Why Read Moby-Dick?

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In chapter 85, “The Fountain,” Ishmael’s description of a whale’s spout causes him to launch into a riff about the figurative steam that sometimes emanates from his own skull, what he calls “a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head . . . while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic.” In this instance, the image leads to a philosophical breakthrough in which Ishmael hits upon the attitude with which all of us should confront this conundrum called life: “[R]ainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.... Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” A generous agnostic, Ishmael is also a witty and profound poet for whom enlightenment comes from the improvisational magic of words.

  16

  Sharks

  Darkness has fallen by the time the second mate Stubb’s freshly killed whale is secured to the side of the Pequod. Even though it is already quite late, Stubb decides he wants a whale steak for supper. He rouses the ship’s black cook, Fleece, from his hammock and orders him to prepare the bloody hunk of whale meat. As Stubb mercilessly harasses the old man about how to cook the steak, hordes of hungry sharks enjoy a meal of their own in the dark waters below: “[T]hou-sands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them . . . wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head.... The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.”

  It is a terrifying and fascinating scene in which Melville lays bare the brutal savagery that underlies even the most polite of slave-master relationships. Stubb claims the uproar in the waters below is bothering him and orders Fleece to address the sharks. While delivered in a stilted dialect, the sermon that follows contains wisdom that comes straight from the author himself. “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.”

  This is Melville’s ultimate view of humanity, the view he will bring to brilliant fruition forty years later in the novella Billy Budd. The job of government, of civilization, is to keep the shark at bay. All of us are, to a certain degree, capable of wrongdoing. Without some form of government, evil will prevail.

  Here lies the source of the Founding Fathers’ ultimately unforgivable omission. They refused to contain the great, ravening shark of slavery, and more than two generations later their grandchildren and great-grandchildren were about to suffer the consequences.

  17

  The Enchanted Calm

  Even amid the worst of all possible worlds, life goes on.

  Even amid the dehumanizing brutality of Southern slavery and the agony of a concentration camp, people find a refuge, if only temporarily, from the suffering and fear. In chapter 87, “The Grand Armada,” Melville takes us to that secret center within the storm. It’s that place where passion and love can bloom, even in the most horrible of circumstances; otherwise the human race (which has known plenty of rough patches) would have long since ceased to exist.

  Shortly after escaping Malaysian pirates, the Pequod comes upon a massive pod of whales. When the whales realize they are under attack, some of them flee in a “distraction of panic.” Others simply give up in a “strange perplexity of inert irresolution” and are easily killed. This mixture of panic and paralysis was typical of a group of whales that had become, in the words of the whalemen, “gallied.” Rather than be surprised by the behavior, Ishmael reminds us that “there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” All of us, whales and men alike, have our absurdities, especially when our fears get the better of us.

  Ishmael’s whaleboat crew harpoons a whale that drags them ever deeper into the chaotic fury of the gallied herd. Eventually, “the direful disorders seemed waning,” and they enter “the innermost heart of the shoal . . . [where] the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek.... Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.”

  Within this lake-like still point, all the rules have changed. Instead of hunter and prey, it is as if the whalemen and the whales are now part of the same extended family. “[I]t almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them,” Ishmael recounts. “Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance.” At the center of this benign and blissful scene, a mother whale suckles her baby. Melville, the new father, engrafts the physical delicacy of his infant son into his account of a newborn whale: “The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.” Elsewhere whales are gently copulating. “Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond,” Ishmael tactfully relates.

  Melville has created a portrait of the redemptive power of intimate human relations, what he calls elsewhere “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.” It is an ideal that would sadly elude him for much of his married life. His professional frustrations seem to have made him a difficult husband; at one point things got so bad that Lizzie’s family considered intervening on her behalf. His relationship with his children, especially his sons, was also filled with tension. Like “young Stiggs” of the Try Pots Inn on Nantucket, his oldest child, Malcolm, a baby during the composition of Moby-Dick, would be found dead in his room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of eighteen. Nineteen years later, Melville’s younger son, Stanwix, died alone in a hospital room in San Francisco at the age of thirty-five.

  During the winter and spring of 1851, however, Melville still dared to believe in the possibility of familial happiness. No matter how troubling the news about the riots in Boston might be, no matter how disappointing his book sales, he could count on the unalloyed pleasures of hearth and home. “And thus,” Ishmael says of this inner circle of cetacean contentment, “though surrounded by circle upon circle of con-sternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concern-ments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”

  And then it all goes to hell. A whale tangled in the line of a deadly cutting spade works his way through the pod, “wounding and murdering his own comrades” with every agonized sweep of his tail. What Ishmael next describes eerily anticipates the gradual collapse of Melville’s own family life—not to mention America’s fated slide into war. “First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instan
tly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.” The hunt is on.

  18

  Pip

  With his tambourine and kindly, laughing eyes, Pip, the black cabin boy, is a favorite of the crew. Unfortunately, he is also afraid of whales. When Stubb’s after-oarsman sprains his hand, Pip is ordered to join the second mate’s whaleboat crew. It does not go well. When a harpooned whale thwacks the boat, Pip leaps up in fright and becomes entangled in the whale line, forcing Tashtego to release the whale.

  Stubb is not happy. “Stick to the boat, Pip,” he commands, “or by the Lord, I wont pick you up. . . . We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” In eerily modern words, Ishmael comments, “[T]hough man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.” Suffice it to say that Pip soon jumps again and falls into the sea.

  “It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day,” Ishmael recounts, “the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.”

  Anyone who has swum out from a boat floating on the ocean or even on a large lake has felt the panic of realizing that below you is an emptiness so vast that you in your pitiful churnings are nothing. You are completely and absolutely alone. “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity,” Ishmael says, “my God! who can tell it?” Pip lives the Essex nightmare in all its heartbreaking, wisdom-gathering poignancy, providing the Pequod with, Ishmael informs us, “a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.”

  Pip’s mind and soul, if not his body, travel down into the distant depths of a sea that Ishmael elsewhere describes as “the tide-beating heart of earth.” Down there at the bottom, “strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” Pip is eventually saved, but he is left a husk, an idiot savant of eternity, to whom Ahab in his angry attempt to get at the source of our collective human misery is inevitably drawn.

  As the innocent victim who sees too much, Pip becomes the counter to Ahab’s other confidant, Fedallah. Whereas the Parsee, an amalgam of Iago and the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, whispers teasing prophecies in Ahab’s ear, Pip is part cipher, part sounding board. Like King Lear’s Fool, Pip proves that Ahab has, in the words of one of the Pequod’s owners, “his humanities.”

  19

  The Squeeze

  There are two ways to get oil out of a sperm whale. You can peel off the blubber, chop it into bits, and boil it into oil. Then there is the creature’s blocklike head, which Ishmael jokingly refers to as the great Heidelburgh Tun: a huge reservoir of vodka-clear oil known as spermaceti. Once the spermaceti is exposed to the air, it begins to solidify, “sending forth beautifully crystalline shoots,” Ishmael informs us, “as when the first thin delicate ice is just forming in water.” Eventually, the spermaceti (so named because that’s what it now looks like, semen or sperm) becomes so thick and lumpy that it must be squeezed back into a liquid form before it can be heated in the tryworks.

  For Ishmael, the antidote to Pip’s terrible loneliness is sitting around a big tub of spermaceti with his shipmates as they all squeeze the gooey, sticky, mushy clumps and, inevitably, each other’s hands. You can just see the crinkle in those small penetrating eyes as Melville pushed this not-so-subtle double entendre into the kinds of places Walt Whitman would go just four years later with the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855. “Oh! my dear fellow beings,” Ishmael effuses, “why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! 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.” This is the homoerotic answer (which, given his troubled marriage, may have been where Melville’s heart really lay) to the heterosexual bliss of “The Grand Armada.”

  As it turns out, chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand,” is just a warm-up for the next chapter, “The Cassock,” in which Melville constructs what may be the most elaborate, not to mention obscene, pun in all of literature. Ishmael begins by describing how the mincer, the sailor who cuts up the whale blubber into thin pieces known as bible leaves, secures a very special coat made from—get this—the foreskin of a sperm whale’s penis . . . that’s right, the foreskin of a whale. I won’t go into the details (for that you have to read the book), but suffice it to say that once the mincer is dressed in this black tubular outfit, he looks, Ishmael insists, just like a clergyman as he stands at a pulpit-like table slicing the blubber into bible leaves. It’s then that Ishmael delivers the punch line. “[W]hat a candidate for an archbishoprick,” he enthuses, “what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!”

  20

  The Left Wing

  When I was growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, we would sometimes drive into the city past the steel mills along the Monongahela River. The stench and smoke were so bad that my younger brother and I would hold our breath as we looked in fascination at those scorched towers belching fire. Twenty or so years later, when I moved to Nantucket and became interested in the island’s whaling past, I came to realize that Nantucket in the early nineteenth century, when the town was the center of America’s first global industry, was much more like the Pittsburgh of my childhood than the posh summer resort it had become. Back in the nineteenth century, Nantucket stank of oil, and in 1846, when a fire broke out at a hat store on Main Street, close to half the town was consumed by flames fed by the very element that had sustained the island for more than a hundred years. Nantucket rebuilt, this time in brick, but for all intents and purposes whaling was finished. Within a couple of decades the island’s population had dropped from ten thousand to just three thousand. Nantucket was on its way to becoming a ghost town, just as my old home Pittsburgh has been abandoned by a sizable segment of its population since it, too, lost the industry that once made it famous. It’s what happens to communities, large or small, afloat or ashore, that play with fire.

  To kindle a fire on an oil-soaked wooden ship was risky at best, but it was the only way to boil the blubber into oil. Wood was used to start the fire in the brick tryworks, but once the rendering of the blubber had begun, the flames were fed with the crispy bits that floated to the top of the bubbling try-pots. This meant that the fire that consumed the whale was fed with pieces of the whale’s own body. The smoke that poured forth from this organically fueled flame smelled even worse than the fumes from burned human hair. According to Ishmael, “It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.”

  This horrible smoke wafts across the deck as Ishmael stands at the Pequod’s helm on a dark and breezy night. “[T]he wild ocean darkness was intense,” he recounts. “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.... [T]he rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.” Ishmael is taken over by a “stark, bewildered feeling, as of death” as he attempts to steer the Pequod through her self-created fog. Suddenly he discovers that he has somehow managed to turn himself around so that he is now facing the stern instead of the bow. This means that any turn of the helm will be the opposite of what he intends and could very well capsize the ship. Ishmael quickly corrects himself. “How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night,” he says.

  There is a lesson in all of this. “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me,” Ishmael advises. “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” What is needed more than anything else in the midst of a crisis is a calm, steadying dose of clarity, the kind of omniscient, all-seeing perspective symbolized by an eagle on the wing: “And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” Here Melville provides a description of the ideal leader, the anti-Ahab who instead of anger and pain relies on equanimity and judgment, who does his best to remain above the fray, and who even in the darkest of possible moments resists the “woe that is madness.”