sight. Hitting the ship full-on, the whale smashed into her bows, then swam off to leeward and was not seen again. The resultant exchange between Captain Pollard and his first mate might have come from a 1940s British film.

  ‘My God, Mr Chase, what is the matter?’

  ‘We have been stove by a whale.’

  As the Essex sank, her crew were circled by the animals they had hunted, the whales unseen in the darkness, ‘blowing and spouting at a terrible rate’. Drifting on the ocean in open boats, the shipwrecked men could hear huge flukes thrashing furiously in the water, ‘and our weak minds pictured out their appalling and hideous aspec
ts’. Yet it was not the whales they had to fear: it was their fellow man. The starving and thirst-maddened survivors refused to sail towards nearby islands for fear of their cannibal inhabitants–only to end up eating each other to stay alive.

  Melville claimed not only to have met Chase’s son, who lent him a copy of his father’s book–‘The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me’–he also maintained he had seen Owen Chase himself on his ship, the William Wirt. However, by the time Melville was sailing on the Acushnet, Chase had retired from the sea and was living alone in Nantucket, hoarding food in his attic, still fearing starvation and having lost his mind, clutching his friend’s hand as he sobbed, ‘Oh my head, my head’. Meanwhile, close by, his former captain lived with his own awful memories. Distrusted with any new command, Pollard worked as a nightwatchman and lamplighter, wandering the streets of Nantucket as if to atone for his sins. It was only after he wrote his book, on his first visit to an island that he had only imagined until then, that Melville met ‘Capt. Pollard…and exchanged some words with him. To the islanders he was a nobody–to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble, that I ever encountered.’

  As Melville’s imagination fastened on the story of the Essex, it was supplemented by other legendary whales in print. In 1839 Jeremiah Reynolds’s ‘Mocha Dick: or, the White Whale of the Pacific’ was published in the Knickerbocker Magazine. A friend of Edgar Allan Poe’s, Reynolds was an eccentric writer and explorer who believed in a hollow earth. He embroidered on tales of a white whale known to haunt the waters off the Chilean island of Mocha, ‘an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength. From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature, as exhibited in the case of the Ethiopian Albino, a singular consequence had resulted–he was as white as wool!’