Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

“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.”

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.”

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 easy promises. “Whaling, gentlemen, is tolerably hard at first,” Browne makes him say, “but it’s the finest business in the world for enterprising young men. Vigilance and activity will insure you rapid promotion. I haven’t the least doubt but you’ll come home boat steerers. I sent off six college students a few days ago, and a poor fellow who had been flogged away from home by a vicious wife. A whaler, gentlemen, is a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy! There’s nothing like it. You can see the world; you can see something of life.”

The second half of this ballad celebrates the hardships of life aboard ship: the poor food and the brutality of the officers. With this side of whaling we know that Melville was familiar. But of the usual preliminaries of whaling recounted by Browne and summarised in the chantey, Melville says not a word, either in Moby-Dick or elsewhere. Nor does tradition or history supplement this autobiographical silence. On this point, we know nothing. Surely it would be intensely interesting to know how far egotism conspired with art in guiding Melville in the writing of the masterful beginning of Moby-Dick.

No matter by what process Melville found his way to the Acushnet, the whaling fleet was, indeed, at the time of his addition to it, “a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy.” J. Ross Browne was warned before his sailing that New Bedford “was the sink-hole of iniquity; that the fitters were all blood-suckers, the owners cheats, and the captains tyrants.”

Though the arraignment was incautiously comprehensive, Browne confesses to have looked back upon it as a sound warning. The boasted advantages of whaling were not selfishly withheld from any man, no matter what the race, or the complexion of his hide or his morals. The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, English, Scotch, Irish, in fact, men of almost every country of Europe, and this with no jealous discrimination against Asia, Africa, or the Islands of the Pacific, were drawn upon by the whale fleet during the days of its greatest prosperity. “And had I not been, from my birth, as it were, a cosmopolite,” Melville remarks parenthetically in Redburn. It would have been difficult for him to find a more promising field for the exercise of this inherited characteristic, than was whaling in 1841: and this, indeed, without the nuisance of leaving New Bedford. “In thoroughfares nigh the docks,” he says, “any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest nondescripts from foreign ports. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and in Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.”

It will be remembered that Ishmael spends his first night in New Bedford in bed with one of these very cannibals; and on the following morning, in a spirit of amiable and transcendent charity, goes down on his knees with his tattooed bed-fellow before a portable wooden deity: an experience fantastic and highly diverting, nor at all outside the bounds of possibility. It is a fact to chasten the optimism of apostles of the promiscuous brotherhood of man, that as the whaling crews grew in cosmopolitanism, they made no corresponding advances towards the Millennium. Had Nantucket and New Bedford but grown to the height of their whaling activities in the fourth century, they might have sent enterprising agents to the African desert to tempt ambitious cenobites with offers of undreamed-of luxuries of mortification. These holy men might have worked miracles in whaling, and transformed the watery wilderness of the Pacific into a floating City of God. But in the nineteenth century of grace, the kennel-like forecastle of the whaler was the refuge not of the athletic saint, but of the offscourings of all races, the discards of humanity, and of this fact there is no lack of evidence. Nor did Melville’s ship-mates, on the whole, seem to have varied this monotony. There survives this record in his own hand: