CHAPTER VII

BLUBBER AND MYSTICISM

“And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet

undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real

repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be

unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that,

upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left

undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors,

find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe

all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale

College and my Harvard.”

--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Moby-Dick_.

In 1892, the year after Melville’s death, Arthur Stedman wrote a

“Biographical and Critical Introduction” to _Typee_. During the final

years of Melville’s sedulous isolation, Arthur Stedman was--with the

minor exception of the late Dr. Titus Munson Coan, whose Missionary

parentage Melville seems never to have quite forgiven him--the single

man who clung to Melville with any semblance of personal loyalty.

Stedman was unwavering in his belief that in his earlier South

Sea novels, Melville had attained to his highest achievement: an

achievement that entitled Melville to more golden opinions, Stedman

believed, than Melville ever reaped from a graceless generation. To

Stedman--as to Dr. Coan--Melville’s later development into mysticism

and metaphysics was a melancholy perversity to be viewed with a

charitable forbearance, and forgiven in the fair name of Fayaway.

Dr. Coan repeatedly used to recount, with a sigh at his frustration,

how he made persistent attempts to inveigle Melville into Polynesian

reminiscences, always to be rebuffed by Melville’s invariable

rejoinder: “That reminds me of the eighth book of Plato’s _Republic_.”

This was a signal for silence and leave-taking. What was the staple

of Stedman’s conversation is not known. But despite the fact that

Melville was to him a crabbed and darkly shadowed hieroglyph, he clung

to Melville with a personal loyalty at once humorous and pathetic.

Melville to him was the “man who lived with the cannibals,” and

merited canonisation because of this intimacy with unholy flesh.

Stedman published in the New York _World_ for October 11, 1891,

a tribute to his dead friend, significantly headed: _“Marquesan”

Melville. A South Sea Prospero who Lived and Died in New York. The

Island Nymphs of Nukuheva’s Happy Valley._ While Stedman was not

necessarily responsible for this caption, it is, nevertheless, a just

summary of the fullest insight he ever got into Melville’s life and

works. The friendship between Petrarch and Boccaccio is hardly less

humorous than the relationship between Melville and Stedman; and surely

Melville has suffered more, in death, if not in life, from the perils

of friendship than did Petrarch: more even than did Baudelaire from the

damaging admiration of Gautier. When one’s enemy writes a book, one’s

reputation is less likely to be jeopardised by literary animosity than

it is by the best superlatives of self-appointed custodians of one’s

good name. But as Francis Thompson has observed, it is a principle

universally conceded that, since the work of a great author is said to

be a monument, the true critic does best evince his taste and sense

by cutting his own name on it. Critical biographers have contrived

a method to hand themselves down to posterity through the gods of

literature, as did the Roman emperors through the gods of Olympus--by

taking the heads off their statues, and clapping on their own instead.

Criticism is a perennial decapitation.

“I have a fancy,” says Stedman, in his _Biographical and Critical

Introduction_, “that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana’s _Two

Years Before the Mast_ which revived the spirit of adventure in

Melville’s breast. That book was published in 1840, and was at once

talked of everywhere. Melville must have read it at the time, mindful

of his own experience as a sailor. At any rate, he once more signed

a ship’s articles, and on January 1, 1841, sailed from New Bedford

harbour in the whaler _Acushnet_, bound for the Pacific Ocean and the

sperm fishery.”

In the second part of this statement, Stedman attempts to stick to the

letter: but there is a flaw in his text. That Melville sailed in the

_Acushnet_ is corroborated by a statement in the journal of Melville’s

wife; in the record surviving in Melville’s handwriting, headed “what

became of the ship’s company on the whaleship _Acushnet_, according

to Hubbard, who came back in her (more than a four years’ voyage) and

visited me in Pittsfield in 1850;” as well as by surviving letters

written by Richard Tobias Greene, the Toby of _Typee_.

The roster of Melville’s ship is preserved in Alexander Starbuck’s

bulky _History of the American Whale Fishery from its Earliest

Inception to the Year 1876_ (published by the author, Waltham, Mass.,

1878). Starbuck rates the _Acushnet_ as a ship of 359 tons, built in

1840. Her managing owners are reported as having been Bradford Fuller &

Co. Under command of Captain Pease she sailed from Fairhaven, bound for

the whaling grounds of the Pacific, on January 3, 1841, and returned to

Fairhaven on May 13, 1845, laden with 850 barrels of sperm oil, 1350

barrels of whale oil, and 13500 pounds of whale-bone. On July 18, 1845,

she started upon her second voyage, under command of Captain Rogers, to

return June 7, 1848, stocked with 500 barrels of sperm oil, 800 barrels

of whale oil, and 6000 pounds of whale-bone. On December 4, 1847, she

had a boat stove by a whale, with the loss of the third mate and four

of the crew. Her third voyage, begun August 31, 1848, under command

of Captain Bradley, was her last. As by some malicious fatality, the

_Acushnet_ was lost on St. Lawrence Island on August 31, 1851, within a

month of the time when Melville brought _Moby-Dick_ to its tragic close.

Between Stedman’s and Starbuck’s accounts of the time and place of

Melville’s sailing there is a discrepancy of half a mile and two days.

This discrepancy, however, does not necessarily impugn Stedman’s

accuracy. Fairhaven is just across the Acushnet river from New

Bedford, and “sailing from New Bedford” may be like “sailing from New

York”--which is often in reality “sailing from Hoboken.”

Stedman dates Melville’s sailing January 1; Starbuck, January 3.

Melville launches the hero of _Moby-Dick_ neither from New Bedford nor

from Fairhaven, but from Nantucket. Ishmael begins his fatal voyage

aboard the _Pequod_ on December 25; and there is a fitting irony in

the fact that on the day that celebrates the birth of the Saviour

of mankind, the _Pequod_ should sail forth to slay Moby-Dick, the

monstrous symbol and embodiment of unconquerable evil.

That Dana’s book should have fired Melville to an impetuous and

romantic jaunt to the South Seas, though an ill-favoured statement, is

Stedman’s very own. When a boy concludes the Christmas holidays by a

mid-winter plunge into the filthy and shabby business of whaling; when

a young man inaugurates the year not among the familiar associations

of the gods of his hearth, but among semi-barbarous strangers of the

forecastle of a whaler: to make such a shifting of whereabouts a sign

of jolly romantic exuberance, is engagingly naïve in its perversity.

Just what specific circumstances were the occasion of Melville’s escape

into whaling will probably never be known: what burst of demoniac

impulse, either of anger, or envy, or spite; what gnawing discontent;

what passionate disappointment; what crucifixion of affection; what

blind impetuosity; what sinister design. But in the light of his

writings and the known facts of his life it seems likely that his

desperate transit was made in the mid-winter of his discontent. That

the reading of Dana’s book should have filled his head with a mere

adolescent longing for brine-drenched locomotion and sent him gallantly

off to sea is a surmise more remarkable for simplicity than insight.

Melville never wearies of iterating his “itch for things remote.” Like

Thoreau, he had a “naturally roving disposition,” and of the two men it

is difficult to determine which achieved a wider peregrination. It was

Thoreau’s proud boast: “I have travelled extensively in Concord.” He

believed that Concord, with its sylvan environment, was a microcosm “by

the study of which the whole world could be comprehended,” and so, this

wildest of civilised men seldom strayed beyond its familiar precincts.

His was a heroic provincialism, that cost him little loss either in

worldliness or in wisdom. Though his head went swimming in the Milky

Way, his feet were well-rooted in New England sod. “One world at a

time” was the programme he set himself for digesting the universe: and

he looked into the eyes of this world with cold stoical serenity.

Melville made no such capitulation with reality. Between the obdurate

world of facts and his ardent and unclarified desires there was always,

to the end of his life, a blatant incompatibility. Alongside the hard

and cramping world of reality, and in more or less sharp opposition

to it, he set up a fictitious world, a world of heart’s desire; and

unlike Thoreau, he hugged his dream in jealous defiance of reality.

It is, of course, an ineradicable longing of man to repudiate the

inexorable restrictions of reality, and return to the happy delusion

of omnipotence of early childhood, an escape into some land of heart’s

desire. Goethe compared the illusions that man nourishes in his breast

to the population of statues in ancient Rome which were almost as

numerous as the population of living men. Most men keep the boundaries

between these two populations distinct: a separation facilitated by the

usual dwindling of the ghostly population. Flaubert once observed that

every tenth-rate provincial notary had in him the debris of a poet.

As Wordsworth complains, as we grow away from childhood, the vision

fades into the light of common day. Thoreau clung to his visions; but

they were, after all, cold-blooded and well-behaved visions. And by

restricting himself to “one world at a time,” by mastering his dream,

he mastered reality. Alcott declared that Thoreau thought he dwelt in

the centre of the universe, and seriously contemplated annexing the

rest of the planet to Concord. The delicacy of the compliment to the

rest of the planet has never been adequately appreciated. Melville’s

more violent and restive impulses never permitted him to feel any

such flattering attachment to his whereabouts, whether it was Albany,

Liverpool, Lima, Tahiti or Constantinople. Like Rousseau, who confessed

himself “burning with desire without any definite object,” Melville

always felt himself an exile from the seacoast of Bohemia. But his

nostalgia, his indefinite longing for the unknown, was not, in any

literal sense, “homesickness” at all. As Aldous Huxley has observed:

“Those find, who most delight to roam

’Mid castles of remotest Spain

That there’s, thank Heaven, no place like home

So they put out upon their travels again.”

That Melville came to no very pleasant haven of refuge in the

forecastle of the _Acushnet_ is borne out by his drastic preference

to be eaten by cannibals rather than abide among the sureties of the

ship and her company. That he “left the ship, being oppressed with hard

fare and hard usage, in the summer of 1842 with a companion, Richard T.

Greene (Toby) at the bay of Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands” is the

statement in the journal of his wife vividly elaborated in _Typee_.

Of Melville’s history aboard the _Acushnet_ there is no straightforward

account. _Redburn_, _Typee_, _Omoo_ and _White-Jacket_ are transparent

chapters in autobiography. From his experiences on board the _Acushnet_

Melville draws generously in _Moby-Dick_: but these experiences do

not for one moment pretend to be the whole of the literal truth. Only

an insanity as lurid as Captain Ahab’s would mistake _Moby-Dick_ for

a similarly reliable report of personal experiences. _Moby-Dick_ is,

indeed, an autobiography of adventure; but adventure upon the highest

plane of spiritual daring. Incidentally, it also offers the fullest,

and truest, and most readable history of an actual whaling cruise

ever written. But it is not a “scientific” history. The “scientific”

historian, proudly unreadable, thanks God that he has no style to tempt

him out of the strict weariness of counting-house inventories; and in

despair of presenting the truth, he boasts a make-shift veracity. The

truest historians are, of course, the poets--and their histories are

“feigned.” Melville, writing in the capacity of poet, was licensed in

the best interests of truth to expurgate reality. And though Captain

Ahab’s hunt of the abhorred Moby-Dick belongs as essentially to the

realm of poetry as does the quest of the Holy Grail, it is, withal, in

its lower reaches, so broadly based on a foundation of solid reality

that it is possible, by considering _Moby-Dick_ in double conjunction

with the few facts explicitly known of Melville during the period

of his whaling cruise, and the wealth of facts known of whaling in

general, to block in, with a considerable degree of certainty, the

contours of his experiences aboard the _Acushnet_.

By all odds, the chief chapter in the history of whaling is the story

of its rise and practical extinction in the Southern New England

States. In this limited geographical area, trade in “oil and bone” was

pursued with an alacrity, an enterprise and a prosperity unparalleled

in the world’s history. When, in 1841, Melville boarded the _Acushnet_,

American whaling, after a development through nearly two centuries,

was within a decade of its highest development, within two decades of

its precipitous decay. The doom of whale-oil lamps and sperm candles

was ultimately decided in 1859 with the opening of the first oil well

in Pennsylvania, and sealed by the Civil War. Melville knew American

whaling at the prime of its golden age, and taking it at its crest, he

raised it in fiction to a dignity and significance incomparably higher

than it ever reached in literal fact.

At the beginning of _Moby-Dick_, Melville culls from the most

incongruous volumes an anthology of comments upon Leviathan, beginning

with the Mosaic comment “And God created great whales,” and ending,

after eclectic quotations from Pliny, Lucian, Rabelais, Sir Thomas

Browne, Spenser, Hobbes, Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Paley,

Blackstone, Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, Darwin, and dozens of others

(including an excerpt “From ‘Something’ Unpublished”) ends on the old

whale song:

“Oh, the rare old whale, mid storm and gale

In his ocean home will be

A giant in might, where might is right,

And King of the boundless sea.”

Rather than conventionally distribute his quotations throughout the

book as chapter headings, Melville offers them all in a block at the

beginning of the volume, somewhat after the manner of Franklin’s grace

said over the pork barrel. And extraordinarily effective is this

device of Melville’s in stirring the reader’s interest to a sense of

the wonder and mystery of this largest of all created live things, of

the wild and distant seas wherein he rolls his island bulk; of the

undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale with all the attending

marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds. Even before the

reader comes to the superb opening paragraph of _Moby-Dick_, the great

flood-gates of the wonder-world are swung open, and into his inmost

soul, as into Melville’s, “two by two there float endless processions

of the whale, and midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like

a snow hill in the air.”

The literature of whaling slopes down from _Moby-Dick_, both before and

after, into a wilderness of several hundred volumes.

There is but one attempt at a comprehensive history of whaling: Walter

S. Tower’s _A History of the American Whale Fishery_ (Philadelphia,

1907). This slender volume first makes a rapid survey of the sources

and proceeds from these to a cautious selection of the outstanding

documented facts which by “economic interpretation” it presents as

a consecutive story. Devoid of literary pretension, it is admirable

in accuracy, compactness and clarity. The most comprehensive popular

treatment of American whaling is to be found in Hyatt Verrill’s _The

Real Story of the Whaler_ (1916): a more exuberant but less workmanly

book than Tower’s. Representative shorter surveys are to be found both

in Winthrop L. Martin’s very able _The American Merchant Marine_ (1902)

and Willis J. Abbot’s _American Merchant Ships and Sailors_ (1902).

Although the literature of whaling extends by repeated dilutions from

“economic interpretations” to infant books, the classical sources for

this extended literature tally less than a score. The great work on

the _Fisheries and Fishing Industries of the United States_, prepared

under the direction of G. Brown Goode in 1884, contains two articles

on whaling of the first magnitude of importance: _Whalemen, Vessels,

Apparatus and Methods of the Whale Fishery_ and a _History of the

Present Condition of the Whale Fishery_. The facts presented in these

last two encyclopædic treatments are drawn principally from Alexander

Starbuck’s _History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest

Inception to the Year 1874_, published in 1876, and C. M. Scammon’s

_Marine Mammals of the North Western Coast of North America, with an

Account of the American Whale Fishery_, published in 1874. Lorenzo

Sabine’s _Report on the Principal Fisheries of the American Seas_,

published in 1870, while prior to the monumental works of Starbuck and

Scammon in date of publication, enjoys no other priority. The most

complete and detailed treatment of the origin and early development

of whaling is to be found in William Scoresby’s _An Account of the

Arctic Regions_, dated 1820. Scoresby--“the justly renowned,” according

to Melville; “the excellent voyager”--was an English naval officer,

and in his discussion of the whale fishery he deals solely with the

European and principally with the British industry. But Scoresby’s book

is principally a classic as regards the earlier history of whaling.

Scoresby seems to have convinced all later historians in this field of

the folly of further research. Melville knew Scoresby’s book--“I honour

him for a veteran,” Melville confesses--and drew from its erudition in

_Moby-Dick_. Obed Macy’s _History of Nantucket_, published in 1836, is

one of the few important original sources for the history of whaling,

and the most readable. Melville expresses repeated indebtedness

to Macy. Macy’s record has the tang of first-hand experience, and

the flavour of local records. Because of the fact that many of the

records from which this fine old antiquary of whales drew have since

been destroyed by fire, his book enjoys the heightened authority of

being a unique source. According to Anatole France, the perplexities

of historians begin where events are related by two or by several

witnesses, “for their evidence is always contradictory and always

irreconcilable.” The fire at Nantucket blazed a royal road to truth.

Daniel Ricketson, in his _History of New Bedford_ (1850) attempted to

emulate Macy. And though Ricketson’s sources, as Macy’s, have been

largely destroyed by fire, his authority, though irrefutable in so far

as it goes, is less detailed and comprehensive.

[Illustration: THROWING THE HARPOON]

[Illustration: SOUNDING]

Of published personal narrative of whale-hunting, Owen Chase’s

_Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Ship Wreck of the

Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket_, published in 1821, as well as F. D.

Bennett’s two-volume _Narrative of a Voyage Round the World_, published

1833-36, were drawn from by Melville in _Moby-Dick_. The account of

the sinking of the _Essex_ is important as being the source from which

Melville borrowed, with superb transformation, the catastrophe with

which he closes _Moby-Dick_. The sinking of the _Essex_--recounted

in _Moby-Dick_--is the first and best known instance of a ship being

actually sent to the bottom by the ramming of an infuriated whale,

and in its sequel it is one of the most dreadful chapters of human

suffering in all the hideous annals of shipwreck. “I have seen Owen

Chase,” Melville says in _Moby-Dick_, “who was chief mate of the

_Essex_ at the time of the tragedy: I have read his plain and faithful

narrative: I have conversed with his son; and all within a few miles

of the scene of the tragedy.” Melville may here be using a technique

learned from Defoe.

Though in _Moby-Dick_ Melville makes several references to J. Ross

Browne’s _Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes on a Sojourn on

the Island of Zanzibar_, mildly praising some of his drawings while

reprobating their reproduction, he owes no debt to J. Ross Browne.

Melville and Browne wrote of whaling with purposes diametrically

opposed. Melville gloried in the romance of whales, and horsed on

Leviathan, through a briny sunset dove down through the nether-twilight

into the blackest haunted caverns of the soul. Browne provokes no such

rhetorical extravagance of characterisation. He sat soberly and firmly

down on a four-legged chair before a four-legged desk and wrote up his

travels. “My design,” he says, “is simply to present to the public

a faithful delineation of the life of a whaleman. In doing this, I

deem it necessary that I should aim rather at the truth itself than

at mere polish of style.” So Browne made a virtue of necessity, and

convinced that “history scarcely furnishes a parallel for the deeds of

cruelty” then “prevalent in the whale fishery,” he sent his book forth

“to show in what manner the degraded condition of a portion of our

fellow-creatures can be ameliorated.” In a study of Melville’s life,

Browne is important as presenting an ungarnished account of typical

conditions aboard a whaler at the time Melville was cruising in the

_Acushnet_. Useful in the same way are R. Delano’s _Wanderings and

Adventures; Being a Narrative of Twelve Years’ Life in a Whaleship_

(1846) and Captain Davis’ spirited overhauling of his journal kept

during a whaling trip, published in 1872 under the title _Nimrod of the

Sea_.

Though whales and Pilgrim Fathers would, at first blush, seem to belong

to two mutually repugnant orders of nature, yet were they, by force

of circumstance, early thrown into a warring intimacy. And strangely

enough, in this armed alliance, it was the whale who made the first

advances. Richard Mather, who came to Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635,

records in his journal, according to Sabine, the presence off the New

England coast of “mighty whales spewing up water in the air like the

smoke of a chimney ... of such incredible bigness that I will never

wonder that the body of Jonah could be in the belly of a whale.” From

this and other evidence it seems undoubted that in early colonial days

whales were undaunted by the strict observances of the Pilgrims, and

browsed in great numbers, even on Sabbath, within the sight of land.

Yet, despite this open violation of Scripture, the resourceful Puritan

pressed them into the service of true religion. Believing that

Whales in the sea

God’s voice obey,

they tolerated leviathan as an emissary more worthy than Elijah’s

raven. And whenever an obedient whale, harkening to the voice of God

in the wilderness, was cast ashore, a part of his bulk was fittingly

appropriated for the support of the ministry.

Tower establishes the fact that among the first colonists there were

men at least acquainted with, if not actually experienced in whaling.

And it is quite generally accepted that the settlement of Massachusetts

was prompted not only by a protestant determination to worship God

after the dictates of a rebellious conscience, but by a no less firm

determination to vary Sunday observances with the enjoyment on secular

days of unrestricted fishing. As a result of this double Puritan

interest in worship and whaling, the history of the American whaling

fishery begins almost with the settlement of the New England colonies.

By the end of the seventeenth century, whaling was established as a

regular business, if still on a comparatively small scale, in the

different Massachusetts colonies, especially from Cape Cod; from the

towns at the eastern end of Long Island, and from Nantucket. With the

very notable exceptions of New London, Connecticut, and New Bedford and

the neighbouring ports in Buzzard’s Bay, every locality subsequently

to become important in its whaling interests was well launched in

this enterprise before 1700. New London did not begin whaling until

the middle of the eighteenth century. New Bedford, though almost the

last place to appear as a whaling port--and this immediately before

the Revolution--was destined to stand, within a century after its

beginnings in whaling, the greatest whaling port the world has ever

known, the city which, in the full glory of whaling prosperity, would

send out more vessels than all other American ports combined.

The earliest colonial adventurers in whaling were men who by special

appointment were engaged to be on the lookout for whales cast ashore.

Emboldened by commerce with drift-whales, these Puritan whalemen soon

took to boats to chase and kill whales which came close in, but which

were not actually stranded.

In 1712, through the instrumentality of Christopher Hussey, Providence

utilised a hardship to His creature to work a revolution in whaling.

Hussey, while cruising along the coast, was caught up by a strong

northerly wind, and despite his prayers and his seamanship was blown

out to sea. When the sky cleared, Hussey’s craft was nowhere to be

seen by the anxious watchers on shore. After awaiting his return for a

decent number of days, his wife and neighbours at home gave him up as

lost. But in the middle of their tribulations, a familiar sail dipped

over the horizon, and Hussey slowly headed landward, dragging a dead

sperm whale in tow: the first sperm whale known to have been taken by

an American whaler.

Hussey’s exploit marked a radical change in whaling methods. All

Nantucket lusted after sperm whales. The indomitable islanders began

immediately to fit vessels, usually sloops of about thirty tons, to

whale out in the “deep.” These little vessels were fitted out for

cruises of about six weeks. On their narrow decks there was no room for

the apparatus necessary to “try out” the oil. So the blubber stripped

from the whale was cast into the hold, the oil awaiting extraction

until the vessel returned. Then the reeking whale fat, its stench

smiting the face of heaven, was transferred to the huge kettles of

the “try houses.” There is an old saying that a nose that is a nose

at all can smell a whaler twenty miles to windward. The New England

indifference to the stenches of whaling suggests that the Puritan

contempt for the flesh was not a virtue but a deformity.

Other whaling communities ventured out after the sperm whale in the

wake of Nantucket. Year after year the colonial whalemen pushed further

and further out into the “deep” as their gigantic quarry retreated

before them. In 1774, Captain Uriah Bunker, in the brig _Amazon_ of

Nantucket, made the first whaling voyage across the equinoctial line to

the Brazil Banks and, according to local tradition, returned to port

with a “full ship” on April 19, 1775, just as the redcoats were in full

retreat from Concord Bridge.

The Revolutionary War dealt a terrific blow to American whaling.

Massachusetts was regarded as the hotbed of the Revolutionary spirit,

and that colony was also the centre of the fishing industries. Hence,

in 1775, “to starve New England,” Parliament passed the famous act

restricting colonial trade to British ports, and placing an embargo

on fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland or on any other part of the

North American coast. It was this same measure which inspired Burke in

his Speech on _Conciliation_ to his superbly eloquent tribute to the

exploits of the American whalemen. When the war began there were in

the whole American fleet between three and four hundred vessels--of an

aggregate of about thirty-three thousand tons. The annual product of

this fleet was, according to Starbuck’s estimate, “probably at least

45,000 barrels of spermaceti oil, and 8,500 barrels of right whale oil,

and of bone nearly or quite 75,000 pounds.” Of all whaling communities,

the island of Nantucket held out most stoutly,--aided by Melville’s

grandfather, who was sent to Nantucket in command of a detachment to

watch the movements of the British fleet. Yet when the war ended in

1783, Macy says that of the one hundred and fifty Nantucket vessels,

only two or three old hulks remained. In Nantucket, the money loss

exceeded one million dollars. So many of the young and active men

perished in the war that in the eight hundred Nantucket families there

were two hundred and two widows and three hundred and forty-two orphan

children.

But even in the face of such prodigal disaster, the fiery spirit of

Nantucket was unquenchable. When the news came of the peace of 1783,

the _Bedford_, just returned to Nantucket from a voyage, was hastily

laden with oil and cleared for London. This was, as a contemporary

London newspaper remarks, “the first vessel which displayed the

thirteen rebellious stripes of America in any British port.”

Through the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the American

whale fishery lived a precarious existence of constant ups and downs.

The whaling voyages were greatly lengthened during this period,

however. In 1789 Nantucket whalemen first went hunting the sperm whale

off Madagascar, and in 1791 six whaleships fitted out at Nantucket for

the Pacific Ocean.

The years between 1820 and 1835 were marked mainly by stable conditions

and by a steady but gradual growth. In 1820 the Pacific whaling was

extended to the coast of Japan, and within the next few years the

whalers were going to all parts of the South Sea and Indian Ocean. And

these years marked, too, the falling of Nantucket from her hundred

years of pre-eminence in whaling, and the emergence of New Bedford as

incomparably the greatest whaling port in the history of the world. It

was a Nantucket whaler, however, who in 1835 captured the first right

whale on the northwest coast of America, thereby opening one of the

most important grounds ever visited by the whaling fleet.

The Golden Age of whaling falls between 1835 and 1860. In 1846 the

whaling fleet assumed the greatest proportions it was ever to know. In

that year, the fleet numbered six hundred and eighty ships and barks,

thirty-four brigs, and twenty-two schooners, with an aggregate of

somewhat over two hundred and thirty thousand tons. The value of the

fleet alone at that time exceeded twenty-one million dollars, while all

the investments connected with the business are estimated, according

to Tower, at seventy million dollars, furnishing the chief support of

seventy thousand persons. This great industry, so widespread in its

operation, emanated, at the time of its most extensive development,

from a cluster of thirty-eight whaling ports distributed along the

southern New England coast from Cape Cod to New York, and on the

islands to the south. The greatest of all the whaling ports, from 1820

onward, was New Bedford.

During the really great days of the whale fishery, the Pacific was by

all odds the chief fishing ground. During the early eighteen-thirties,

the Nantucket fleet began cruising mainly in the Pacific, and after

1840, the Nantucket whalers hunted there almost exclusively. The

Nantucket fleet was soon followed by the majority of the New Bedford

fleet, and a large proportion of the New London and Sag Harbor vessels.

These vessels, manned by a mixed company of Quakers, farm boys, and a

supplementary compound of the dredgings of the terrestrial globe, would

usually be gone for three years, not infrequently for four or five.

As long as the craft held, and the food lasted, and an empty barrel

lay in the hold, the captain kept to the broad ocean, eschewing both

the allurements of home and the seductions of tattooed Didoes. When

at last they sailed into the harbour of their home ports, weed-grown,

storm-beaten, patched and forlorn, they usually looked, as Verrill

says, more like the ghosts of ancient wrecks than seaworthy carriers of

precious cargo manned by crews of flesh and blood. After a few months

of repair and overhauling in port, these vessels were refitted for

another cruise, and off they sailed again for another space of years.

It thus happened that the veteran whalers of Nantucket and New Bedford

and the sister ports could look back upon whole decades of their lives

spent cruising upon the high seas: a fact that Melville amplifies with

a cadence he learned from the Psalms. Of the Nantucketer he says: “For

the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen

having but a right of way through it. He alone resides and riots on

the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and

fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. _There_ is his home;

_there_ lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt,

though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea,

as prairie cocks on the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs

them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the

land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another

world, more strangely than the moon would to an earthsman. With the

landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep

between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of

land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very

pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”

The number of supplies, and the variety of articles required in fitting

out a whaling ship for a cruise, was, of course, prodigious. For aside

from the articles required in whaling, it was necessary that a whaling

vessel should sail prepared for any emergency, and equipped to be

absolutely independent of the rest of the world for years at a time,

housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers,

doctors, bakers and bankers. Aside from the necessary whaling

equipment, there were needed supplies for the men, ship’s stores and a

dizzy number of incidentals: “spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines

and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and a

duplicate ship.... While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff,

to be transferred to foreign wharves, the world-wandering whale-ship

carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants.

She has a whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is

ballasted with utilities. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have

gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of

ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one

grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like

themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had

come; they would answer--‘Well, boys, here’s the ark!’” N. H. Nye, a

New Bedford outfitter, published in 1858 an inventory of _Articles for

a Whaling Voyage_: a shopping list totalling some 650 entries, useful

once to whalers with fallible memories, useful now to landsmen with

lame imaginations.

When, from such a port as Nantucket or New Bedford, a whaling vessel

was preparing to sail, there would be no house, perhaps, without some

interest in the cruise. Each took a personal pride in the success of

the whalers: a pride clinched by the economic dependence of nearly

every soul in the community upon the whalemen’s luck. During the

time of continual fetching and carrying preparatory to the sailing

in _Moby-Dick_, no one was more active, it will be remembered, than

Aunt Charity Bildad, that lean though kind-hearted old Quakeress of

indefatigable spirit. “At one time she would come on board with a

jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch

of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his log; a third

time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic

back.” Hither and thither she bustled about, “ready to turn her hand

and her heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort

and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother

Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of

well-saved dollars.” Nor did she forsake the ship even after it had

been hauled out from the wharf. She came off in the whaleboat with a

nightcap for the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for

the steward. Such were the conditions in whaling-towns like Nantucket

or New Bedford that there was nothing remarkable in Aunt Charity’s

behaviour. In such communities, “whale was King.” The talk of the

street was, as Abbot observes, of big catches and the price of oil and

bone. The conversation in the shaded parlours, where sea-shell, coral,

and the trophies of Pacific cruises were the chief ornaments, was,

in an odd mixture of Quaker idiom, of prospective cruises or of past

adventures, of distant husbands and sons, the perils they braved, and

when they might be expected home. Col. Joseph C. Hart, in his _Miriam

Coffin, or the Whale Fishermen: a Tale_ (1834) offers perhaps the

truest and most vivid picture of life in Nantucket when whaling was at

its prime. Speaking of himself in the third person in the dedication,

Hart describes his book as being “founded on facts, and illustrating

some of the scenes with which he was conversant in his earlier days,

together with occurrences with which he is familiar from tradition and

association.” Though reprinted in California in 1872, _Miriam Coffin_

is now very difficult to come by. It should be better known.

The extended voyages of the American whaleman were made in heavy,

bluff-bowed and “tubby” crafts that were designed with fine contempt

for speed, comfort or appearance. In writing of Nantucket whaling

during the period about 1750, Macy says: “They began now to employ

vessels of larger size, some of 100 ton burden, and a few were

square-rigged.” For over a century thereafter the changes in whaling

vessels were almost solely in size. With the opening of the Pacific,

the longer voyages and the desire for larger cargoes led, as a

necessary result, to the employment of larger vessels. The first

Nantucket ship sailing to the Pacific in 1791 was of 240-ton burden.

By 1826, Nantucket had seventy-two ships carrying over 280 tons each,

and before 1850 whalers of 400 to 500 tons burden were not unusual. The

_Acushnet_, it will be remembered, was rated as a ship of 359 tons.

The vessels used in whaling, built, as has been said, less with a view

to speed than to carrying capacity, had a characteristic architecture.

The bow was scarce distinguishable from the stern by its lines, and the

masts stuck up straight, without that rake which adds so much to the

trim appearance of a clipper. Three peculiarities chiefly distinguished

the whalers from other ships of the same general character. (1) At each

mast head was fixed the “crow’s-nest”--in some vessels a heavy barrel

lashed to the mast, in others merely a small platform laid on the

cross-trees, with two hoops fixed to the mast above, within which the

look-out could stand in safety. Throughout Melville’s experiences at

sea, in the merchant marines, in whalers, and in the navy, it appears

that his happiest moments were spent on mast-heads. (2) On the deck,

amidships, stood the “try-works,” brick furnaces holding two or three

great kettles, in which the blubber was reduced to odourless oil. (3)

Along each rail were heavy, clumsy wooden cranes, or davits, from which

hung the whale boats--never less than five, sometimes more--while still

others were lashed to the deck. For these boats were the whales’ sport

and playthings, and seldom was a big “fish” made fast without there

being work made for the ship’s carpenter.

As for the crow’s-nest, and the business of standing mast-heads,

Melville has more than a word to say. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the

_Garden of Cyrus_ of “the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations

of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered,” to

find, as Coleridge remarks, “quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in

earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in tones, in

optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything,” so Melville

finds the visible and invisible universe a symbolic prefiguring of all

the detailed peculiarities of whaling. In the town of Babel he finds

a great stone mast-head that went by the board in the dread gale of

God’s wrath; and in St. Simon Stylites, he discovers “a remarkable

instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads, who was not to be driven

from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly

facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.” And in

Napoleon upon the top of the column of Vendome, in Washington atop his

pillar in Baltimore, as in many another man of stone or iron or bronze,

he sees standers of mast-heads.

In most American whalemen, the mast-heads were manned almost

simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; and this even though

she often had fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail before reaching

her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’

voyage, she found herself drawing near home with empty casks, then her

mast-heads were frequently kept manned, even until her skysail-poles

sailed in among the spires of her home port.

The three mast-heads were kept manned from sunrise to sunset, the

seamen taking regular turns (as at the helm) and relieving each other

every two hours, watching to catch the faint blur of vapour whose

spouting marks the presence of a whale. “There she blows! B-l-o-o-ws!

Blo-o-ows!” was then sung out from the mast-head: the signal for the

chase.

As for Melville, he tries to convince us he kept very sorry watch,

as in the serene weather of the tropics, he perched “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 huge monsters of the deep, even as ships once sailed between

the boots of the famous Colossus of old Rhodes.” There, through his

watches, he used to swing, he says, “lost in the infinite series of the

sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently

rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into

languor.” “I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in

the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I

might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a

lazy leg over the topsail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery

pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.” According

to Melville’s own representation, the _Acushnet_ was not a pint of oil

richer for all his watching in the thought-engendering altitude of

the crow’s-nest. He admonishes all ship-owners of Nantucket to eschew

the bad business of shipping “romantic, melancholy, absent-minded

young men, disgusted with the cankering cares of earth”: young men

seeking sentiment--as did he--in tar and blubber. “Childe Harold not

infrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless

disappointed whaleship,” he warns prosaic ship-owners, “young men

hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition,” and indifferent to the

selling qualities of “oil and bone.” It is well both for Melville and

Captain Pease, the testy old skipper of the ship _Acushnet_, that he

could not see into the head of Melville as he hung silently perched in

his dizzy lookout. “Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of

vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending

cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;

takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that

deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every

strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every

dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to

him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul

by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit

ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space;

like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of

every shore the round globe over.”

When, from the mast-head, eyes less abstracted than Melville’s

sighted a whale, the daring and excitement of the ensuing pursuit in

the whale-boats left Melville less occasion, during such energetic

intervals, to luxuriate in high mysteries. And it seems likely that

Melville was of more value to the ship’s owners when in a whale-boat

than riding the mast-head.

Through long years of whaling these boats had been developed until

practical perfection had been reached. Never has boat been built

which for speed, staunchness, seaworthiness and hardiness excels the

whaleboat of the Massachusetts whalemen. These mere cockleshells, sharp

at both ends and clean-sided as a mackerel, were about twenty-seven

feet long by six feet beam, with a depth of twenty-two inches amidships

and thirty-seven inches at the bow and stern. These tiny clinker-built

craft can ride the heaviest sea, withstand the highest wind, resist

the heaviest gale. Incredible voyages have been made in these whaling

boats, not the least remarkable being the three months’ voyage of two

boats that survived the wreck of the _Essex_ in 1819, or the even

more remarkable six months’ voyage of the whaling boat separated from

the _Janet_ in 1849. In _Mardi_ Melville describes a prolonged voyage

in a whale-boat. In this account Melville takes one down to the very

plane of the sea. He is speaking from experience when he says: “Unless

the waves, in their gambols, toss you and your chip upon one of their

lordly crests, your sphere of vision is little larger than it would be

at the bottom of a well. At best, your most extended view in any one

direction, at least, is in a high slow-rolling sea; when you descend

into the dark misty spaces, between long and uniform swells. Then,

for the moment, it is like looking up and down in a twilight glade,

interminable; where two dawns, one on each hand, seem struggling

through the semi-transparent tops of the fluid mountains.”

Of his first lowering in pursuit of a whale, he says in _Moby-Dick_:

“It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of

the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they

rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless

bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip

for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that seemed

almost threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the

watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the

top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other

side:--all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and

the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, and wondrous sight of the ivory

_Pequod_ bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a

wild hen after her screaming brood;--all this was thrilling. Not the

raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat

of his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first

unknown phantom in the other world,--neither of these can feel stranger

and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds

himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm

whale.”

After this first lowering, Melville returned to the ship to indulge

in the popular nautical diversion of making his will. This ceremony

concluded, he says he looked round him “tranquilly and contentedly,

like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of

a snug family vault. Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the

sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and

destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.”

In _Moby-Dick_, whales are sighted, chased, and captured; nor does

Melville fail to give detailed accounts of these activities or of the

ensuing “cutting in” and the “trying” of the oil. One of the most

vivid scenes in _Moby-Dick_ is the description of the “try-works” in

operation.

“By midnight,” says Melville, “the works were in full operation.

We were clean from the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was

freshening; 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 rope in the rigging, as with

the famed Greek fire.... The hatch, removed from the top of the works,

now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were

the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooners, always the whaleship’s

stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber

into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the

snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the

feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the

ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness

to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the

further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served

for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed,

looking into the red heat of the fire, their tawny features, now all

begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting

barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these strangely revealed in the

capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other

their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth;

their uncivilised laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames

from the furnace: to and fro, in their front, the harpooners wildly

gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; the wind howled

on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, yet steadfastly

shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and

the night; and scornfully champed, and viciously spat round her on all

sides.” During this scene Melville stood at the helm, “and for long

silent hours guarded the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for

that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness,

the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the

fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire these

at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield

to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a

midnight helm.”

In a chapter on dreams, in _Mardi_, one of the wildest chapters

Melville ever wrote, and the one in which he profoundly searched into

the heart of his mystery, he compares his dreams to a vast herd of

buffaloes, “browsing on to the horizon, and browsing on round the

world; and among them, I dash with my lance, to spear one, ere they all

flee.” In this world of dreams, “passing and repassing, like Oriental

empires in history,” Melville discerned, “far in the background, hazy

and blue, their steeps let down from the sky, Andes on Andes, rooted on

Alps; and all round me, long rolling oceans, roll Amazons and Orinocos;

waver, mounted Parthians; and to and fro, toss the wide woodlands:

all the world an elk, and the forest its antlers. Beneath me, at the

equator, the earth pulses and beats like a warrior’s heart, till I know

not whether it be not myself. And my soul sinks down to the depths,

and soars to the skies; and comet-like reels on through such boundless

expanses, that methinks all the worlds are my kin, and I invoke them to

stay in their course. Yet, like a mighty three decker, towing argosies

by scores, I tremble, gasp, and strain in my flight, and fain would

cast off the cables that hamper.”

On that night that Melville drowsed at the helm of the _Acushnet_ while

she was “freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a

corpse, and plunging into that blackness of blackness” his soul sank

deep into itself, and he seems to have awakened to recognise in the

ship that he drowsily steered, the material counterpart of the darkest

mysteries of his own soul. It was then that he awoke to be “horribly

conscious” that “whatever swift rushing thing I stood on was not so

much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.” And

in reflecting upon that insight Melville plunges into the lowest abyss

of disenchantment. “The truest of men was the Man of Sorrows,” he says,

“and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine

hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.... He who ... calls Cowper,

Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout

a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore

jolly; not that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break the

green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.”

The greatest of all dreamers conquer their dreams; others, who are

great, but not of the greatest, are mastered by them, and Melville

was one of these. There is a passage in the works of Edgar Allan Poe

that Melville may well have pondered when he awoke at the helm of the

_Acushnet_ after looking too long into the glare of the fire: “There

are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad

humanity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man

is no Carathes to explore with impunity its every cavern. All the grim

legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful;

but, like the demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the

Oxus, they must sleep or they will devour us--they must be suffered to

slumber or we perish.”