In 1892, the year after Melville’s death, Arthur Stedman wrote a “Biographical and Critical Introduction” to Typee. During the final years of Melville’s sedulous isolation, Arthur Stedman was—with the minor exception of the late Dr. Titus Munson Coan, whose Missionary parentage Melville seems never to have quite forgiven him—the single man who clung to Melville with any semblance of personal loyalty. Stedman was unwavering in his belief that in his earlier South Sea novels, Melville had attained to his highest achievement: an achievement that entitled Melville to more golden opinions, Stedman believed, than Melville ever reaped from a graceless generation. To Stedman—as to Dr. Coan—Melville’s later development into mysticism and metaphysics was a melancholy perversity to be viewed with a charitable forbearance, and forgiven in the fair name of Fayaway. Dr. Coan repeatedly used to recount, with a sigh at his frustration, how he made persistent attempts to inveigle Melville into Polynesian reminiscences, always to be rebuffed by Melville’s invariable rejoinder: “That reminds me of the eighth book of Plato’s Republic.” This was a signal for silence and leave-taking. What was the staple of Stedman’s conversation is not known. But despite the fact that Melville was to him a crabbed and darkly shadowed hieroglyph, he clung to Melville with a personal loyalty at once humorous and pathetic. Melville to him was the “man who lived with the cannibals,” and merited canonisation because of this intimacy with unholy flesh. Stedman published in the New York World for October 11, 1891, a tribute to his dead friend, significantly headed: “Marquesan” Melville. A South Sea Prospero who Lived and Died in New York. The Island Nymphs of Nukuheva’s Happy Valley. While Stedman was not necessarily responsible for this caption, it is, nevertheless, a just summary of the fullest insight he ever got into Melville’s life and works. The friendship between Petrarch and Boccaccio is hardly less humorous than the relationship between Melville and Stedman; and surely Melville has suffered more, in death, if not in life, from the perils of friendship than did Petrarch: more even than did Baudelaire from the damaging admiration of Gautier. When one’s enemy writes a book, one’s reputation is less likely to be jeopardised by literary animosity than it is by the best superlatives of self-appointed custodians of one’s good name. But as Francis Thompson has observed, it is a principle universally conceded that, since the work of a great author is said to be a monument, the true critic does best evince his taste and sense by cutting his own name on it. Critical biographers have contrived a method to hand themselves down to posterity through the gods of literature, as did the Roman emperors through the gods of Olympus—by taking the heads off their statues, and clapping on their own instead. Criticism is a perennial decapitation.

“I have a fancy,” says Stedman, in his Biographical and Critical Introduction, “that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast which revived the spirit of adventure in Melville’s breast. That book was published in 1840, and was at once talked of everywhere. Melville must have read it at the time, mindful of his own experience as a sailor. At any rate, he once more signed a ship’s articles, and on January 1, 1841, sailed from New Bedford harbour in the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific Ocean and the sperm fishery.”

In the second part of this statement, Stedman attempts to stick to the letter: but there is a flaw in his text. That Melville sailed in the Acushnet is corroborated by a statement in the journal of Melville’s wife; in the record surviving in Melville’s handwriting, headed “what became of the ship’s company on the whaleship Acushnet, according to Hubbard, who came back in her (more than a four years’ voyage) and visited me in Pittsfield in 1850;” as well as by surviving letters written by Richard Tobias Greene, the Toby of Typee.

The roster of Melville’s ship is preserved in Alexander Starbuck’s bulky History of the American Whale Fishery from its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (published by the author, Waltham, Mass., 1878). Starbuck rates the Acushnet as a ship of 359 tons, built in 1840. Her managing owners are reported as having been Bradford Fuller & Co. Under command of Captain Pease she sailed from Fairhaven, bound for the whaling grounds of the Pacific, on January 3, 1841, and returned to Fairhaven on May 13, 1845, laden with 850 barrels of sperm oil, 1350 barrels of whale oil, and 13500 pounds of whale-bone. On July 18, 1845, she started upon her second voyage, under command of Captain Rogers, to return June 7, 1848, stocked with 500 barrels of sperm oil, 800 barrels of whale oil, and 6000 pounds of whale-bone. On December 4, 1847, she had a boat stove by a whale, with the loss of the third mate and four of the crew. Her third voyage, begun August 31, 1848, under command of Captain Bradley, was her last. As by some malicious fatality, the Acushnet was lost on St. Lawrence Island on August 31, 1851, within a month of the time when Melville brought Moby-Dick to its tragic close.

Between Stedman’s and Starbuck’s accounts of the time and place of Melville’s sailing there is a discrepancy of half a mile and two days. This discrepancy, however, does not necessarily impugn Stedman’s accuracy. Fairhaven is just across the Acushnet river from New Bedford, and “sailing from New Bedford” may be like “sailing from New York”—which is often in reality “sailing from Hoboken.”

Stedman dates Melville’s sailing January 1; Starbuck, January 3. Melville launches the hero of Moby-Dick neither from New Bedford nor from Fairhaven, but from Nantucket. Ishmael begins his fatal voyage aboard the Pequod on December 25; and there is a fitting irony in the fact that on the day that celebrates the birth of the Saviour of mankind, the Pequod should sail forth to slay Moby-Dick, the monstrous symbol and embodiment of unconquerable evil.

That Dana’s book should have fired Melville to an impetuous and romantic jaunt to the South Seas, though an ill-favoured statement, is Stedman’s very own. When a boy concludes the Christmas holidays by a mid-winter plunge into the filthy and shabby business of whaling; when a young man inaugurates the year not among the familiar associations of the gods of his hearth, but among semi-barbarous strangers of the forecastle of a whaler: to make such a shifting of whereabouts a sign of jolly romantic exuberance, is engagingly naÏve in its perversity.

Just what specific circumstances were the occasion of Melville’s escape into whaling will probably never be known: what burst of demoniac impulse, either of anger, or envy, or spite; what gnawing discontent; what passionate disappointment; what crucifixion of affection; what blind impetuosity; what sinister design. But in the light of his writings and the known facts of his life it seems likely that his desperate transit was made in the mid-winter of his discontent. That the reading of Dana’s book should have filled his head with a mere adolescent longing for brine-drenched locomotion and sent him gallantly off to sea is a surmise more remarkable for simplicity than insight.

Melville never wearies of iterating his “itch for things remote.” Like Thoreau, he had a “naturally roving disposition,” and of the two men it is difficult to determine which achieved a wider peregrination. It was Thoreau’s proud boast: “I have travelled extensively in Concord.” He believed that Concord, with its sylvan environment, was a microcosm “by the study of which the whole world could be comprehended,” and so, this wildest of civilised men seldom strayed beyond its familiar precincts. His was a heroic provincialism, that cost him little loss either in worldliness or in wisdom. Though his head went swimming in the Milky Way, his feet were well-rooted in New England sod. “One world at a time” was the programme he set himself for digesting the universe: and he looked into the eyes of this world with cold stoical serenity.

Melville made no such capitulation with reality. Between the obdurate world of facts and his ardent and unclarified desires there was always, to the end of his life, a blatant incompatibility. Alongside the hard and cramping world of reality, and in more or less sharp opposition to it, he set up a fictitious world, a world of heart’s desire; and unlike Thoreau, he hugged his dream in jealous defiance of reality. It is, of course, an ineradicable longing of man to repudiate the inexorable restrictions of reality, and return to the happy delusion of omnipotence of early childhood, an escape into some land of heart’s desire. Goethe compared the illusions that man nourishes in his breast to the population of statues in ancient Rome which were almost as numerous as the population of living men. Most men keep the boundaries between these two populations distinct: a separation facilitated by the usual dwindling of the ghostly population. Flaubert once observed that every tenth-rate provincial notary had in him the debris of a poet. As Wordsworth complains, as we grow away from childhood, the vision fades into the light of common day. Thoreau clung to his visions; but they were, after all, cold-blooded and well-behaved visions. And by restricting himself to “one world at a time,” by mastering his dream, he mastered reality. Alcott declared that Thoreau thought he dwelt in the centre of the universe, and seriously contemplated annexing the rest of the planet to Concord. The delicacy of the compliment to the rest of the planet has never been adequately appreciated. Melville’s more violent and restive impulses never permitted him to feel any such flattering attachment to his whereabouts, whether it was Albany, Liverpool, Lima, Tahiti or Constantinople. Like Rousseau, who confessed himself “burning with desire without any definite object,” Melville always felt himself an exile from the seacoast of Bohemia. But his nostalgia, his indefinite longing for the unknown, was not, in any literal sense, “homesickness” at all. As Aldous Huxley has observed:

That Melville came to no very pleasant haven of refuge in the forecastle of the Acushnet is borne out by his drastic preference to be eaten by cannibals rather than abide among the sureties of the ship and her company. That he “left the ship, being oppressed with hard fare and hard usage, in the summer of 1842 with a companion, Richard T. Greene (Toby) at the bay of Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands” is the statement in the journal of his wife vividly elaborated in Typee.

Of Melville’s history aboard the Acushnet there is no straightforward account. Redburn, Typee, Omoo and White-Jacket are transparent chapters in autobiography. From his experiences on board the Acushnet Melville draws generously in Moby-Dick: but these experiences do not for one moment pretend to be the whole of the literal truth. Only an insanity as lurid as Captain Ahab’s would mistake Moby-Dick for a similarly reliable report of personal experiences. Moby-Dick is, indeed, an autobiography of adventure; but adventure upon the highest plane of spiritual daring. Incidentally, it also offers the fullest, and truest, and most readable history of an actual whaling cruise ever written. But it is not a “scientific” history. The “scientific” historian, proudly unreadable, thanks God that he has no style to tempt him out of the strict weariness of counting-house inventories; and in despair of presenting the truth, he boasts a make-shift veracity. The truest historians are, of course, the poets—and their histories are “feigned.” Melville, writing in the capacity of poet, was licensed in the best interests of truth to expurgate reality. And though Captain Ahab’s hunt of the abhorred Moby-Dick belongs as essentially to the realm of poetry as does the quest of the Holy Grail, it is, withal, in its lower reaches, so broadly based on a foundation of solid reality that it is possible, by considering Moby-Dick in double conjunction with the few facts explicitly known of Melville during the period of his whaling cruise, and the wealth of facts known of whaling in general, to block in, with a considerable degree of certainty, the contours of his experiences aboard the Acushnet.

By all odds, the chief chapter in the history of whaling is the story of its rise and practical extinction in the Southern New England States. In this limited geographical area, trade in “oil and bone” was pursued with an alacrity, an enterprise and a prosperity unparalleled in the world’s history. When, in 1841, Melville boarded the Acushnet, American whaling, after a development through nearly two centuries, was within a decade of its highest development, within two decades of its precipitous decay. The doom of whale-oil lamps and sperm candles was ultimately decided in 1859 with the opening of the first oil well in Pennsylvania, and sealed by the Civil War. Melville knew American whaling at the prime of its golden age, and taking it at its crest, he raised it in fiction to a dignity and significance incomparably higher than it ever reached in literal fact.

At the beginning of Moby-Dick, Melville culls from the most incongruous volumes an anthology of comments upon Leviathan, beginning with the Mosaic comment “And God created great whales,” and ending, after eclectic quotations from Pliny, Lucian, Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne, Spenser, Hobbes, Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Paley, Blackstone, Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, Darwin, and dozens of others (including an excerpt “From ‘Something’ Unpublished”) ends on the old whale song:

Rather than conventionally distribute his quotations throughout the book as chapter headings, Melville offers them all in a block at the beginning of the volume, somewhat after the manner of Franklin’s grace said over the pork barrel. And extraordinarily effective is this device of Melville’s in stirring the reader’s interest to a sense of the wonder and mystery of this largest of all created live things, of the wild and distant seas wherein he rolls his island bulk; of the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds. Even before the reader comes to the superb opening paragraph of Moby-Dick, the great flood-gates of the wonder-world are swung open, and into his inmost soul, as into Melville’s, “two by two there float endless processions of the whale, and midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”

The literature of whaling slopes down from Moby-Dick, both before and after, into a wilderness of several hundred volumes.

There is but one attempt at a comprehensive history of whaling: Walter S. Tower’s A History of the American Whale Fishery (Philadelphia, 1907). This slender volume first makes a rapid survey of the sources and proceeds from these to a cautious selection of the outstanding documented facts which by “economic interpretation” it presents as a consecutive story. Devoid of literary pretension, it is admirable in accuracy, compactness and clarity. The most comprehensive popular treatment of American whaling is to be found in Hyatt Verrill’s The Real Story of the Whaler (1916): a more exuberant but less workmanly book than Tower’s. Representative shorter surveys are to be found both in Winthrop L. Martin’s very able The American Merchant Marine (1902) and Willis J. Abbot’s American Merchant Ships and Sailors (1902).

Although the literature of whaling extends by repeated dilutions from “economic interpretations” to infant books, the classical sources for this extended literature tally less than a score. The great work on the Fisheries and Fishing Industries of the United States, prepared under the direction of G. Brown Goode in 1884, contains two articles on whaling of the first magnitude of importance: Whalemen, Vessels, Apparatus and Methods of the Whale Fishery and a History of the Present Condition of the Whale Fishery. The facts presented in these last two encyclopÆdic treatments are drawn principally from Alexander Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1874, published in 1876, and C. M. Scammon’s Marine Mammals of the North Western Coast of North America, with an Account of the American Whale Fishery, published in 1874. Lorenzo Sabine’s Report on the Principal Fisheries of the American Seas, published in 1870, while prior to the monumental works of Starbuck and Scammon in date of publication, enjoys no other priority. The most complete and detailed treatment of the origin and early development of whaling is to be found in William Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions, dated 1820. Scoresby—“the justly renowned,” according to Melville; “the excellent voyager”—was an English naval officer, and in his discussion of the whale fishery he deals solely with the European and principally with the British industry. But Scoresby’s book is principally a classic as regards the earlier history of whaling. Scoresby seems to have convinced all later historians in this field of the folly of further research. Melville knew Scoresby’s book—“I honour him for a veteran,” Melville confesses—and drew from its erudition in Moby-Dick. Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket, published in 1836, is one of the few important original sources for the history of whaling, and the most readable. Melville expresses repeated indebtedness to Macy. Macy’s record has the tang of first-hand experience, and the flavour of local records. Because of the fact that many of the records from which this fine old antiquary of whales drew have since been destroyed by fire, his book enjoys the heightened authority of being a unique source. According to Anatole France, the perplexities of historians begin where events are related by two or by several witnesses, “for their evidence is always contradictory and always irreconcilable.” The fire at Nantucket blazed a royal road to truth. Daniel Ricketson, in his History of New Bedford (1850) attempted to emulate Macy. And though Ricketson’s sources, as Macy’s, have been largely destroyed by fire, his authority, though irrefutable in so far as it goes, is less detailed and comprehensive.

Of published personal narrative of whale-hunting, Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Ship Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket, published in 1821, as well as F. D. Bennett’s two-volume Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, published 1833-36, were drawn from by Melville in Moby-Dick. The account of the sinking of the Essex is important as being the source from which Melville borrowed, with superb transformation, the catastrophe with which he closes Moby-Dick. The sinking of the Essex—recounted in Moby-Dick—is the first and best known instance of a ship being actually sent to the bottom by the ramming of an infuriated whale, and in its sequel it is one of the most dreadful chapters of human suffering in all the hideous annals of shipwreck. “I have seen Owen Chase,” Melville says in Moby-Dick, “who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy: I have read his plain and faithful narrative: I have conversed with his son; and all within a few miles of the scene of the tragedy.” Melville may here be using a technique learned from Defoe.

Though in Moby-Dick Melville makes several references to J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes on a Sojourn on the Island of Zanzibar, mildly praising some of his drawings while reprobating their reproduction, he owes no debt to J. Ross Browne. Melville and Browne wrote of whaling with purposes diametrically opposed. Melville gloried in the romance of whales, and horsed on Leviathan, through a briny sunset dove down through the nether-twilight into the blackest haunted caverns of the soul. Browne provokes no such rhetorical extravagance of characterisation. He sat soberly and firmly down on a four-legged chair before a four-legged desk and wrote up his travels. “My design,” he says, “is simply to present to the public a faithful delineation of the life of a whaleman. In doing this, I deem it necessary that I should aim rather at the truth itself than at mere polish of style.” So Browne made a virtue of necessity, and convinced that “history scarcely furnishes a parallel for the deeds of cruelty” then “prevalent in the whale fishery,” he sent his book forth “to show in what manner the degraded condition of a portion of our fellow-creatures can be ameliorated.” In a study of Melville’s life, Browne is important as presenting an ungarnished account of typical conditions aboard a whaler at the time Melville was cruising in the Acushnet. Useful in the same way are R. Delano’s Wanderings and Adventures; Being a Narrative of Twelve Years’ Life in a Whaleship (1846) and Captain Davis’ spirited overhauling of his journal kept during a whaling trip, published in 1872 under the title Nimrod of the Sea.

Though whales and Pilgrim Fathers would, at first blush, seem to belong to two mutually repugnant orders of nature, yet were they, by force of circumstance, early thrown into a warring intimacy. And strangely enough, in this armed alliance, it was the whale who made the first advances. Richard Mather, who came to Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635, records in his journal, according to Sabine, the presence off the New England coast of “mighty whales spewing up water in the air like the smoke of a chimney ... of such incredible bigness that I will never wonder that the body of Jonah could be in the belly of a whale.” From this and other evidence it seems undoubted that in early colonial days whales were undaunted by the strict observances of the Pilgrims, and browsed in great numbers, even on Sabbath, within the sight of land. Yet, despite this open violation of Scripture, the resourceful Puritan pressed them into the service of true religion. Believing that

they tolerated leviathan as an emissary more worthy than Elijah’s raven. And whenever an obedient whale, harkening to the voice of God in the wilderness, was cast ashore, a part of his bulk was fittingly appropriated for the support of the ministry.

Tower establishes the fact that among the first colonists there were men at least acquainted with, if not actually experienced in whaling. And it is quite generally accepted that the settlement of Massachusetts was prompted not only by a protestant determination to worship God after the dictates of a rebellious conscience, but by a no less firm determination to vary Sunday observances with the enjoyment on secular days of unrestricted fishing. As a result of this double Puritan interest in worship and whaling, the history of the American whaling fishery begins almost with the settlement of the New England colonies.

By the end of the seventeenth century, whaling was established as a regular business, if still on a comparatively small scale, in the different Massachusetts colonies, especially from Cape Cod; from the towns at the eastern end of Long Island, and from Nantucket. With the very notable exceptions of New London, Connecticut, and New Bedford and the neighbouring ports in Buzzard’s Bay, every locality subsequently to become important in its whaling interests was well launched in this enterprise before 1700. New London did not begin whaling until the middle of the eighteenth century. New Bedford, though almost the last place to appear as a whaling port—and this immediately before the Revolution—was destined to stand, within a century after its beginnings in whaling, the greatest whaling port the world has ever known, the city which, in the full glory of whaling prosperity, would send out more vessels than all other American ports combined.

The earliest colonial adventurers in whaling were men who by special appointment were engaged to be on the lookout for whales cast ashore. Emboldened by commerce with drift-whales, these Puritan whalemen soon took to boats to chase and kill whales which came close in, but which were not actually stranded.

In 1712, through the instrumentality of Christopher Hussey, Providence utilised a hardship to His creature to work a revolution in whaling. Hussey, while cruising along the coast, was caught up by a strong northerly wind, and despite his prayers and his seamanship was blown out to sea. When the sky cleared, Hussey’s craft was nowhere to be seen by the anxious watchers on shore. After awaiting his return for a decent number of days, his wife and neighbours at home gave him up as lost. But in the middle of their tribulations, a familiar sail dipped over the horizon, and Hussey slowly headed landward, dragging a dead sperm whale in tow: the first sperm whale known to have been taken by an American whaler.

Hussey’s exploit marked a radical change in whaling methods. All Nantucket lusted after sperm whales. The indomitable islanders began immediately to fit vessels, usually sloops of about thirty tons, to whale out in the “deep.” These little vessels were fitted out for cruises of about six weeks. On their narrow decks there was no room for the apparatus necessary to “try out” the oil. So the blubber stripped from the whale was cast into the hold, the oil awaiting extraction until the vessel returned. Then the reeking whale fat, its stench smiting the face of heaven, was transferred to the huge kettles of the “try houses.” There is an old saying that a nose that is a nose at all can smell a whaler twenty miles to windward. The New England indifference to the stenches of whaling suggests that the Puritan contempt for the flesh was not a virtue but a deformity.

Other whaling communities ventured out after the sperm whale in the wake of Nantucket. Year after year the colonial whalemen pushed further and further out into the “deep” as their gigantic quarry retreated before them. In 1774, Captain Uriah Bunker, in the brig Amazon of Nantucket, made the first whaling voyage across the equinoctial line to the Brazil Banks and, according to local tradition, returned to port with a “full ship” on April 19, 1775, just as the redcoats were in full retreat from Concord Bridge.

The Revolutionary War dealt a terrific blow to American whaling. Massachusetts was regarded as the hotbed of the Revolutionary spirit, and that colony was also the centre of the fishing industries. Hence, in 1775, “to starve New England,” Parliament passed the famous act restricting colonial trade to British ports, and placing an embargo on fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland or on any other part of the North American coast. It was this same measure which inspired Burke in his Speech on Conciliation to his superbly eloquent tribute to the exploits of the American whalemen. When the war began there were in the whole American fleet between three and four hundred vessels—of an aggregate of about thirty-three thousand tons. The annual product of this fleet was, according to Starbuck’s estimate, “probably at least 45,000 barrels of spermaceti oil, and 8,500 barrels of right whale oil, and of bone nearly or quite 75,000 pounds.” Of all whaling communities, the island of Nantucket held out most stoutly,—aided by Melville’s grandfather, who was sent to Nantucket in command of a detachment to watch the movements of the British fleet. Yet when the war ended in 1783, Macy says that of the one hundred and fifty Nantucket vessels, only two or three old hulks remained. In Nantucket, the money loss exceeded one million dollars. So many of the young and active men perished in the war that in the eight hundred Nantucket families there were two hundred and two widows and three hundred and forty-two orphan children.

But even in the face of such prodigal disaster, the fiery spirit of Nantucket was unquenchable. When the news came of the peace of 1783, the Bedford, just returned to Nantucket from a voyage, was hastily laden with oil and cleared for London. This was, as a contemporary London newspaper remarks, “the first vessel which displayed the thirteen rebellious stripes of America in any British port.”

Through the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the American whale fishery lived a precarious existence of constant ups and downs. The whaling voyages were greatly lengthened during this period, however. In 1789 Nantucket whalemen first went hunting the sperm whale off Madagascar, and in 1791 six whaleships fitted out at Nantucket for the Pacific Ocean.

The years between 1820 and 1835 were marked mainly by stable conditions and by a steady but gradual growth. In 1820 the Pacific whaling was extended to the coast of Japan, and within the next few years the whalers were going to all parts of the South Sea and Indian Ocean. And these years marked, too, the falling of Nantucket from her hundred years of pre-eminence in whaling, and the emergence of New Bedford as incomparably the greatest whaling port in the history of the world. It was a Nantucket whaler, however, who in 1835 captured the first right whale on the northwest coast of America, thereby opening one of the most important grounds ever visited by the whaling fleet.

The Golden Age of whaling falls between 1835 and 1860. In 1846 the whaling fleet assumed the greatest proportions it was ever to know. In that year, the fleet numbered six hundred and eighty ships and barks, thirty-four brigs, and twenty-two schooners, with an aggregate of somewhat over two hundred and thirty thousand tons. The value of the fleet alone at that time exceeded twenty-one million dollars, while all the investments connected with the business are estimated, according to Tower, at seventy million dollars, furnishing the chief support of seventy thousand persons. This great industry, so widespread in its operation, emanated, at the time of its most extensive development, from a cluster of thirty-eight whaling ports distributed along the southern New England coast from Cape Cod to New York, and on the islands to the south. The greatest of all the whaling ports, from 1820 onward, was New Bedford.

During the really great days of the whale fishery, the Pacific was by all odds the chief fishing ground. During the early eighteen-thirties, the Nantucket fleet began cruising mainly in the Pacific, and after 1840, the Nantucket whalers hunted there almost exclusively. The Nantucket fleet was soon followed by the majority of the New Bedford fleet, and a large proportion of the New London and Sag Harbor vessels.

These vessels, manned by a mixed company of Quakers, farm boys, and a supplementary compound of the dredgings of the terrestrial globe, would usually be gone for three years, not infrequently for four or five. As long as the craft held, and the food lasted, and an empty barrel lay in the hold, the captain kept to the broad ocean, eschewing both the allurements of home and the seductions of tattooed Didoes. When at last they sailed into the harbour of their home ports, weed-grown, storm-beaten, patched and forlorn, they usually looked, as Verrill says, more like the ghosts of ancient wrecks than seaworthy carriers of precious cargo manned by crews of flesh and blood. After a few months of repair and overhauling in port, these vessels were refitted for another cruise, and off they sailed again for another space of years. It thus happened that the veteran whalers of Nantucket and New Bedford and the sister ports could look back upon whole decades of their lives spent cruising upon the high seas: a fact that Melville amplifies with a cadence he learned from the Psalms. Of the Nantucketer he says: “For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. He alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks on the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”

The number of supplies, and the variety of articles required in fitting out a whaling ship for a cruise, was, of course, prodigious. For aside from the articles required in whaling, it was necessary that a whaling vessel should sail prepared for any emergency, and equipped to be absolutely independent of the rest of the world for years at a time, housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers and bankers. Aside from the necessary whaling equipment, there were needed supplies for the men, ship’s stores and a dizzy number of incidentals: “spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and a duplicate ship.... While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves, the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had come; they would answer—‘Well, boys, here’s the ark!’” N. H. Nye, a New Bedford outfitter, published in 1858 an inventory of Articles for a Whaling Voyage: a shopping list totalling some 650 entries, useful once to whalers with fallible memories, useful now to landsmen with lame imaginations.

When, from such a port as Nantucket or New Bedford, a whaling vessel was preparing to sail, there would be no house, perhaps, without some interest in the cruise. Each took a personal pride in the success of the whalers: a pride clinched by the economic dependence of nearly every soul in the community upon the whalemen’s luck. During the time of continual fetching and carrying preparatory to the sailing in Moby-Dick, no one was more active, it will be remembered, than Aunt Charity Bildad, that lean though kind-hearted old Quakeress of indefatigable spirit. “At one time she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic back.” Hither and thither she bustled about, “ready to turn her hand and her heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.” Nor did she forsake the ship even after it had been hauled out from the wharf. She came off in the whaleboat with a nightcap for the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward. Such were the conditions in whaling-towns like Nantucket or New Bedford that there was nothing remarkable in Aunt Charity’s behaviour. In such communities, “whale was King.” The talk of the street was, as Abbot observes, of big catches and the price of oil and bone. The conversation in the shaded parlours, where sea-shell, coral, and the trophies of Pacific cruises were the chief ornaments, was, in an odd mixture of Quaker idiom, of prospective cruises or of past adventures, of distant husbands and sons, the perils they braved, and when they might be expected home. Col. Joseph C. Hart, in his Miriam Coffin, or the Whale Fishermen: a Tale (1834) offers perhaps the truest and most vivid picture of life in Nantucket when whaling was at its prime. Speaking of himself in the third person in the dedication, Hart describes his book as being “founded on facts, and illustrating some of the scenes with which he was conversant in his earlier days, together with occurrences with which he is familiar from tradition and association.” Though reprinted in California in 1872, Miriam Coffin is now very difficult to come by. It should be better known.

The extended voyages of the American whaleman were made in heavy, bluff-bowed and “tubby” crafts that were designed with fine contempt for speed, comfort or appearance. In writing of Nantucket whaling during the period about 1750, Macy says: “They began now to employ vessels of larger size, some of 100 ton burden, and a few were square-rigged.” For over a century thereafter the changes in whaling vessels were almost solely in size. With the opening of the Pacific, the longer voyages and the desire for larger cargoes led, as a necessary result, to the employment of larger vessels. The first Nantucket ship sailing to the Pacific in 1791 was of 240-ton burden. By 1826, Nantucket had seventy-two ships carrying over 280 tons each, and before 1850 whalers of 400 to 500 tons burden were not unusual. The Acushnet, it will be remembered, was rated as a ship of 359 tons.

The vessels used in whaling, built, as has been said, less with a view to speed than to carrying capacity, had a characteristic architecture. The bow was scarce distinguishable from the stern by its lines, and the masts stuck up straight, without that rake which adds so much to the trim appearance of a clipper. Three peculiarities chiefly distinguished the whalers from other ships of the same general character. (1) At each mast head was fixed the “crow’s-nest”—in some vessels a heavy barrel lashed to the mast, in others merely a small platform laid on the cross-trees, with two hoops fixed to the mast above, within which the look-out could stand in safety. Throughout Melville’s experiences at sea, in the merchant marines, in whalers, and in the navy, it appears that his happiest moments were spent on mast-heads. (2) On the deck, amidships, stood the “try-works,” brick furnaces holding two or three great kettles, in which the blubber was reduced to odourless oil. (3) Along each rail were heavy, clumsy wooden cranes, or davits, from which hung the whale boats—never less than five, sometimes more—while still others were lashed to the deck. For these boats were the whales’ sport and playthings, and seldom was a big “fish” made fast without there being work made for the ship’s carpenter.

As for the crow’s-nest, and the business of standing mast-heads, Melville has more than a word to say. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the Garden of Cyrus of “the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered,” to find, as Coleridge remarks, “quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything,” so Melville finds the visible and invisible universe a symbolic prefiguring of all the detailed peculiarities of whaling. In the town of Babel he finds a great stone mast-head that went by the board in the dread gale of God’s wrath; and in St. Simon Stylites, he discovers “a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads, who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.” And in Napoleon upon the top of the column of Vendome, in Washington atop his pillar in Baltimore, as in many another man of stone or iron or bronze, he sees standers of mast-heads.

In most American whalemen, the mast-heads were manned almost simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; and this even though she often had fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail before reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage, she found herself drawing near home with empty casks, then her mast-heads were frequently kept manned, even until her skysail-poles sailed in among the spires of her home port.

The three mast-heads were kept manned from sunrise to sunset, the seamen taking regular turns (as at the helm) and relieving each other every two hours, watching to catch the faint blur of vapour whose spouting marks the presence of a whale. “There she blows! B-l-o-o-ws! Blo-o-ows!” was then sung out from the mast-head: the signal for the chase.

As for Melville, he tries to convince us he kept very sorry watch, as in the serene weather of the tropics, he perched “a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the huge monsters of the deep, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus of old Rhodes.” There, through his watches, he used to swing, he says, “lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor.” “I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the topsail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.” According to Melville’s own representation, the Acushnet was not a pint of oil richer for all his watching in the thought-engendering altitude of the crow’s-nest. He admonishes all ship-owners of Nantucket to eschew the bad business of shipping “romantic, melancholy, absent-minded young men, disgusted with the cankering cares of earth”: young men seeking sentiment—as did he—in tar and blubber. “Childe Harold not infrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whaleship,” he warns prosaic ship-owners, “young men hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition,” and indifferent to the selling qualities of “oil and bone.” It is well both for Melville and Captain Pease, the testy old skipper of the ship Acushnet, that he could not see into the head of Melville as he hung silently perched in his dizzy lookout. “Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.”

When, from the mast-head, eyes less abstracted than Melville’s sighted a whale, the daring and excitement of the ensuing pursuit in the whale-boats left Melville less occasion, during such energetic intervals, to luxuriate in high mysteries. And it seems likely that Melville was of more value to the ship’s owners when in a whale-boat than riding the mast-head.

Through long years of whaling these boats had been developed until practical perfection had been reached. Never has boat been built which for speed, staunchness, seaworthiness and hardiness excels the whaleboat of the Massachusetts whalemen. These mere cockleshells, sharp at both ends and clean-sided as a mackerel, were about twenty-seven feet long by six feet beam, with a depth of twenty-two inches amidships and thirty-seven inches at the bow and stern. These tiny clinker-built craft can ride the heaviest sea, withstand the highest wind, resist the heaviest gale. Incredible voyages have been made in these whaling boats, not the least remarkable being the three months’ voyage of two boats that survived the wreck of the Essex in 1819, or the even more remarkable six months’ voyage of the whaling boat separated from the Janet in 1849. In Mardi Melville describes a prolonged voyage in a whale-boat. In this account Melville takes one down to the very plane of the sea. He is speaking from experience when he says: “Unless the waves, in their gambols, toss you and your chip upon one of their lordly crests, your sphere of vision is little larger than it would be at the bottom of a well. At best, your most extended view in any one direction, at least, is in a high slow-rolling sea; when you descend into the dark misty spaces, between long and uniform swells. Then, for the moment, it is like looking up and down in a twilight glade, interminable; where two dawns, one on each hand, seem struggling through the semi-transparent tops of the fluid mountains.”

Of his first lowering in pursuit of a whale, he says in Moby-Dick: “It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that seemed almost threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side:—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, and wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world,—neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.”

After this first lowering, Melville returned to the ship to indulge in the popular nautical diversion of making his will. This ceremony concluded, he says he looked round him “tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault. Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.”

In Moby-Dick, whales are sighted, chased, and captured; nor does Melville fail to give detailed accounts of these activities or of the ensuing “cutting in” and the “trying” of the oil. One of the most vivid scenes in Moby-Dick is the description of the “try-works” in operation.

“By midnight,” says Melville, “the works were in full operation. We were clean from the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.... The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooners, always the whaleship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; their uncivilised laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace: to and fro, in their front, the harpooners wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night; and scornfully champed, and viciously spat round her on all sides.” During this scene Melville stood at the helm, “and for long silent hours guarded the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.”

In a chapter on dreams, in Mardi, one of the wildest chapters Melville ever wrote, and the one in which he profoundly searched into the heart of his mystery, he compares his dreams to a vast herd of buffaloes, “browsing on to the horizon, and browsing on round the world; and among them, I dash with my lance, to spear one, ere they all flee.” In this world of dreams, “passing and repassing, like Oriental empires in history,” Melville discerned, “far in the background, hazy and blue, their steeps let down from the sky, Andes on Andes, rooted on Alps; and all round me, long rolling oceans, roll Amazons and Orinocos; waver, mounted Parthians; and to and fro, toss the wide woodlands: all the world an elk, and the forest its antlers. Beneath me, at the equator, the earth pulses and beats like a warrior’s heart, till I know not whether it be not myself. And my soul sinks down to the depths, and soars to the skies; and comet-like reels on through such boundless expanses, that methinks all the worlds are my kin, and I invoke them to stay in their course. Yet, like a mighty three decker, towing argosies by scores, I tremble, gasp, and strain in my flight, and fain would cast off the cables that hamper.”

On that night that Melville drowsed at the helm of the Acushnet while she was “freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of blackness” his soul sank deep into itself, and he seems to have awakened to recognise in the ship that he drowsily steered, the material counterpart of the darkest mysteries of his own soul. It was then that he awoke to be “horribly conscious” that “whatever swift rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.” And in reflecting upon that insight Melville plunges into the lowest abyss of disenchantment. “The truest of men was the Man of Sorrows,” he says, “and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; not that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.”

The greatest of all dreamers conquer their dreams; others, who are great, but not of the greatest, are mastered by them, and Melville was one of these. There is a passage in the works of Edgar Allan Poe that Melville may well have pondered when he awoke at the helm of the Acushnet after looking too long into the glare of the fire: “There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man is no Carathes to explore with impunity its every cavern. All the grim 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.”