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CHAPTER 1
HERMAN MELVILLE
Whaleman, Author, Natural Philosopher
In one of those southern whalemen, on a long three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several months.
Ishmael, "The Mast-Head"
In the first chapter of Moby-Dick, "Loomings," Ishmael is on the verge of suicide, eager to quit urban life and get back out onto the wild, open ocean. He strolls the New York City waterfront in the mid-1800s before the raising of the Statue of Liberty, before the Brooklyn Bridge, and before the population of Manhattan had ballooned to a half million people as immigrants continued to form and build the largest city in the Western Hemisphere.
Ishmael travels from New York City to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the sea is a place to make a living, but also a place to die, and one where God reigns, with his agent the whale. In New Bedford, he meets his Polynesian soulmate and the story's human hero, Queequeg, a Pacific Islander. In Nantucket, he chooses their ship, the Pequod, named after what he believes to be an extinct Native American tribe. Once out at sea, Ishmael in "The Mast-Head" comes to grips with the immediate potential for his death, not by the whale, but by the searching itself.
Historians estimate that on average at least one man died at sea per mid-nineteenth-century whaling voyage, figuring a thirty-man crew and a three-and-a-half-year average trip to sea. Half of the dead perished from disease, and the other half died from some type of accident, which included deaths while engaged with hunting the whale, but also fatalities by falling from aloft when working the ship or looking for these animals. For example, not long after Melville a young man named William Allen sailed out of New Bedford aboard another whaleship. He wrote in his journal in 1842 of a moment when he was aloft looking for whales. His shipmate, George Stevens, whizzed by him from above with "inconceivable velocity." Allen wrote: "He struck the water face downwards with a terrible crash; the water flew as high as the foot of the foresail!" The captain ordered a whaleboat to be lowered with a few men to look for the body, but then he ceased the search far too quickly for the crew's comfort. As they sailed away, the sailors went aft and asked the captain to have the royal yards rigged back in place "as all sperm whaler's do" in order to give them more to hold on to. The captain denied their request, consenting only to an additional rope strung across the shrouds.
Toward the end of Moby-Dick in "The Life-Buoy," Ishmael describes a shipmate falling from aloft. After the sun rises and the watch changes over, a man rolls out of his hammock and climbs straight up for his shift. "He had not been long at his perch," Ishmael explains, "when a cry was heard — a cry and a rushing — and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea."
Well before the death of this sailor in the Pacific, it becomes clear that Ishmael's sense of height and depth is essential to understanding Moby-Dick and the nineteenth-century whaleman's relationship with his watery world. After the Pequod first leaves Nantucket, the sailors do not visit a port. They barely sight land for the rest of the story. Yet Ishmael spends far fewer words than you'd expect talking about time or distance or vast horizons. His descriptions of life at sea in Moby-Dick are primarily vertical. Ishmael ponders the visions aloft at the masthead, the height of the sky, and the metaphors of the heavens and clouds as lofty, philosophical thoughts. Then, by contrast, he dwells on the depths of the sea, the deepest dives under the surface, and the metaphors of Hell and bottomless madness. In the chapter "The Castaway," it is the one imaginary God-given glimpse of the ocean beneath the surface, deep down, that transforms Pip, the boy with the least power on board, into a raving lunatic. Pip had jumped a second time from a whaleboat, and his shipmates left him behind to float alone on the ocean. His insanity comes not from the unbroken horizon or from his distance from the ship, but from when his soul, his previous stand in reality, is now lost, sinking beneath the surface.
Melville drove the plot of his novel with Ahab's vendetta against one individual sperm whale and with Ishmael's intellectual quest to understand the largest predator on Earth. Ishmael says this species stays below "for an hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the sea." Throughout the novel Ishmael and Ahab regularly reference the whale's ability to dive into darkness. Today we know that sperm whales, along with some beaked whales, dive deeper and longer than any other mammals on the planet. Melville and his contemporaries suspected this of the sperm whale, but they could not definitively confirm it. They did not have sonar or radio transmitter technology to tell the exact depths of the sea or to follow a whale, but they clocked the sperm whale diving for at least eighty minutes, and individuals that they had harpooned could take out 4,800 feet of line beneath the surface. Biologists have since tracked sperm whales foraging as deep as 6,500 feet, staying under for as long as 138 minutes.
Ishmael's ocean is "unsounded" and "bottomless." The year before the publication of Moby-Dick, the American government for the first time sent out a ship for the sole purpose of searching for deep sea soundings. With a steel wire they recorded a spellbinding depth in the middle of the North Atlantic of 34,200 feet, deeper than any peak is high on land. This would turn out to be incorrect at that location, but an equivalent depth has since been measured in a few other ocean trenches, in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Oceanographers estimate today that the average depth of the sea is about 12,450 feet, while the average elevation on land is barely 2,755 feet. The deepest place on Earth, the Mariana Trench, is not far from where we might imagine the Pequod sails on its way to meet its final end in the equatorial Pacific. The Mariana Trench is 36,200 feet deep, providing enough water to drown the height of Mount Everest — with Mount Washington scooped on top.
Melville found inspiration for his deep diving when he attended a lecture in Boston by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the winter of 1849. Although he found Emerson a bit too optimistic and self-satisfied, spouting ideas too far out even for him, Melville was still impressed. He wrote a letter to a friend after the lecture:
And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; — then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. — I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he dont attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now — but of the whole corps of thoughtdivers, that have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.
The following year in The Literary World, praising Nathaniel Hawthorne — to whom he would dedicate Moby-Dick — Melville wrote that a man of lofty genius who can "soar to such a rapt height" must also have "deep and weighty" meanings. Hawthorne, Melville declared, was a genius of "great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet."
For Moby-Dick Melville found ideal metaphors in the heaven-bound masthead and the deep-diving sperm whale.
THE WHALESHIP CHARLES W. MORGAN
Although it's a warm spring morning, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards wears a thick fisherman's sweater under her climbing harness. She stands on the deck of the Charles W. Morgan beside a massive stretch of chain that leads to a monstrous rusted hook, which was once used for peeling the blubber off whales. The whaleship is docked in the estuary at Mystic Seaport, a maritime museum in Mystic, Connecticut.
"It can get cold up there," she says, looking aloft toward the hoops. Bercaw Edwards is the foreman of the group of museum staff members who show visitors the traditional arts and jobs of the sailor. For the visitors' experience, for example, she has over the years often climbed up to the hoops to shout "Whale ho!" She is also, not coincidentally, a professor and a Melville scholar.
"This first step is the hardest," she says, "because of the distance."
She hoists herself off the rail and onto the ratlines, which are the rope rungs tied between vertical cables wrapped in tar and twine. These cables, called shrouds, taper up to the mast under the first platform, which is called the lower top.
Melville would not have sailed with a harness, of course, nor were his ship's masts supported by wire and steel standing rigging — shipwrights began using these materials on working ships a few decades later — but otherwise the climb aloft on the Charles W. Morgan is nearly identical to the path Melville would've climbed when aboard his whaleships.
Bercaw Edwards climbs up and then clips in. To get around and onto the lower top, Bercaw Edwards has to clamber nearly horizontally to the water and then around the edge to stand up on the small platform. We're about four stories above the water now. The deck of the whaleship from aloft looks like a fish lying on its side. But it's more similar to a mahi-mahi, since unlike nearly all other types of ship designs, the bow of the American whaleship was not sharply pointed, nor is the widest part of the hull toward the middle. The whaleship hull is widest forward. This shape is in part to provide more storage for casks of oil, water, and food. Keep this in mind when we consider the final scene of the novel when Moby Dick smashes his head into the bow of the Pequod. The hull of the American whaleship, in a sort of convergent evolution, had the shape of the sperm whale's head itself, which also, squarish up front, tapers down underneath to a narrow keel-like lower jaw.
Here's the thing about the Charles W. Morgan: this whaleship is practically Herman's boat. Shipwrights launched this ship in July 1841 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In the fall of the previous year, a shipyard in Mattapoisett, just five miles to the east, launched the Acushnet. This Acushnet was the whaleship aboard which twenty-one-year-old Melville sailed on the third of January, 1841, out of the Acushnet River. The Charles W. Morgan is nearly identical to the Acushnet in tonnage, rig, and all functional parts (see plate 1). The Charles W. Morgan is also similar to the Pequod, which is Melville's imaginary creation of a more fantastical, older model — a "cannibal of a craft." So when you walk the decks of the Charles W. Morgan, you're experiencing something as close as possible to that which inspired and transported Melville to the Pacific and then later to the writing of Moby-Dick. In this way, the Charles W. Morgan is one of the most significant artifacts in American literature. Wrapping your hands around the shrouds of the Morgan aloft is equivalent to drumming your fingers on the railing in Harper Lee's courthouse in Monroeville, Alabama. Or, if it still existed, to placing your palms on the frosty window in the cabin that Henry David Thoreau built beside Walden Pond.
"All right. Let's keep climbing," Bercaw Edwards says.
MELVILLE'S EXPERIENCE AT SEA
Melville was born in New York City, the third of eight children. His father was an upper-middle-class merchant who went bankrupt when Herman was a child and then died a few years later "in delirium," as Bercaw Edwards puts it, when Herman was twelve. His mother somehow took care of the family, leaning on Herman's oldest brother and the reluctant generosity of their extended family. Melville was far from an intellectual prodigy, although he showed some early aptitude for applied math and spent about two years at one of the best academies for science in Albany, New York. But he had to leave because of family circumstances. As a teenager he read and learned through other community institutions when possible, and he worked as a bank messenger and on his uncle's farm. At nineteen he trained to be a surveyor and civil engineer but wasn't able to get a job. In early June 1839, he signed on as a foremast hand aboard a merchant ship named the St. Lawrence. He sailed trans-Atlantic to Liverpool to help deliver cotton, and then returned a couple months later to New York harbor with the ship now loaded with metal bars, spools of rope, sewing supplies, and thirty-two passengers.
He tried teaching school for a while, then visited an uncle in Galena, Illinois. He next moved to New York City to try to work in an office. This didn't go well. According to his older brother, "Herman has had his hair sheared & whiskers shaved & looks more like a Christian than usual," but his illegible handwriting and inconsistent spelling did not place him in a favorable position to find work. Meanwhile, Melville had read the sea novels of James Fenimore Cooper and was recently reading Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s bestseller Two Years before the Mast (1840), one of the first realistic narratives of a working sailor's life on a merchant ship. Melville had a couple relatives who had been to sea and were at the time working on naval vessels and whaleships. So with few other options and surely a mixture of the call for adventure and a semi-suicidal ambivalence about his safety and future such as Ishmael would later describe in "Loomings," young Melville decided to go back out on the ocean. This time he found a whaleship.
Aboard the Acushnet, Melville stood his lookout every day or two with his feet on a mere set of spreaders. These "t'gallant crosstrees" amount to a couple wood boards bolted across the mast. Shipwrights did not begin to install the iron hoops until decades later. (See fig. 2.)
About two years before sitting down to write Moby-Dick, Melville read Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846), written and illustrated by J. Ross Browne. He reviewed the narrative for the Literary World. Browne, an aspiring journalist, advocated for the rights of working whalemen by showing the brutality and injustice on board. Yet Browne wrote romantically of shifts on lookout for whales: "There was much around me to inspire vague and visionary fancies: the ocean, a trackless waste of waters; the arched sky spread over it like a variegated curtain; the sea-birds wheeling in the air; and the myriads of albacore [tuna] cleaving their way through the clear, blue waves, were all calculated to create novel emotions in the mind of a landsman."
A few years later in Moby-Dick, Melville wrote through Ishmael in "The Mast-Head," sharing Browne's sentiments: "In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant — the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea."
On the way to the central Pacific and the Marquesas, a passage of about a year and a half, Herman Melville and his shipmates aboard the Acushnet likely stopped in only three ports: Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Santa and Tumbez in Peru (see fig. 1). After leaving Tumbez, the Acushnet sailed for more than six months without entering any port. The ship cruised for whales around the Galápagos, anchored, and then sailed west along the eastern equatorial Pacific, known then as the Offshore Ground. The captain of the Acushnet, deliciously named Valentine Pease Jr., could have reasonably made the leg from the Galápagos to the Marquesas Group in less than three weeks. Instead Captain Pease dawdled for 141 days, zigging and zagging back and forth across the equator, searching for whales with little success as the Acushnet meandered over some of the most open ocean on Earth.
After that passage, perhaps because of it, in July 1842 Melville and a shipmate deserted the Acushnet on the island of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas. Meanwhile, the first major expedition of exploration funded by the United States, led by Charles Wilkes, had just returned from its four-year circumnavigation. John James Audubon, aware of this and toward the end of his career, had written to Secretary of State Daniel Webster to request a position to illustrate and supervise the specimens, "but would be better pleased if our government would establish a natural history institution to advance our knowledge of natural science, and place me at the head of it."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ahab's Rolling Sea"
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Copyright © 2019 Richard J. King.
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