June 5, 2019 - Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen

In these chapters, Ishmael and Queequeg sail from New Bedford to Nantucket on a boat called the Moss, upon which Queequeg experiences the racism of one of the crew members, to whom Queequeg demonstrates his physical superiority – first by throwing him into the air such that he lands safely, and second by rescuing the name when he falls overboard. It is in this way that Queequeg wins the admiration of the crew members, which says something about how well or poorly a “savage” can get by in such an environment.

Ishmael then waxes poetic on the virtues of the Nantucket sailors. It is in the chapter entitled “Nantucket” that we get the first reference to Noah and the Flood – one of several to follow. Here, it is an allusion to compare how even the Deluge itself could not have prevented Nantucket Islanders from sailing the seas, even though it had drowned the whole population of China.

Last but not least, the selection mentions the Eddystone Lighthouse, the website for which is here. It turns out the lighthouse to which Melville refers in the novel is not the one found there today – the earlier lighthouse, called the Smeaton Lighthouse after the British civil engineer John Smeaton, was deemed unsafe in the 1870s and eventually destroyed. The current lighthouse, as those before, lies some 14 km south of the southwest coast of England.