Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
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.”
CHAPTER VIII
LEVIATHAN
“At the battle of Breviex in Flanders, my glorious old gossiping
ancestor Froissart informs me, ten good knights, being suddenly
unhorsed, fell stiff and powerless to the plain, fatally encumbered
by their armour. Whereupon the rascally burglarious peasants, their
foes, fell to picking their visors; as burglars, locks; as oystermen
oysters; to get at their lives. But all to no purpose. And at last
they were fain to ask aid of a blacksmith; and not till then were
the inmates of the armour despatched. Days of chivalry these, when
gallant chevaliers died chivalric deaths! Yes, they were glorious
times. But no sensible man, given to quiet domestic delights, would
exchange his warm fireside and muffins, for a heroic bivouac, in a
wild beechen wood, of a raw gusty morning in Normandy; every knight
blowing his steel-gloved fingers, and vainly striving to cool his
cold coffee in his helmet.”
HERMAN MELVILLE: _Mardi_.
It was the same Edmund Burke who movingly mourned the departure of
the epic virtues of chivalry, who in swift generalities celebrated
the heroic enterprise of the hunters of leviathan. But Burke viewed
both whaling and knight-errantry from a safe remove of time or place,
and the crude everyday realities of each he smothered beneath billows
of gorgeous generalisation. Burke offers a notable instance wherein
romance and rhetoric conspired to glorify two human activities that
are glorious only in expurgation. Piracy is picturesque in its
extinction, and to the snugly domesticated imagination there is both
virtue and charm in cut-throats and highwaymen. Even the perennial
newspaper accounts of massacre and rape doubtless serve to keep sweet
the blood of many a benevolent pew-holder. The incorrigible tendency
of the imagination to extract sweet from the bitter, honey from the
carcass of the lion, makes an intimate consideration of the filthy
soil from which some of its choicest illusions spring, downright
repugnant to wholesomemindedness. Intimately considered, both whaling
and knight-errantry were shabby forms of the butchering business. Their
virtues were but the nobler vices of barbarism: vices that take on a
semblance of nobility only when measured against the deadly virtues of
emasculated righteousness. In flight from the deadly virtues, Melville
was precipitated into the reeking barbarism of the forecastle of a
whaling ship. Whaling he applied as a counter-irritant to New England
decorum, and he seems to have smarted much during the application. He
was blessed with a high degree of the resilience of youthful animal
vigour, it is true; and there is solace for all suffering, the godly
tell us--omitting the ungodly solaces of madness and suicide. It will
be seen that whaling prompted Melville to extreme measures. The full
hideousness of his life on board the _Acushnet_ has not yet transpired.
The chief whaling communities--those of Nantucket and Buzzard’s
Bay--were originally settled by Quakers. The inhabitants of these
districts in general retained in an uncommon measure throughout the
golden age of whaling, the peculiarities of the Quaker. Never perhaps
in the history of the world has there been mated two aspects of life
more humorously incompatible than whale-hunting and Quakerism. This
mating produced, however, a race of the most sanguinary of all sailors;
a race of fighting Quakers: in Melville’s phrase, “Quakers with a
vengeance.” Though refusing from conscientious scruples to bear arms
against land invaders, yet these same Quakers inimitably invaded the
Atlantic and the Pacific; and though sworn foes to human bloodshed,
yet did they, in their straight-bodied coats, spill tons and tons of
leviathan gore. And so, as Melville goes on to point out, “there are
instances among them of men who, named with Scripture names, and in
childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of
the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these
unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.”
The two old Quaker captains of _Moby-Dick_, Bildad and Peleg, are
typical of the race that made Nantucket and New Bedford the greatest
whaling ports in all history. Peleg significantly divides all good
men into two inclusive categories: “pious good men, like Bildad,”
and “swearing good men--something like me.” The “swearing good men,”
Melville would seem to imply, in sacrificing piety to humanity, while
standing lower in the eyes of God, stood higher in the hearts of their
crew. Though Bildad never swore at his men, so Melville remarks, “he
somehow got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out
of them.”
Typical of the cast of mind of the whaling Quaker is Captain Bildad’s
farewell to ship’s company on board the ship in which he was chief
owner: “God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping. Be careful in
the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooners;
good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent, within the
year. Don’t forget your prayers, either. Don’t whale it too much a’
Lord’s day, men; but don’t miss a fair chance either; that’s rejecting
Heaven’s good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it
was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask,
beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye!”
The old log-books most frequently begin: “A journal of an intended
voyage from Nantucket by God’s permission.” And typical is the closing
sentence of the entry in George Gardener’s journal for Saturday,
January 21, 1757: “So no more at Present all being in health by the
Blessing of God but no whale yet.”
At first, the New England vessels were manned almost entirely by
American-born seamen, including a certain proportion of Indians and
coast-bred negroes. But as the fishery grew, and the number of vessels
increased, the supply of hands became inadequate. Macy says that as
early as about 1750 the Nantucket fishery had attained such proportions
that it was necessary to secure men from Cape Cod and Long Island to
man the vessels. Goode says: “Captain Isaiah West, now eighty years
of age (in 1880), tells me that he remembers when he picked his crew
within a radius of sixty miles of New Bedford; oftentimes he was
acquainted, either personally or through report, with the social
standing or business qualifications of every man on his vessel; and
also that he remembers the first foreigner--an Irishman--that shipped
with him, the circumstance being commented on at that time as a
remarkable one.” Time was, however, when it was easy to gather at New
Bedford or New London a prime crew of tall and stalwart lads from the
fishing coast and from the farms of the interior of New England. Maine
furnished a great many whalemen, and for a long time the romance of
whaling held out a powerful fascination for adventurous farmer boys of
New Hampshire, Vermont, and Upper New York. During Melville’s time the
farms of New England still supplied a contingent of whalers. In writing
of New Bedford he says: “There weekly arrive in this town scores of
green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory
in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows
who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the
whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they
came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look
there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath-knife.
Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.” Of
course, these farm-boys were of the verdant innocence Melville paints
them when they signed the ship’s papers, not knowing a harpoon from
a handspike. It is a curious paradox in the history of whaling,--a
paradox best elaborated by Verrill,--that the ship’s crew were almost
never sailors. The captain, of course, the officers and the harpooners
were usually skilled and efficient hands. But so filthy was the work
aboard the whaler, and so perilous; so brutal the treatment of the
crew, and so hazardous the actual earnings, that competent deep-water
sailors stuck to the navy or the merchant marine. When Melville shipped
from Honolulu as an “ordinary seaman in the United States Navy,” he
soon found occasion “to offer up thanksgiving that in no evil hour had
I divulged the fact of having served in a whaler; for having previously
marked the prevailing prejudice of men-of-war’s-men to that much
maligned class of mariners, I had wisely held my peace concerning stove
boats on the coast of Japan.” And in _Redburn_ he says “that merchant
seamen generally affect a certain superiority to ‘blubber-boilers,’ as
they contemptuously style those who hunt the leviathan.”
When the farmer lads came down to the sea no more in adequate numbers,
the whaleships were forced to fill their crews far from home, and to
take what material they could get. Shipping offices, with headquarters
at the whaling ports, employed agents scattered here and there in
the principal cities, especially in the Middle West and the interior
of New England. These agents received ten dollars for each man they
secured for the ship’s crew. Besides this, each agent was paid for
the incidental expenses of transportation, board, and outfit of every
man shipped. By means of lurid advertisements and circulars, these
agents with emancipated conscience, made glowing promises to the
desperate and the ignorant. Each prospective whaleman was promised a
“lay” of the ship’s catch. For in the whaling business, no set wages
were paid. All hands, including the captain, received certain shares
of the profits called “lays.” The size of the lay was proportioned to
the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the
ship’s company. The captain usually received a lay of from one-twelfth
to one-eighteenth; green hands about the one-hundred-and-fiftieth.
What lay Melville received is not known. Bildad is inclined to think
that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay was not too much for
Ishmael; but Bildad was a “pious good man.” Peleg, the “swearing good
man,” after a volcanic eruption with Bildad, puts Ishmael down for
the three hundredth lay. Though this may exemplify the relation that,
in Melville’s mind, existed between profanity and kindness, it tells
us, unfortunately, nothing of the prospective earnings of Melville’s
whaling. Of one thing, however, we can be fairly certain: Melville did
not drive a shrewd and highly profitable bargain. The details of his
life bear out his boast: “I am one of those that never take on about
princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board
and lodge me, while I put up at the grim sign of the Thunder Cloud.”
Each prospective whaler, besides being assured a stated fraction
of the ship’s earnings, was by the agents promised an advance of
seventy-five dollars, an outfit of clothes, as well as board and
lodging until aboard ship. From this imaginary seventy-five dollars
were deducted all the expenses which the agent defrayed, as well as
the ten dollars head payment. By a shameless perversion of exaggerated
charges, a really competent outfitter managed to ship his embryo
whalemen without a cent of the promised advance. The agent who shipped
J. Ross Browne and his unfortunate friend, was a suave gentleman of