5. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 105-129

Chapter XXIII: The Lee Shore; Chapter XXIV: The Advocate; Chapter XXV: Postscript; Chapter XXVI: Knights and Squires; Chapter XXVII: Knights and Squires; Chapter XXVIII: Ahab; Chapter XXIX: Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb; Chapter XXX: The Pipe; Chapter XXXI: Queen Mab

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Bulkington, whom Ishmael first glimpsed in New Bedford, is now a member of the Pequod's crew, causing Ishmael to remark on how short his stay on land was after a four-years' voyage. But his brief reappearance in the novel is his last: "this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington." He is there as the epitome of the seafaring man, the one to whom "The land seemed scorching to his feet." He is likened to the ship that must avoid getting too close to the land in a storm:

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. 

Perhaps Bulkington is fleeing from the law, but Melville doesn't supply a reason for his shunning the land, preferring to regard him as the embodiment of the attempt to remain unfettered: "all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore." Of course, as Moby-Dick will show, the sea has its own treachery. Bulkington takes his chances on the sea, just as the liberated imagination prefers to confront infinity rather than retreat into the knowable: "as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God -- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!" Bulkington will perish at sea, we are told, but in the process he becomes a "demigod":  "Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing -- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!" Still, the question abides: Why did Melville choose to load so much symbology on this most minor of characters? Bulkington, we hardly knew ye. One speculation is that Bulkington was originally intended to be Ishmael's bosom buddy instead of Queequeg. If so, he made the right choice.

In the next chapter, Ishmael takes time out for an apology for whaling, which he says "has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit." (Melville couldn't know how disreputable it would become in the next century, leading him to an observation that for us comes freighted with irony: "If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.") There is some facetiousness in the chapter, but it starts out with the semi-earnest comparison of whaling to warfare: "what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits?"

The facetiousness comes in when he tries to answer some straw-men objections, such is the assertion that no famous author has ever written about whaling, and cites Job, Alfred the Great, and Edmund Burke in his counter-argument. He claims that whalers have "good blood" because Benjamin Franklin's kin were harpooners, and that whaling is respectable because "By old English statutory law, the whale is declared 'a royal fish'" and the bones of a whale figured prominently in a Roman triumphal procession. Moreover, Cetus is a constellation in the Southern hemisphere. And in a "Postscript" chapter he adds that whale oil is the oil used at coronations. All this, of course, is in service of his (i.e., Ishmael's, though many have applied it to Melville) own credentials:

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 honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. 

And, having got all that off his chest, he turns to introducing the dramatis personae of this whaling pageant, particularly the mates Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, and their respective harpooners, Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo. Starbuck, the first mate, is a Nantucketer and a Quaker, a tall, thin man. "His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed to prepare to endure for long ages to come." He is superstitious, but his superstition seemed "to spring, somehow, from intelligence rather than from ignorance." Personally courageous, following a profession that took the lives of his father and his brother, he vows,"'I will have no man in my boat ... who is not afraid of a whale.' By this, he seemed to mean ... that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward." Again, as in his apotheosis of Bulkington, Melville lets Ishmael soar off into the empyrean:

But this abounding dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself!... Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

Even Walt Whitman never thundered so loud in democratic praise, and Whitman had Abraham Lincoln for a model, not the somewhat questionable Jackson.

Fortunately, Ishmael tones it down for Stubb and Flask. The former is a laid-back Cape Codder who "converted the jaws of death into an easy chair" and who, when getting dressed, "instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth." The latter is a native of Martha's Vineyard, "short, stout, ruddy" and "very pugnacious concerning whales," which he regarded as "but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil."

Starbuck had chosen Queequeg as his harpooner. Stubb's is the American Indian Tashtego, notable for his "long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes -- for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression." Daggoo, Flask's harpooner, is an African, "erect as a giraffe," who "moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks." Flask "looked like a chess-man beside him."

Though he dubs the mates and their harpooners "knights and squires," Ishmael sees this crew as something of a microcosm of America, though a hierarchical America rather than a melting-pot, with the immigrants subordinated to the native-born:

not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are.... The ... native American literally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.

(By "native American," of course, he doesn't mean Tashtego, the real Native American.) His purpose here is to celebrate the multicultural as long as it knows its place. The crew of many colors becomes

An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever come back.

(For "Anacharsis Clootz," or "Cloots," see the comments on Billy Budd here.)

Ahab, by Rockwell Kent

And finally Ahab appears. "He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them." The rest everyone knows: the white mark running from his hair down the right side of his face and into his clothes, the "barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood," the hole drilled in the deck into which he fits the point of the leg that "had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw." But we usually forget that in spring weather, "More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile." It's a perfunctory attempt to humanize a character that lends itself too easily to allegorizing.

In fact, Melville even attempts some black humor in portraying Ahab, as in his abstention from patrolling the decks at night, "because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks." When Ahab forgets, an awakened Stubb dares to challenge the captain, and is rebuked with "Down, dog, and kennel!" Stubb furiously protests, but backs off from Ahab's fury, grumbling about the insult and wondering, "is he mad? Anyway, there's something's on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then." The cabin-steward has told Stubb as much. "I guess he's got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row, they say -- worse nor a toothache." We will soon find out what Ahab's toothache, his tic douloureux is. Meanwhile, Stubb decides to obey his personal "eleventh commandment": "Think not."

For Ishmael, " Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab," and he is presumably present to witness as Ahab casts his pipe, the last attempt to achieve serenity, overboard. Stubb, meanwhile, is dreaming of being kicked by Ahab and returning the kick only to find Ahab transformed into a pyramid. There is too much temptation to linger on the symbolism here, as many have done, but the "sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back," who appears to Stubb in the dream deserves the last word:

"No, you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honor; I consider it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be your boast, Stubb, that you were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of." 

As Stubb is telling Flask of this dream, Ahab shouts out orders: "There are whales hereabouts! If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!" And the wise man Stubb recognizes the truth: "Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind."

2. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 10-39

Chapter III: The Spouter-Inn; Chapter IV: The Counterpane; Chapter V: Breakfast; Chapter VI: The Street; Chapter VII: The Chapel; Chapter VIII: The Pulpit

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The Spouter-Inn, despite the proprietor's ominous name, is a Dickensianly cozy place with a large, "thoroughly besmoked" oil painting in the entry that Ishmael spends some time trying to make out. There "was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.... But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? Even the great leviathan himself?" He decides is"an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, ... in the enormous act of impaling himself on the three mast-heads." (As so often in Moby-Dick, one roots for the whale.)

He finds the landlord amidst a welter of whaling memorabilia, and asks for a room. None at the inn, unless Ishmael wants to double up with a harpooneer. Ishmael overcomes his distaste for sleeping "two in a bed," and saying that it really depends on the harpooneer. But "rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night," he'll put up with it. The landlord, "looking a sort of diabolically funny," says "the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap" who "eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."

A group of whalers just returned from the sea enters the inn and make for the bar. Ishmael observes one of them who seems to hold back from the others. "He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast." Ishmael can tell from his accent that he's a Southerner, and he hears the others call him Bulkington. But he slips away from the crowd, "and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea."

The harpooneer hasn't shown up yet and Ishmael decides that rather than have some stranger get in bed with him in the middle of the night, he'll sleep on a bench. The landlord even tries to plane down the rough surface of the bench, but it's too short and too narrow, and the room it's in is too drafty, so Ishmael changes his mind again. He tries to get more information out of the landlord about his potential bedmate, but he "seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension" and will only offer that "he went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can't sell his head."

Much ado about this until Ishmael gets the point that the harpooneer "has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads." And since tomorrow is Sunday, he doesn't want to go about trying to sell them to people on their way to church. Ishmael gives in and lets the landlord show him to the bedroom. He inspects the possessions the harpooneer has left, including an item he can't figure out:

I can compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of the mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos.... I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.

Ishmael gets in bed and dozes off, but awakes when the harpooneer enters. He doesn't speak, however, but watches as the man gets ready for bed, and is startled when he sees his face: "a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares." At first he thinks he's been in a fight, and then remembers "a story of a white man -- a whaleman too -- who falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure."

Meanwhile, the harpooneer doesn't seem to notice him. He's shocked when the man takes off his beaver hat and reveals "no hair on his head -- none to speak of at least -- nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull." And "his back, too, was all over the same dark squares." Moreover, the man now takes out "a curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the color of a three days' old Congo baby," which turns out to be a wooden idol that he places in the empty fireplace and sacrifices a bit of ship's biscuit to. Then he take his tomahawk, which does double service as a pipe, lights it and jumps into bed.

In his surprise at finding Ishmael in the bed, he brandishes the tomahawk and Ishmael cries out for the landlord in terror. The landlord arrives and assures him, "Queequeg here wouldn't harm a hair of your head." The landlord settles them both down, and Ishmael decides "For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal." And having registered his objection about smoking in bed, with which Queequeg complies, "I turned in, and never slept better in my life."

"The Counterpane," by Rockwell Kent 

The next morning, Ishmael "found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife." The tattooed arm even resembles the patchwork quilt on the bed. The sensation of Queequeg's hug evokes a childhood memory when he was punished for trying to climb the chimney by his stepmother's sending him to bed without his supper -- at two o'clock on the longest day of the year, June 21. After pleading to be allowed to stay up but being sent back to bed by "the best and most conscientious of stepmothers," he finally falls asleep only to wake in the dark to find "a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine." He is too terrified to look at "the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged." When he awakens again "in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it."

Several things: First, for a famous crux in the issue of Melville's sexuality, the episode of Queequeg and Ishmael in a marital hug is curiously lacking in an evocation of real homoerotic feeling. Granted, there's an element of protesting too much in Ishmael's subsequent "loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style." Especially since expressions of male-male affection were, as we now know, more demonstrative in that age before the word "homosexual" had even been coined. Do we get a sense that Ishmael, who has already objected to what was a common sleeping arrangement in those days, is a little too afraid of his own sexuality?

Second, the incident of the phantom hand is a curiously off-kilter parallel to the experience of finding Queequeg's arm around him. Has it really never occurred to him that the hand might have been that of his stepmother, come to comfort him? That is, if she really was "the best and most conscientious of stepmothers"? Granted, stepmothers are legendarily cruel, and this one was "all the time whipping me." And that "best and most conscientious" is perhaps freighted with irony, though he also calls her "mother" as well as "stepmother." The best that can be said of this memory is that it is eerie and ambiguous.

And third, recounting the experience of being sent to bed in mid-afternoon on a summer day, he says, "I felt dreadfully." Generations of prescriptivist grammarians would have objected to this use of the adverb instead of the adjective "dreadful," just as they continue to object to the common "I felt badly about that." Interesting to find this usage in the Great American Novel.

Finally, Ishmael gets Queequeg to stop hugging him, and arranges that Queequeg should get dressed first. There's more homoeroticism in Ishmael's staying in bed and watching Queequeg getting dressed than there is in the whole business of sleeping together. Ishmael justifies it as a kind of anthropological experience: "Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage -- neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show of his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners" -- in this case, putting his boots on under the bed. But Ishmael is also a prude, who is concerned that there are no curtains on the windows and that people outside can see "the indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on." And then Queequeg uses his harpoon to shave himself, which makes a distinct impression on Ishmael, although he later comes to accept it "when I came to know of what fine steel the head of harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept.

Monkey jacket

Ishmael goes down to breakfast with "a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns." He joins them "preparing to hear some good stories about whaling," but is surprised when "nearly every man maintained a profound silence." Queequeg, at the head of the table, uses his harpoon to reach across the table and "to the jeopardy of many heads," fork the plate of beefsteaks toward himself.

On the street after breakfast, Ishmael discovers that Queequeg is not the only outlandish figure in town: "actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh." It's probably worth noting here that the narrator is the comparatively naive Ishmael, and not necessarily Melville, whose own experience in the South Seas made him acquainted with, and somewhat tolerant of, people stigmatized as eaters of "unholy flesh" -- accusations of cannibalism were used to justify subjugating native peoples. Ishmael's use of outlandishly spelled names for his "cannibals" -- "Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brightggians" -- reinforces our sense of his naiveté. There are lots of people on the 'net looking for the originals of these peoples, but I'm willing to guess that Melville is poking fun at Ishmael here.

Contrasted with the cannibals are the "bumpkins," the greenhorns come to New Bedford to try their hands at whaling, the industry that has made the town "perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England." (Once again, you wonder why an inn in this wealthy town would have to serve coffee made from roasted peas.)  Its "brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?" (Alexander Heimburger, who performed as Herr Alexander, was a 19th-century magician who performed at the White House when Polk was president, and was visited in his old age by Harry Houdini.)

Seamen's Bethel, New Bedford

It's Sunday, so Ishmael visits the Whaleman's Chapel, where he reads the "frigid inscriptions on the wall," memorializing sailors perished at sea, occasioning a meditation on death and its memorials, which contains the chillingly beautiful observation that "all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city." Ishmael (and here again, it's important to distinguish Ishmael from Melville) proceeds to reflect:

Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact, take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Melville in his own voice is somewhat less confident about such matters.

Interior, Seamen's Bethel. The prow-shaped pulpit was added in 1961, in imitation of the one Melville invented in Moby-Dick.

Father Mapple enters. He had once been a harpooneer himself, and his pulpit is shaped like the prow of a ship. He reaches it by climbing "a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea." And when he is in the pulpit, he pulls up the ladder, "leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec." Visiting Québec, Melville had been struck by the fortified citadel, and he reinforces this impression at the end of the next paragraph by calling the pulpit "a self-containing stronghold -- a lofty Ehrenbreitstein" -- the fortress at Koblenz. After considering that the action has something theatrical about it, Ishmael decides that it's an emblem of Father Mapple's spiritual withdrawal into a place of security. And he concludes, rather too sententiously, that "the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow."