Summer of Dick

Lest we think we’ve seen the last of Fedallah, he appears in this, the third (and final) day of the hunt of Moby Dick – in a manner of speaking. Rather, he appears lashed to the white whale’s back when he sounds once again. Ahab cries, “"Aye, Parsee! I see thee again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst promise.” Ahab might believe he will survive this final encounter; he certainly believes that this third day will be the final day of the hunt. There is, after all, a certain finality about the number three.

Ahab comes out from under his boat short one leg and one Parsee – his ivory leg has snapped off, and Fedallah is apparently gone. As much a mystery as Fedallah and his henchmen were when they first appeared in the novel, that mystery is no less enigmatic now that he is dead. One wonders why Melville felt it was necessary to introduce the character of Fedallah at all – what purpose the character ultimately serves. Could it be that Melville was merely trying to “darken” the pall around Ahab as he hunts the whale? If that’s the case, it seems clumsy in hindsight.

On the second day of the hunt, Ahab and the other crew men are able to sink three harpoons into the white whale but still don’t take him out. Instead, Moby Dick destroys Ahab’s boat, giving us a clear sense that this dispute is personal not just for Ahab. It does raise the question of how well whale intelligence was understood at the time the novel was written and published. We know today how smart sea mammals are – dolphins are purportedly the smartest, but whales are not considered to be slouches by any sense. Is Melville personifying the whale to some extent, or is he merely recognizing the species’ inherent intelligence?

Toward the end of this chapter, we are reminded of the gold doubloon that Ahab had nailed to the mast and promised to whomever sees the white whale first on the day the whale is killed. Now, however, Ahab adds, “and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye!” Clearly, the stakes are much higher now that the whale has been sighted and chased for a day. Lest we think that his near-death encounter with the whale will deter Ahab, we are sorely mistaken.

Finally, the chase begins. In the first part, which ends with the destruction of Ahab’s boat by the white whale (he said ironically), we get this: “But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge.” As we have already been told, Moby Dick isn’t actually all white, as the image below of said bridge shows us. The question is why the whale is referred to as white when it clearly isn’t. Curious readers should probably consult the chapter entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale” once again.

This is the final chapter before the hunt of Moby Dick begins (yes – we will finally hunt the white whale beginning tomorrow). We learn a bit more about Ahab in this chapter, e.g., his marriage: “away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow.” So the son that Ahab has was presumably conceived on his wedding night and Ahab has pretty much never been home since. Upon seeing Ahab’s despair, Starbuck urges him to give up the hunt. He begins his plea thus: “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all!” The line, of course, evokes Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” The question is which came first – the novel or the poem. Since Whitman’s poem is about the assassination of Lincoln, we know the poem came second. That said, you can read an interesting exposition of the relationship between the two texts here .

Melville is nothing if not subtle. In this short chapter, the Pequod encounters the Delight , which has had contact with Moby Dick. The Delight has lost five men but not killed the white whale, and it is now preparing to busy its lost men at sea. Ahab is looking upon the scene: “As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.” Lest we wonder whether that coffin at the side of the Pequod still symbolizes death, Melville gives us yet another example of foreshadowing to assure us that, with the end of the novel coming quickly, the coffin will surely be filled.

Now sure that he is within the same stretch of sea as Moby Dick, Ahab displays singleness of purpose. When the watchmen fail to spot the white whale, he decides to go up the mast himself to search for it. He asks Starbuck to help him: "Take the rope, Sir—I give it into thy hands, Starbuck." Once up the mast, a bird steals Ahab’s hat and drops it in the water. The chapter ends with an allusion to Tarquin, an ancient king of Rome who had a similar experience with a bird and a hat, but the more interesting allusion is the one I quoted in the previous paragraph. Does it not resemble the last words of Jesus on the cross: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”? If it does, then in this case, Ahab is Jesus and Starbuck is God. I don’t know that I’ve heard Ahab described as a Christ figure before, although there is some discussion of the topic here .

In this brief dramatic chapter, we are treated to an inside view of Ahab’s relationship with Pip, the black sailor whom Ahab has been keeping in his cabin for some time. Ahab intends to leave to go on deck, and Pip wants to come with him, but Ahab refuses. Here, we are reminded of the homosexual undercurrent of the novel, first with the “marriage” between Ishmael and Queequeg and now the cohabitation between Ahab and Pip. In the latter relationship, the power differential is clearly off – Ahab is the most powerful aboard the Pequod , while Pip is a mere sailor and black to boot. Still, the “love” between the two men is somewhat purer and less ambiguous than that between Ishmael and Queequeg – that relationship is never explicitly sexual, and while that between Ahab and Pip is not either, it is much more clearly intimate and sensuous in a way that Ishmael and Queequeg’s is not.

These two chapters have Ahab viewing the coffin (Queequeg's), which will now serve as a lifebuoy, and the meeting of the  Pequod  with the  Rachel --  the latter of which is also a Nantucket whaler that has not only seen Moby Dick but has lost a boat in pursuing the white whale. This boat had the captain's son on it, and in this gam, the  Rachel 's captain begs Ahab for help -- help that Ahab refuses. The captain reminds Ahab that he has a son of his own -- a point I don't think we've heard before -- and Ahab still refuses, thus demonstrating his monomania. In one of the more obvious allusions of the novel, noted directly by the narrator, the reference here is to the biblical Rachel “weeping for her children,” recalling the slaughter of innocents in the Gospel of Matthew.

Today’s chapter sees the first fatality of the novel – a man falls overboard during a watch for the white whale, and the life-buoy of the chapter’s title is also lost in the attempt to save him. Queequeg offers the coffin of an earlier chapter to be used as a new life-buoy, since the ship can’t be without one. This is an odd inversion of an earlier point, i.e., that an instrument of death will be used to preserve life. Again, having read this novel before, I know how it ends and I know that Ishmael is the sole survivor. In the event that you (the reader) have not, I won’t spoil the matter of how he is saved.

This is a bizarre chapter. While helping Ahab with a ship task, a member of the crew who is Manx is teased by Ahab for his national origin: “Here's a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man.” I’d thought this was an anachronism, but a bit of research showed that, while Man was technically part of the U.K. and subject to its monarch as far back as the Middle Ages, it was only in 1765 that the island became a direct possession of the monarch him-/herself – in this case, George III. While not within Ahab’s lifetime, it was at least history of the preceding century and not akin to thinking of William the Conqueror or further back.

The two chapters for today are both named after single objects: the musket and the needle. The former is the gun that Ahab pointed at Starbuck in an earlier scene; the latter is the needle of the compass of the ship, which has apparently been knocked out of commission in the recent thunderstorm. Ahab makes this discovery when he notes that the compass is pointing east, but they are in fact traveling west (which he can tell from the position of the sun relative to the time of day). Unclear is whether the change in wind that Starbuck detects in the first chapter is related to the discovery in the second. What is clear is the sense that, by moving west, the ship is now moving away from Moby Dick.

For today, the narration returns to the dramatic form, and we have three short chapters featuring crew members from Ahab down to Tashtego. The subject of all three is the falling apart of the Pequod , Ahab’s refusal to fix it, and instead his command to lash down the sails. The command goes from Ahab (Chapter 120), through Stubb and Flash (Chapter 121), and finally to Tashtego (Chapter 122), who utters the following line while doing the actual work: "Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!" It’s unclear why this work would fall to one of the harpooners, nor is it clear why Tashtego’s desire to be drunk is relevant here – although it is probably worth nothing that Tashtego, like all the harpooners, is non-white.

In these two chapters, the final act of the novel begins. At 500 pages in and almost 120 chapters, it’s about time. As the ship prepares the cross the equator, a hurricane comes and lighting casts the masts of the ship on fire. Addressing the fire, Ahab says, “Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship.” What’s curious about this line is that his companion Fedallah is there; Fedallah is a Parsi – a word that means “Persian” but that means Zoroastrian. In the Zoroastrian faith, fire is considered a holy purifier; thus, in some sense, it is fitting that these lines are uttered. What’s odd is that it is Ahab that utters them, and not Fedallah. Could it be that Ahab has learned the lines from Fedallah? It’s clear Ahab was not himself a Zoroastrian, at least when he grew up, since he speaks like a Quaker. Is there an aspect of Ahab’s past and/or his relationship with Fedallah that we have yet to learn?

Today’s reading consists of three short chapters – the first another meeting with a whaling ship; the second, an account of the Pequod killing four more whales; and the last a prophesy from Fedallah that Ahab will see two “hearses” before he dies and be killed “only by hemp.” I wanted to focus here on the first chapter and this brief exchange between Ahab (speaking first) and the captain of the other whaling ship: "Thou are too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?" "Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that's all.” This captain views the men from the islands as poor enough stock that their deaths are not worth mentioning. The lines remind me of ones from Huckleberry Finn . After a riverboat explosion, a woman on the banks of the Mississippi asks Huck whether anyone was killed. Huck responds, “No’m. Killed a nigger.” The same sentiment appears here, albeit in a different racial context. That Huck utters the line in Twain’s novel denotes his ...

In the first of the two chapters for today, we learn what the blacksmith is doing on the Pequod – he’s responsible for making the harpoons. Ahab watches Perth make a new harpoon and then insists that he incorporate his shaving razors into it as barbs. Finally, Ahab insists that his three harpooners “baptize” the new harpoon with their blood. He says, “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” The line is reminiscent of that spoken by John the Baptist in the Vulgate: “Ego quidem aqua baptizo vos: veniet autem fortior me, cujus non sum dignus solvere corrigiam calceamentorum ejus: ipse vos baptizabit in Spiritu Sancto et igni” (Luke 3:16). John tells the people around him that, while he baptizes them with water, Jesus will do so with fire and the Holy Spirit. Ahab says that he baptizes not in the name of the Father but in the name of the Devil.

These two chapters are both on single subjects: the first on the Pacific and the second on the blacksmith of the Pequod , named Perth. Taking the second chapter first, it seeks merely to tell us how Perth came to be on the ship in the first place, which is that alcoholism destroyed his former life, including his marriage. Regarding the first chapter, although I’d thought we’d reached the Pacific already, I was apparently wrong. One line from the narrator summarizes the feeling the sailors have perfectly: “And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly .” Two points are notable. The first is the use of the word “meet” to mean “appropriate” – surely a usage we would consider archaic today. The second is the notion of four continents: are these Eurasia, the Americas, Australia, and Africa? Is it North America, South America, Africa, and Austral...

These two chapters for today deal with the discovery on the Pequod that some of the barrels of sperm oil in the hold are leaking. In maybe the most obvious case of foreshadowing in the entire novel, the second of the two chapters is entitled “Queequeg in His Coffin.” Although Queequeg doesn’t die, that he has a coffin built for him and even “tries it on” doesn’t bode well for him. A particularly pointed line from the first chapter stood out of me. Referring to the ship when the barrels of oil have been moved from the hold up to the top deck, the narrator says, “Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.” I had a laugh.

This chapter returns us to the dramatic form, with a short soliloquy by the carpenter from the previous chapter, along with a discussion between him and Ahab. In the discussion, Ahab references the phantom pain he still feels from his lost limb, and he asks the carpenter whether he might be able to help him. The oddest line that Ahab utters is “This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of.” I think Ahab is remarking on the blackness of soot and the skin of Africans, but the Greek reference is more difficult. He refers elsewhere in the exchange to Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods – a little digging shows that Greek myth also taught that Prometheus fashioned human beings from clay.

We return to the narrative in these two chapters and are treated to a bit of information we haven’t heard earlier, i.e., that Ahab has a groin wound from being poked there by his ivory leg, and that’s why he’s spent much of his time below during the voyage. This seems like a key bit of information to have withheld for well nigh 500 pages of the novel, but there you are. At any rate, it seems likely that this will be important information to the climax of the novel, to say nothing of the chapter for tomorrow, in which the ship’s carpenter will have a soliloquy – or so we are directly told at the end of today’s second chapter.

We are presented again with two short chapters on cetology – here on the fossils of prehistoric whales (perhaps dinosaurs) and on the population of whales and whether it is dwindling. Two references stand out. The shorter is to Shem, the son of Noah from whom the Israelites are said to have descended. In Jewish lore, he is considered the same person as Melchizedek, the king who greets Abraham and after the war on the cities of the plain. The second reference is lengthier: “whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.” It seems to me that this is an apt metafictional meditation. For once, our narrator and/or author is aware of his/her/their use of a range of vocabulary to tell this story.

If you’ve been waiting for a detailed description of the skeleton of a sperm whale, then the two chapters for today are right up your alley. If visuals are your thing, I’m placing a photo below. The point is that Melville does an extraordinary job, particularly in the first chapter, of making something fairly mundane seem extraordinary. By setting his examination of the whale’s skeleton in a garden (bower) in one of the Solomon Islands (Arsacides), he is able to paint a picture of a more enveloping kind of experience than what the real examination would be. I look at the image below and can't imagine a man walking through it like a hallway; I read Ishmael's description, and it's easy.

This chapter brings up what might seem like a minor point but one that I think could be overlooked. Here, Ishmael, thinking further about the recently departed Samuel Enderby , remembers how much beer a Dutch whaling ship he once encountered had carried – two barrels per sailor. Certainly, this is a lot of beer, but as we were told in a much earlier chapter, whaling ships don’t stop at ports very often, if at all. As such, it must be borne in mind that the ability of whalers to consort with women are extremely rare. As a result, we ought not be surprised that so much alcohol is available aboard them.

In this chapter, the Pequod encounters the Samuel Enderby , another whaling ship, the captain of which is an interested counterpart to Ahab, having lost an arm to the white whale. This captain says he won’t hunt Moby Dick anymore and find’s Ahab crazy for wanting to. The actual Samuel Enderby was a whaler himself, who was instrumental in the introduction of the industry to Australia. His father and son, both also named Samuel, also worked in whaling. Other than the Enderbys being a “colorful” family, I can’t find any other resonance in Melville’s choice of this name for this whaling ship, although I suppose it’s relevant that the Samuel Enderby is a British whaler.

This chapter, “The Doubloon,” returns us to the topic of radical subjectivity and each crewman’s different perception of the same situation. In this case, the subject being analyzed is the coin Ahab nailed to the mast in an earlier chapter as a promise of reward to the man responsible for bringing in Moby Dick. Here, Ahab looks upon the coin first, followed by his mates and on down to several unnamed crewman, who appear as disembodied voices before the chapter ends. As before, the theme here is that we are islands unto ourselves – our perceptions are shaped by our individual experiences, and so the extent to which any two people perceive the same object or event in the same way is more coincidental than anything else. In short, there is no objective truth.

The first of these two chapters is a (very) short observation that whaling ships have lamps because they trade in lamp oil. The second chapter describes how the now barreled sperm oil is stowed, how the deck is cleaned, and how the whole process inevitably starts again. Here, I wish only to reference the allusion to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – the companions of the prophet Daniel who appear in the biblical book of the same name. They are famous in Jewish lore for refusing to worship the gods of Babylon. Here, they correspond, respectively, to spermaceti, oil, and bone from the whales. Perhaps it is only the fire of the furnace (into which the three men are thrown in Daniel) and the fire of the try-works that links the two in Melville’s mind.

Of the chapters of this book I remember best from reading it in the past, “A Squeeze of the Hand” stands out for its clear homoeroticism. Let’s face it: we’re not far from the topic given that the animal being hunted is called a sperm whale, but the image of Ishmael and his fellow sailors sitting around a large cauldron of spermaceti and squeezing lumps back into liquid does evoke images of an activity for which a first-generation L.A. hardcore band was named. The subsequent chapter features a description of the sperm whale’s penis (called the grandissimus) being fashioned into a priestly garment by the whalers. The final chapter for today has Ishmael falling asleep while at the helm of the Pequod and nearly losing control of the ship.

Two more chapters discuss, first, ambergris and its value and, second, an incident in which Pip, one of the black crewmen, learns his value. I found particular humor in the scatology of the following line from the first chapter: “How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.” In the second chapter, racism returns with a vengeance in Stubb’s admonition to Pipe that “a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” Nevertheless, before this statement, our narrator says, “ For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days.” Whether this is Ishmael’s (or other narrator’s) personal view of what life is like for most black Americans or what the narrator believes it should be like is unclear. Nevertheless, it’s troubling. While Pip survives th...

In the latest encounter of the Pequod with another whaling ship, Stubb takes advantage of a naïve French crew to steal ambergris from one of their dead whales. As one of the Rose-Bud ’s crew translates for Stubb, Stubb asks him to tell the French captain, “tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey.” Notably, the crewman does not translate this for Stubb. That said, it turns out there is such a thing as a St. Jago monkey, specifically from the (then) Portuguese-controlled islands of Cape Verde. A picture appears below.

The epigram that begins this chapter is in Latin: “"De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam” – translating roughly as “The king gets the head of the whale, while the queen gets the tale.” It’s apparently a direct quotation from a compendium of medieval or early modern law, although our narrator (Ishmael?) tells us at the end of the short chapter, “But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.” Not really. It turns out that the queen gets the tail because the bones used for corsets were taking from whale’s tales.