Leviathan

In December 2004, the New York Times reported on the publication of an obscure scientific paper. Twelve Years of Tracking 52-Hz Whale Calls From a Unique Source in the North Pacific was the result of research on a whale cruising from California to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, ‘calling out with a voice unlike any other whale’s, and getting no response’.

‘The call, possibly a mating signal, suggests that the animal lives in total, and undesired, isolation.’ The sound had been tracked for more than a decade, and in that time its timbre deepened, suggesting that the whale was still maturing. One scientist thought it might be ‘miswired, broadcasting on the wrong frequency but listening on the right one’; another considered that the caller could be the miscegenic result of a liaison between a blue whale and another species, ‘and hence truly alone of its kind’.

Such stories seem to tug at our hearts because we cannot help but invest emotion in these paradoxical animals. They feed on the tiniest organisms–whales have to be big to swallow such huge quantities–yet they need to eat large amounts to sustain their size. Humpbacks, for instance, eat a ton of fish a day, mostly sand eels which, with their salt-excreting glands, are full of fresh water and therefore sate the animals’ thirst. Whales might live in the world’s great bodies of water, but they can never drink.

Delicately attuned to their surroundings, whales announce their presence in sonar pulses; seeing in sound, they diagnose the condition of a world from which we are insulated by our ignorance. As products of a different branch of evolutionary selection, they appear to have arrived at a superior way of being. The open ocean, without barriers and with a ready supply of food, is an excellent medium for the evolution of such huge, long-lived and intelligent animals; an environment in which communication and socializing take the place of material culture. Theirs is a landless race, free from mortgages and fossil fuel, unconstrained by borders or want, content merely to sing and sleep and eat and die.

It has taken us almost all our existence to come close to the true nature of the whale; only in the last few decades have we come to realize what the whale might be. In the long view of history, it will seem a remarkable turn-around: that a century that began by actively hunting whales ended by passively watching them. Animals, too, have a history–although one we can know only a tiny part of–and while modern science has demystified the whale whilst revealing its true wonders, our attitudes to whales also changed when we came to see them close-up. When, in effect, they became mediated, in photographs, on film, on television, part of our public discourse.

For the modern world, the whale is a symbol of innocence in an age of threat. It is an animal out of Genesis, a ‘myth of the fifth morning’, in Mary Oliver’s poem, both childlike and reproving. History, on the other hand, saw peril in the great fish that swallowed Jonah, or on which Sinbad found himself, a gigantic whale ‘on whose back the sands have settled and trees have grown since the world was young!’ The ancient writer Lucian told of a whale one hundred and fifty miles long in which was contained an entire nation and men who believed themselves to be dead, years after they were first engulfed. The beast that attacked Andromeda, and which was slain by Perseus, was believed to be a whale. Cetus was sent by Poseidon to consume the young of Ethiopia, only to be turned into a huge rock when it looked at the Medusa–a celestial myth re-enacted each autumn as the whale constellation rears over the southern horizon.

Although D.H. Lawrence would declare that ‘Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes’, to the Christian era, the whale was the very shape of the Beast of Revelation. In the sixteenth century the metaphysical poet John Donne wrote of a monstrous animal,

His ribs are pillars, and his high arch’d roofe Of barke that blunts best steele, is thunder-proofe

while a continent away in the New World, North-Western American Indians believed that the giant waves that carried away their villages were the backwash of battles between thunderbirds and whales. In the Hindu version of the flood, Vishnu assumes his first avatar in the shape of a great fish with a horn and tows Manu and his ark to safety, and followers of Islam contend that of the ten animals that will enter paradise, one is the whale that swallowed Jonah. Overwhelmingly, however, the modern whale exists in one great image, the looming shape of its most famous incarnation: Moby Dick.

And the angel of the LORD said to her, ‘Behold, you are with child, and shall bear a son; you shall call his name Ishmael; because the LORD has given heed to your affliction. He shall be a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.’

Genesis 16:11-12

Like many people, I found the densely written chapters of Herman Melville’s book difficult to read. I was defeated by its size and scale, by its ambition. It was as incomprehensible as the whale itself. Over the years I’d pick up the book, become engrossed, only for my attention to wander. But after my first visit to New England, I looked at it again; just as I was ready to see whales, I was ready to read Moby-Dick.

Perhaps it was the solace I’d found in reading Billy Budd, Sailor, & Other Stories during the endless hours of a transatlantic flight when, despite the darkened cabin and everyone else around me cocooned like larvæ in thin airline blankets, my own eyes resolutely refused to remain shut. The yellowing pages of a 1970s Penguin edition–bought when I was at college in London, studying English literature–seemed somehow consoling with their tales of travel in less constrained times, especially the elegiac story of the Handsome Sailor, a boy fated to die for sins not his own. Or perhaps it was the enigma of the author himself that intrigued me, a man who lived through an American century which he foretold, yet who died forgotten at its end.

Published in the middle of that century, in 1851–four years after Wuthering Heights, the only novel to rival its mysterious narrative power–Moby-Dick drew on Melville’s own experiences of a whaling voyage ten years before. The book begins with a startling, modern abruptness, launching itself on the reader like a rushing wave with the most evocative opening line of any work of fiction:

Call me Ishmael.

From this deliberately equivocal declaration–is this our hero’s real name, or merely a convenient disguise?–and its biblical overtones, we follow the rootless young man from Manhattan, where he has become so tired of life that he feels murderous, even suicidal, to his chosen refuge, the sea. From New Bedford, Ishmael sails around the world in pursuit of whales. His intentions are both poetic and prosaic: ‘I always go to sea as a sailor,’ he says wryly, ‘because they made a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay a passenger a single penny that I ever heard of.’

For his half-demented, peg-legged captain, Ahab, however, the voyage of the Pequod is an extended act of vengeance against a monstrous sperm whale: a terrifying, toothed creature of the deep ocean, rather than the placid baleen whale of coastal waters. This is the beast that dismasted Ahab, and which will in time take the rest of him, too. Even in this new industrial century, man still feared the elements of nature; and as the wild Yorkshire heath is itself a character in Emily Brontë’s book, so for Melville the whale was the unholy instrument of fate. Not for nothing is Ahab warned by the mad prophet Gabriel of the passing ship, Jeroboam, that the White Whale is ‘the Shaker God incarnate’. Jonah was saved by the whale for God’s work; Ahab is destroyed by the devil’s. Only Ishmael survives as ‘another orphan’, an emblem of martyrdom and rebirth, for a man must lose his life to save it.

Moby-Dick surpasses all other books because it is utterly unlike any other. It stands outside itself from the start, with its introductory list of historical quotations pertaining to the whale, as gathered by Ishmael’s ‘sub-sub-librarian’; and from there it moves through eccentric taxonomical descriptions as Melville attempts to capture his subject even as his hunters sought to harpoon it. Sidestepping his own narrative even as he delivers it, Ishmael almost wilfully and continually interrupts the reader with diversions and digressions, pulling him aside to address him with hell-fire sermons or musical interludes, with anatomical allegories or sensual dissertations on spermaceti oil.

In chapter after chapter, Melville teases out new legends to encircle the world and the whale. He creates a new family of men bent in pursuit of the whale, and a new kind of existence, culled from the lives he himself witnessed. Out of the oily, grimy labour of whaling, he forges a sterling heroism. In doing so, he melds his experience at sea with his dark view of the world and the nature of good and evil itself, seeing the future of his nation through his immaculate yet blasphemous creation, as if the whale were an American Sibyl of the new age.

Now, as I came to it again, I saw that Moby-Dick is a book made mythic by the whale, as much as it made a myth of the whale in turn. It is the literary mechanism by which we see the whale, the default evocation of anything whalish–from newspaper cartoons and children’s books to fish and chip shops and porn stars. Few could have predicted such an outcome for this eccentric work, least of all its author. Moby-Dick failed to sell out its first edition, and was almost entirely ignored in Melville’s lifetime. It took a new century for its qualities to be appreciated. In 1921 Viola Meynell declared that ‘to read it and absorb it is the crown of one’s reading life’, and wrote of its author, ‘His fame may still be restricted, but it is intense, for to know him is to be partly made of him for ever.’ (She also noted that J.M. Barrie invented Captain Hook out of Ahab, and his pursuant, time-ticking crocodile from the White Whale.) Two years later, in his extraordinary collection of rhetorical essays, D.H. Lawrence wrote: ‘He was a futurist long before futurism found paint…a mystic and an idealist’, author of ‘one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery and its tortured symbolism’.

Moby-Dick became the great American novel retrospectively. It also became a kind of bible, a book to be read two pages at a time, a transcendental text. Each time I read it, it is as if I am reading it for the first time. I study my tiny edition as I ride on the Tube, as intently as the veiled woman next to me reads her Koran. Every day I am reminded that it is part of our collective imagination: from newspaper leaders that evoke Ahab in the pursuit of the war on terror, to the ubiquitous chain of coffee-shops named after the Pequod’s first mate, Starbuck, where customers sip to a soundtrack generated by a great-nephew of the author, Richard Melville Hall, better known as Moby.

Melville’s White Whale is far from the comforting anthropomorphism of the smiling dolphin and the performing orca, from Flipper to Free Willy, or the singing humpback and the ‘Save the Whale’ campaign–all carriers, in their own way, of our own guilt. Rather, Moby Dick’s ominous shape and uncanny pallor, as seen through Ahab’s eyes, represents the Leviathan of the Apocalypse, an avenging angel with a crooked jaw, hung with harpoons from the futile attempts of other hunters. This whale might as well be a dragon as a real animal, with Ahab as his would-be slayer.

The age of whaling brought man into close contact with these animals–never closer, before or since. The whale represented money, food, livelihood, trade. But it also meant something darker, more metaphysical, by virtue of the fact that men risked their lives to hunt it. The whale was the future, the present and the past, all in one; the destiny of man as much as the destiny of another species. It offered dominion, wealth and power, even as it represented death and disaster, as men met the monster eye to eye, flimsy boat to sinewy flukes, and often died in the process. More than anyone has realized, perhaps, the modern world was built upon the whale. What was at stake was the future of civilization, in the most brutal meeting of man and nature since history began. And as the animals paid for the encounter in their near extinction, so we must ask what price we paid in our souls. How have we moved so far from one notion of the whale to the other, in such a short space of time?

When I close my eyes, I see those massive animals swimming in and out of my vision, into the blue-black below; the same creatures that came to obsess Melville’s ambiguous narrator, ‘and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale’. On my own uncertain journey, I sought to discover why I too felt haunted by the whale, by the forlorn expression on the beluga’s face, by the orca’s impotent fin, by the insistent images in my head. Like Ishmael, I was drawn back to the sea; wary of what lay below, yet forever intrigued by it, too.

II The Passage Out

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs–commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon…What do you see?–Posted like silent sentinels around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries…Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land…Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Loomings, Moby-Dick

Nowadays Pearl Street is covered with asphalt, but once it was strewn with oyster shells, like the glistening white paths you can still see on Cape Cod. On 1 August 1819, when Herman Melville was born here, this thoroughfare marked the lower limits of Manhattan. And if it is hard now to imagine what New York looked like without its towers, rising to the sky in an insatiable search for space, then it was a notion familiar to Melville, for the city changed utterly within his own lifetime.

In 1819 much of Manhattan was still farmland; Central Park had yet to be born out of the common ground where freed slaves and the last Native Americans lived. Most New Yorkers were British or Dutch by descent; this was not the polyglot city it would become by the century’s end. The shallows in which the oysters grew were yet to be clawed back from the sea, and at the end of Pearl Street was the Battery, a promenade where citizens could take the sea air. Its Castle Clinton was still an island, although it would later become the home of the New York Aquarium where, in 1913, Charles H. Townsend exhibited a live porpoise.

The house in which Melville was born was demolished long ago. Set into a wall nearby is a memorial bust of the author, covered by perspex like a square porthole and overshadowed by an office block. Across the road, the river ferries spill out their early morning commuters from Jersey, in the shadow of the moored, anachronistic masts of South Street Seaport.

The sun shines through the cables of Brooklyn Bridge; a down-and-out stirs from a riverside bench. This is still a fluid place, accustomed to reshaping itself in its own image and leaving its history behind. Yet the past remains imprinted in these streets, and in the memory of the people who once walked them.

They were what we would call middle class. Herman’s father, Allan Melvill–the ‘e’ was added later as a claim on their noble Scottish ancestry–was an importer of fancy goods. A dandified figure with his brushed-forward hair, he had made many trips to Europe, bringing back French antiques and engravings over which his children pored on a Saturday afternoon. ‘Above all there was a picture of a great whale, as big as a ship, stuck full of harpoons, and three boats sailing after it as fast as they could fly.’ Such images left his young son with ‘a vague prophetic thought, that I was fated, one day or other, to be a great voyager’.

On both sides Melville sprang from heroes. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, was one of the ‘Indian’ raiders who tipped tea into Boston harbour in protest at British taxes; the family kept a phial of the tea leaves in his honour. His other grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, after whom his brother was named, had held Fort Stanwix in the 1777 siege against the British and the Indians; Herman would call his own son Stanwix in memory of this famous victory. The sea was in the family blood, too. One uncle, Captain John D’Wolf II, had sailed from the Kamchatka Peninsula and onto the back of a whale. ‘It was like striking a rock, and brought us to a complete standstill,’ he recorded. ‘The monster soon showed himself, gave a spout, “kicked” his flukes and went down. He did not appear to be hurt, nor were we hurt, but most confoundedly frightened.’ A fine, handsome man with white hair and a florid face, D’Wolf was the first captain young Herman had ever met. He was later lost at sea.

With their growing family, the Melvills moved steadily uptown in a succession of grander houses until they reached 675 Broadway–a neighbourhood known as Bond Street whose gentility has long since been swept away by the waves of commerce and cheap denim. Here Herman and his brothers and sisters were taught by a governess, although a bout of scarlet fever damaged his eyesight and made it difficult to read. Life seemed stable enough, but in 1830 their father was declared bankrupt. The family were forced to move to Albany, the state capital up the Hudson River. Two years later, aged forty-eight, Allan died in a maniacal fever, leaving his wife Maria with only debt and eight children in her care.

At the most formative point in his life, twelve-year-old Herman was cast adrift, losing all sense of security when he most needed it. He would later claim that his mother, a strict Calvinist, hated him. He left school to work in a bank, but could not settle, and after a spell teaching and working on his uncle’s farm, he went west, hoping to become a surveyor on one of the new canals that were opening up the American interior. He got as far as the frontier, St Louis, Missouri, before returning to New York, where he was declined employment as a lawyer’s clerk because his handwriting was so bad. ‘There is no misanthrope like a boy disappointed, and such was I, with the warm soul of me flogged out by adversity.’ Rejected by the land, the young man sought a new life at sea.

On 5 June 1839 the St Lawrence sailed from New York with a cargo of cotton destined for Lancashire mills. Also on board was the nineteen-year-old Herman Melville. He was an outsider, abused by the crew for his middle-class manners, his dandified clothes, and his ignorance of shipboard life, ‘so that at last I found myself a sort of Ishmael…without a single friend or companion’. He found consolation in the ocean, which swelled unaccountably as if possessed of a mind of its own. Once, in a Newfoundland fog, he heard the sound of sighing and sobbing which sent him to the side of the ship. There he saw ‘four or five long, black snaky-looking shapes, only a few inches out of the water’. These were not the monstrous whales of his father’s engravings, no ‘regular krakens, that…inundated continents when they descended to feed!’ They even made him wonder if the story of Jonah could be true.

The sights of Liverpool, the second city of the Empire, amazed the young man. He saw a Floating Chapel converted from an old sloop-of-war, with a steeple instead of a mast, and a balcony built like a pulpit. Here William Scoresby, once one of England’s greatest whalers and now a man of the cloth, preached. There were scenes of shocking poverty, too. One young man silently exhibited a placard depicting himself ‘caught in the machinery of some factory, and whirled about among spindles and cogs, with his limbs mangled and bloody’. And in an even more horrific image, a nameless shape moaned at the bottom of some cellar steps: a destitute mother with two skeletal children on either side and a baby in her arms. ‘Its face was dazzlingly white, even in its squalor; but the closed eyes looked like balls of indigo. It must have been dead some hours.’

On 30 September Melville returned to New York on the St Lawrence, only to find nothing had changed but himself. He had made no money, and had to go back to teaching to support his widowed mother and his four sisters. But he had known life at sea, and within a year he would leave on an even more ambitious voyage–from the Whaling City itself.

The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor…

Loomings, Moby-Dick

In the second chapter of Moby-Dick, Ishmael arrives in New Bedford on a snowy Saturday night, only to discover that he has to wait two days until the next packet sails for Nantucket, where he intends to join his ship. Searching the shore-huddled town for a cheap bed for the night, he finds the Spouter Inn, its timbered interior hung with ‘horrifying implements’ and murky paintings of impenetrable sea-scenes. Here he is told by the landlord that he must bunk with a harpooneer.

There was nothing so unusual in that; Abraham Lincoln himself often shared his bed with a travelling companion. But Ishmael is aghast to find that his room-mate is a six-foot savage with a tattooed face. ‘Such a face! It was of a dark, purplised, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares.’ And as Queequeg puts aside the mummified head he has been trying to sell in town and undresses by candlelight, Ishmael realizes with horror that the cannibal’s entire body is tattooed, too.

This is the man with whom he is expected to spend the night. After some hullabaloo, however, the white American lies down with the blue-stained Polynesian, and in the morning, Ishmael awakes to find Queequeg’s arm tight around his body ‘in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.’ But as he lies there, unable to move, the young man is taken back to a childhood memory, of darkness, claustrophobia and terror.

It was midsummer’s day. For some minor misdemeanour, the infant Ishmael was sent to bed early. He endured the awful punishment of confinement while the world went on around him, outside his bedroom. Coaches passed by, other children played. The sun shone brightly on the longest day of the year, defying his attempts to kill time.

Eventually, he fell into ‘a troubled nightmare of doze’, from which he awoke with his arm dangling down beside the bed–only to find another hand clasped in his own. ‘For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand.’ As he fell asleep again, the sensation left him; yet he could never reconcile the strange, half-waking, half-sleeping encounter he had had with ‘the nameless, unimaginable, silent form’ that had gripped his hand.

Lying there on that frosty December dawn in New Bedford, imprisoned by his bed-mate, Ishmael could barely distinguish Queequeg’s arm from the counterpane. Both were so heavily patterned that they seemed to blend one into the other: ‘this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth’; the patchwork cover with its ‘odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles’. Far from being terrified, Ishmael is comforted by the sensation, secure in the giant man’s embrace, as if he himself might become patterned all over, too. That night he becomes Queequeg’s ‘bosom friend’; the two would die for each other. Such is Ishmael’s rebellion against the normal world, that he should so intimately identify with so pagan a figure.