Summer of Dick

Two more chapters on whaling and cetology are presented today. The first regards, essentially, the love life of whales, with male whales compared to sultans and females to their harems. The second chapter, covering the law of possession as applied to who “owns” a hunted whale, is more interesting. It ends with this observation: “What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?” Here, Melville or his narrator realizes that the U.S. annexation of Texas following the Mexican War is no different in kind from that of Ireland by the English. It is not a question or right or wrong; it is merely a question of who controls what.

The rest of the chapter is the conclusion of the hunt, with another whale netted. There is this curious message embedded in a footnote though. The Sperm Whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob: —a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum. It turns out this description is accurate, as shown below (note mammary ...

In this longish chapter, the narrative picks up again, with us first being reminded of where the Pequod is, i.e., in the seas around Indonesia, heading toward the eastern coast of Japan for whaling season. Two curiosities struck me in reading these pages. First is that the Pequod does not to stop at ports to provision itself for food or water because it carries no cargo and only crew. Therefore, much of the space on the ship that would be occupied by cargo can hold sufficient board for everyone. Second is the footnote on the word gally provided in this chapter, which just struck me as odd given how many other words are used in the novel that are not explained.

In this short chapter, there is an overview of the tail or flukes of the whale. An allusion to the Bible appears near the end: “Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen.” The reference is to Exodus 33:23 , in which God warns Moses, about to lead the Exodus, to avert his eyes before he (God) passes because to see the face of God would be too dangerous and would kill him. Thus does Melville (or Ishmael or the narrator or whoever) liken the sperm whale to Jehovah himself.

Today’s chapter is, frankly, a bit dull. In it, the narrator – presumably Ishmael – provides a discourse on the breathing apparatus of the whale and its spout. He confesses his lack of scientific training but assures the reader that the account is correct. Of course it is not – camels don’t store water in their humps, for instance. So perhaps it’s worth noting that Moby Dick was published eight years before Darwin’s Origin of Species . As a result, the ability of Melville (and most everyone) to more clearly see connections between types of animals on the basis of evolution by natural selection was simply absent. As a result, all of the zoology offered by the novel must be taken with a huge grain of salt.

The first two of today’s three chapters (the third returns to whaling and a fourth whale chase) refer to several more instances of whales in classical literature, as well as returning to some from earlier in the book (e.g., Jonah). Two allusions are of particular interest. First is that to Ezekiel 32:2: “Thou art like a lion of the nations, and art as a dragon in the sea” (Geneva 1599), where dragon is sometimes rendered whale . The second is to the Philistine god Dagon: “In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name.” Dagon is pictured below.

When the Pequod finally meets the whale that the Jungfrau has been chasing, it is truly a monstrous encounter. The whale is old and blind, and it has an infected hide to boot. It is swiftly killed, and in the process of beginning to slaughter it, an old stone harpoon is found in it. However, the crew loses hold of it and it sinks. The scene as a whole is impressive for the naturalism of it. Like later writings of naturalism in the American tradition – notably Stephen Crane – scenes showing the true gruesomeness of killing have been rare thus far in the novel. This scene finally presents hunting to a certain extent as what it really is.

In this chapter, we have our third whale hunt, this time conducted by the men of the Pequod alongside the Jungfrau , a German whaler with whom they come into contact. There is a clear sense of prejudice that the men, regardless of where they are from, have against the Jungfrau’ s captain Derick de Deer and the other Germans, with name calling, among other narrative techniques, employed along the way. It does raise of the question of Melville’s own conception of Germans during the 1840s – a period during which German power was growing in Europe but had not yet reached the peak that it would following 1870. In 1848, during the composition of Moby Dick , there was a failed revolution in Germany that nevertheless added fuel to the fires of German nationalism. In the decades leading up to 1848, German immigration to the United States had begun, with many German immigrants taking advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire farms in the Midwest. Oddly, a bit of research tells me Moby Dick h...

These two chapters continue Ishmael’s dissection of the sperm whale into its parts – first the face and then the skull and spine. The former is packed with allusions to the phrenologists and other pseudoscientists of the day. Perhaps the most bizarre reference is this: “They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless.” Melville apparently refers here to an actual belief of the ancient Egyptians, one of whose Gods did not speak (and thus was considered without a tongue) and the crocodile (ditto). The reference was likely taken by Melville from Plutarch ( referred to here ).

After a brief chapter telling us where and how in a sperm whale’s head the spermaceti (sperm oil) is stored, we return to the narrative in the second chapter for today. Here, Tashtego drills down into the whale’s head with his harpoon to harvest the spermaceti but ultimately falls inside the head. He is ultimately rescued by Queequeg, who drills into the head from the other side and pulls Tashego out – an operation called “obstetric” by the narrator. This near-death experience is the second of the novel, following the first whale chase in which the whaling boat is stranded for the better part of a day.

After a description of the right whale’s head in the first of these two chapters, the narrator turns to discuss the “battering ram” of the sperm whale’s forehead, which rises like a “wholly vertical plane to the water.” Near the end of the second chapter, we’re told the sperm whale “stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific.” The isthmus here is that through which the Panama Canal was eventually dug, so the assumption is that, rather than rounding Cape Horn, the whale crossed this isthmus. Lest we think the idea for a Panama Canal came from Moby Dick , Wikipedia tells me that the initial idea of a canal comes from the early 16th century.

In this chapter and the next, we’re treated to a comparison of the heads of sperm whales and right whales, now that the two are both on board the Pequod . There’s not much to say about this chapter, so I thought I’d focus on a minor detail; i.e., how is it that whales with eyes on the opposite sides of their heads see? It turns out that Ishmael is not too far off the mark here. As you can see in the below image, what’s not seen by the whale is generally what is directly in front of it. That said, it can cover quite a bit of what’s on either side.

In the first of these two chapters, we return to the slaughter of the whale to get a description of the process by which the whale is hooked, in this case by Queequeg. In the second chapter, as the title suggests, Stubb and Flask kill a right whale. It’s an odd chapter indeed, since the hunt in much shorter and the talk that Stubb and Flask have over the whale’s body most of the chapter. It is agreed that the head of the right whale will make a good counterbalance to that of the sperm whale already on board. The narrator says, “So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again.” Kant is obviously set in opposition to Locke’s tabula rasa here.

Lest we forget the important roles played thus far in the novel by foreshadowing and prophesy, we get a taste of both again in this chapter. Here, the foreshadowing is the same – the Pequod will come to a bad end as a result of its pursuit of Moby Dick. The prophet takes the form of the Angel Gabriel – a hand aboard the Jeroboam , a whaling ship with which the Pequod makes contact – who it turns out was already a religious fanatic before he came aboard the Jeroboam and promptly went crazy. Finally, there is the matter that the Jeroboam is afflicted by a plague when it is encountered by the Pequod , which evokes the Oedipus the Tyrant , in addition to the name of the whaling shape evoking the Biblical idolater king. It’s kind of a smorgasbord of allusions.

These two chapters continue the butchering of Stubb’s whale. A single allusion in the first of the two chapters I comment on here – i.e., to the final line: “There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.” The story of the ghost spoken of can be read here . The Doctor Johnson of the allusion is Samuel Johnson, one of the giants of English literature in the 18th century, including authorship of one of the first dictionaries of modern English. A representative sample of his works can be found here .

The first of these three chapters is an odd little chapter that just describes how a whale yet to be harvested for blubber is to be kept, particularly when the waters are shark-infested. One particular quote could my eye: “any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.” Readers of Carlo Ginzburg will recognize this allusion to The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller and in particular its subject, about whom you can read more here . Clearly this was a story known before Ginzburg wrote his book. The second and third chapters deal with the blubber and skin of the whale and the harvesting of both.

Following on the previous chapter, we are treated to a discourse here on the delicacies to be made from whale meat, since most people then (and now) are likely not to consider whale as something that would normally be eaten. The narrator (Ishmael?) reminds us that all foods that come from animals require that the animal be killed first. It is even pointed out to the reader that the process by which foie gras is made is exceedingly cruel – giving rise to the suggestion that there be founded a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Ganders. I confess not being aware that the particularly cruelty of foie gras was a cause as long ago as the 1840s and dare say PETA could use the PSCG as a slogan if it wanted to.

This chapter, in which Stubb eats a steak from the whale he’s just killed, offers what passes for “comic relief” in this novel, apparently. Really, it’s just a very Amos & Andy -style celebration of racial stereotyping, with Stubb heaping abuse on Fleece, the ninety-year-old black cook on the Pequod . So far, I’ve been trying to extend the benefit of the doubt to Melville by applying Dan Carlin’s “grade racism on a curve” rule, but a chapter like this one just makes it hard – what which the “dialect,” the abuse itself, and so on. It’s frankly disheartening.

At this point, we’ve just passed the halfway mark in the novel. The two chapters I’m writing on today – “The Dart” and “The Crotch” – are both quite short. The dart of the first chapter is the first harpoon to be sunk into a whale during the chase. The chapter itself is a bit of an afterthought – strictly speaking, it’s a whaling chapter, but it’s more like the pure cetology chapters in not advancing the plot or developing character at all. The crotch of the second chapter is a kind of wooden rest for the harpoon itself. In all, these short chapters go with the ones immediately before to paint a more complete picture of not only the tools of whaling but also (more importantly) the inherent dangers of it.

The two chapters for today are both quite short. The second chapter, “Stubb Kills a Whale,” is self-explanatory. The whale isn’t Moby Dick, although there is a suspicion at first that it is. It is, notably, the first whale killed in the novel. The first chapter, “The Line,” is a dissertation on the line used to harpoon a whale. It’s made of hemp, which is racialized by Ishmael as “a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.” Circassian here likely stands in for “Caucasian.” The line, it turns out, can be quite dangerous, “As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off” and “were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundit...

In the first of these two short chapters, we’re treated to a number of allusions, two of which I thought I’d comment on here. The first is rather a lengthy one to Noah’s Ark; note the bolded text: “The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.” I wasn’t aware Portuguese vengeance was so notorious, but apparently it was. The second allusion is to the “Persian host who murdered his own guests.” It turns out that this allusion has never been positively identified, although a few possibilities exist. In the second chapter, we’re told the Pequod is nearing the Dutch East Indies, and a possible sighting of Moby Dick turns out to be a giant squid – which, given the title of the chapter (i.e., “Squid”), isn...

The next two chapters offer, according to Ishmael, examples of more accurate depictions of whales from the past. However, the line I found most interesting in these two chapters was this: “Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage; owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.” Although it has been hinted here and there when non-white characters, such as Queequeg and Tashtego are mentioned, the “noble savage” myth appears again. Lest we believe that there is any inherent difference between the non-white “savage” and the white man, Ishmael here assures us that it is nothing more than environment. It’s nurture, not nature.

In this chapter, we return to an extended study of cetology. Here, Ishmael seeks to disabuse the reader of the false images of whales provided in the previous literature to people who have never seen a whale in person. First, it’s important to note that a chapter such as this one without illustrations lacks something in translation – I’m appending below an image of the Hindu avatar Matsya, to which Ishmael refers early in the chapter. The other thing I noted here is the reference to the bones of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism. In fact, it isn’t the bones of Bentham that are kept to this day at University College London – it is his mummified body, which is wheeled out (apparently, I can’t confirm 100%) for department meetings, with his votes even recorded (“Professor Bentham abstained”).

As the story of the Town-Ho draws to a close, lest we wonder what the point is of including this (rather lengthy) story within Moby Dick , the white whale makes his appearance, taking the life of Radney, the captain, even as the two antagonists of the story cooperate to try to kill him. Obviously, Melville is once again trading in foreshadowing, although to precisely what end remains unclear. On the one hand, the fate of Ahab is being strongly hinted at in the episode. On the other hand, while there is tension between Ahab and one of his mates, it does not seem (at this point) to be pointing in the direction of mutiny, particularly since Starbuck, the chief mate, does not seem to be unhappy at all. The final thing to note is that Ishmael closes the story by claiming that he actually met Steelkilt and heard the story from him. Whether this is true is of course impossible to know, but given the extremely hearsay nature of the story, it isn’t likely. Thus, the whole chapter (and th...

As the story of the Town-Ho mutiny continues, we are introduced by Ishmael to a system of taxonomizing sailors. The two main characters in the story, Radney and Steelkit – captain and mutineer, respectively – are a Nantucket native and Lake Erie native, thus representing the sea and freshwater. Complicating this classification are the “Canallers”— two men on the Town-Ho who had worked mainly on the Erie Canal connecting upstate New York to the Hudson River. The environment of corruption on the Erie Canal apparently makes these men particularly venal and violent to boot. Whether these categories are ones that Melville created for the purposes of this story or based on actual stereotypes among sailors is unclear.

This chapter is the longest in the novel and involves Ishmael telling the story of a mutiny on a ship called the Town-Ho . What’s curious about this story within the story is that, as presented to us as the readers of Moby Dick , the entire tale is told within quotation marks, since it is Ishmael’s recounting of his telling of the story some time earlier in Lima, Peru, to an entirely different group of people. I.e., it is the story of a story being told. To complicate matters, Ishmael was not present on the Town-Ho when the mutiny occurred. Therefore, the entire story is hearsay so the reliability of the story is heavily questionable. In this regard, the chapter is reminiscent of Faulkner’s novel Absalom! Absalom! , in which the central story of incest and murder in the 19th century American South is told and retold over the course of the novel, in one prominent case by a person who took no part in it whatsoever. Clearly, Melville wants us to take the story with a grain of ...

Following Ahab’s refusal to board the Albatross , our narrator shares some information about encounters between whaling vessels at sea. We’re told they engage in a “gam,” which is apparently a whaling term used to describe such a meeting. Curious, I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary to find out something about this word. I append the definition here for your perusal. Note that the OED provides only a single example before Moby Dick.

In these three short chapters, there are ta few short details worth noting. First is Ishmael’s observations about Fedallah, likening him to the kind of man from “when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.” The reference here is to the Nephilim of Genesis, from whom “giants in the earth” were eventually fathered. These beings were destroyed in the Great Flood of Noah, but Ishmael imagines Fedallah is what one of them would be like. Second is the mysterious ghost-like spout that Fedallah sees repeatedly as the Pequod heads further into the Atlantic. Once closer to the Cape of Good Hope, the spout disappears, but Fedallah and Ahab both remain resolute in their purpose, to the detriment of the other men on the ship. Third is the Albatross -- the near-ghost ship that the Pequod  meets as it heads into the Indian Ocean after rounding the Cape. If our literary ...

A short chapter follows the first whale hunt, with a reminder to the reader that Ishmael is on his first whaling voyage and was previously unaware of how apparently dangerous such expeditions are. Now having this knowledge, he prepares his will. He says, “After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be.” I was here reminded not only of the stone before Jesus’s grave famously rolled away when found on Easter morning, but also of a poem by Robert Browning about the case of Lazarus. This poem, entitled “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician” (and available here ), is the report of a doctor who treats the resurrected Lazarus, finding him far worse for the wear for having been dead ...

Finally the action and a solution to an earlier puzzle. The second issue first: The men smuggled on board some type ago were apparently four-man dark-skinned whalers plus an Asian Muslim-looking -sounding man named Fedallah (pictured below). They emerge as the first whale is sighted, and a chase ensues that ends with the whale escaping and with the pursuit boat of Starbuck destroyed as the men in it jump overboard and reboard the Pequod . So the first earnest whale hunt of the novel ends with a failure and with near death for some men of the crew. Melville has been fairly ham-handed with his foreshadowing, so we might take this scene as a hint of what’s to come.

This is a short but suspenseful chapter, although it doesn’t seem as if it I is going to be this way when the chapter begins. At the start, Ishmael (returned as narrator) is helping Queequeg weave a mat (thus the chapter’s title). Melville makes a fairly overt allusion to the Fates, given the roles of the two men in the action they’re undertaking. The question is where the third of the three Fates would be. Suddenly, Tashtego yells “Thar she blows” to indicate that he sees a whale, and crew gets ready to pursue it. However, Ahab appears with five dark-skinned men whom the crew has not seen before – Melville describes them as “five dusky phantoms.” Well, at least now we know whom we heard in an earlier chapter from below.