🎤011 Moby-Full Text Chs23-25

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Contents

• CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
• CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
• CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
• FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of,¹ a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; ==this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington==. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land.² The port would fain³ give succor;⁴ the port is pitiful;⁵ in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.⁶ But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly⁷ all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!⁸

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CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.⁹

As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales.

In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions.¹⁰ If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval officers¹¹ he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.

Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor.¹² And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies’ plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier’s profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery,¹³ would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

But, though the world scouts at¹⁴ us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!

But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.

Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time¹⁵ have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI¹⁶ of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk,¹⁷ and politely invite to that town some score¹⁸ or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of £1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded¹⁹ whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000!andeveryyearimportingintoourharborsawellreapedharvestof$7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant²⁰ in whaling?

But this is not the half; look again.

I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues,²¹ that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves pregnant²² from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook²³ or Vancouver²⁴ had ever sailed. If American and European men-of-war²⁵ now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns;²⁶ but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship’s common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!

Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast.²⁷ It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy²⁸ in those parts.

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia,²⁹ was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman,³⁰ all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously³¹ barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan,³² is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.

But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no æsthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet every time.

The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say.

The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great,³³ who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!³⁴

True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their veins.

No good blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger,³⁵ one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers—all kith and kin to noble Benjamin—this day darting the barbed iron³⁶ from one side of the world to the other.

Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.

Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is declared “a royal fish.” § ³⁷

Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way.

The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world’s capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.§^{38 39}

*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.

Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in whaling.

No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest. Cetus⁴⁰ is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.⁴¹

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of;⁴² if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS.⁴³ in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

§ See subsequent chapters for something more on this head. (chs 82 and 90)

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CHAPTER 25. Postscript.

In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts,⁴⁴ an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be blameworthy?

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them⁴⁵ for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state,⁴⁶ so called, and there may be a castor⁴⁷ of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy⁴⁸ spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality.

But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil,⁴⁹ nor castor oil,³⁸ nor bear’s oil,⁵⁰ nor train oil,⁵¹ nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

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Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Bulkington appears in [Chapter 3](Moby - Cross-chapter References) ↩

2. The lee side of the ship is the downwind side, Leeward land is a coastline on that side of the ship. ↩

3. fain = like to (i.e., I would fain sit in a room with you and talk about this book rather than sending you audio.•) ↩

4. succor = aid ↩

5. pitiful = full of pity ↩

6. mortalities = the things that make us mortal ↩

7. fly = variation on “flee” ↩

8. apotheosis = the highest point of development ↩

9. The Advocate - Ishmael is acting like a lawyer in this chapter, arguing his case on the side of the whalers. ↩

10. Liberal professions = liberal arts, public service, etc. ↩

11. i.e., as the Navy would put U.S.N. or USS on the side of the ship ↩

12. Oof - and he’s writing pre-Civil War ↩

13. battery, like Battery Park in NYC, a fortified piece of land that can support heavy guns ↩

14. scouts at = scorns ↩

15. Johan de Witt (1625-1672) Dutch PM, during the time the Dutch were big in the New World and trade around the world, and had a major whaling industry focused on the Arctic. ↩

16. Louis XVI - King of France from 1774-1792, executed in 1793 ↩

17. Dunkirk = not only site of the largest land/sea rescue in history (though some say 9-11 was larger. That said, I was there. I think Dunkirk was bigger.) Dunkirk was also the site of a ‘colony’ made by Nantucket whalers to avoid import taxes on whale oil and help Louis XVI start a whaling trade (by request). Here’s an 1893 article from The Atlantic about “Nantucket Quakers in France” (gift article so you should be able to read without a subscription). ↩

18. score = 20 ↩

19. banded = bound together in a group ↩

20. puissant = powerful ↩

21. sequential issues = consequences ↩

22. Egyptian myth - Isis and Osiris are twins, mother is Nut. Isis becomes pregnant by Osiris in utero. (Ew!) ↩

23. Captain James Cook (1728-1779) British explorer, first European contact with Hawaii/eastern Australia, first to map Newfoundland. ↩

24. Captain George Vancouver (1757-1798) - explored Pacific coast of Canada and US (Oregon and North) ↩

25. armed ships ↩

26. Russian Admiral Adam Johann von Krusenstern (1770-1846) led first Russian voyage around the earth ↩

27. Coast of South America ↩

28. Okay, well…the potential for eternal democracy, at least. ↩

29. Both were considered a bit “Wild West” in vibe. ↩

30. Willem Janszoon - Dutch Captain of The Duyfken who was surprised by the Australian mainland in 1606 (surprised by because he couldn’t “discover” a land that already had people 😏). England started using it as a penal colony in 1788. ↩

31. pestiferously = infectious / diseased ↩

32. Japan’s “closed-country policy” From 1639-1854 meaning no one could enter or leave the country (or risk death). Melville was right, however. When it opened in 1854, it opened three ports to American whaling ships. ↩

33. Anglo-Saxon ruler (871-899 C.E.) kingdom of Wessex in So. England ↩

34. Burke - (1729-1797) - Irish Anglican statesman who praised the success of New England’s whaling industry vs Europe’s ↩

35. Mary Folger = true, she was B. Franklin’s grandmother. She was the wife of Peter Folger (1618-1690). Her daughter Abiah was the second wife of Josiah Franklin. Their 10th son was Benjamin. As decendents of Folder that makes Franklin also an ancestor of the co-founder of Cornell University and of the founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library. ALSO, apparently Melville didn’t know that through his Grandmother Greenleaf, he, too, was “kith and kin to noble Benjamin.” Apparently ↩

36. throwing a harpoon ↩

37. A Royal Fish = statutory law that whales and sturgeons become property of the English monarch when caught. Will also be further commented on in Chapter 90. ↩

38. Castor oil is now the oil of the castor bean. (It is also the oil secreted by beavers. “Castor” is Latin for “beaver”.) Unclear if the latter was ever taken as a medicine the way the former was/is. ↩ ↩²

39. From Pliny the Elder: “[Marcus Aemilius] Scaurus, in his aedileship [head of Games and Spectacles], brought from Joppa, in Judaea, the bones of the monster to which Andromeda is fabled to have been exposed; and these were exhibited at Rome… The monster was forty feet in length, the height of its ribs exceeding that of an Indian elephant…” Occurred ± 58 B.C.E. ↩

40. late-Autumn to Winter constellation in Northern Hemisphere and late Spring constellation in Southern Hemisphere, connected to the sea monster from the Perseus/Andromeda myth; constellation now often referred to as “the whale” ↩

41. Unclear. Could be Alexander the Great, Scipio Africanus, or Julius Cæsar ↩

42. i.e., Heaven ↩

43. MSS. = manuscripts ↩

44. Embattling = prepping for a fight ↩

45. like seasoned wood, getting it ready for use ↩

46. Apparently this is true!?! It’s ceremonial and dates back to when salt was expensive. More than being at the head or foot of a table, you were above or below the SALT. Also, someone being “not worth their salt” comes to mind. ↩

47. there are sugar casters and pepper casters—he’s being funny and playing off of “seasoning” Also, the Chrism oil used for King Charles’ coronations was made of: “olive oil and is scented with a mix of essential oils, such as sesame, rose, jasmine, cinnamon, neroli, benzoin, and orange blossom. Unlike previous coronation oils, this one is vegan and does not contain animal products like musk or ambergris.” ↩

48. quoggy = like it sounds, soft, mushy, boggy; could be a misspelling of “quaggy” - like quagmire. ↩

49. macassar oil= hair pomade, apparently originating from Makassar in Indonesia. Also, the reason our great grandmas had ANTI-Macassars on their nice furniture. ↩

50. bear’s oil = Another hair treatment made from (you guessed it!) bear fat ↩

51. Train oil = oil made from blubber of Right or Bowhead whales (maybe) as well as seal, porpoise, dolphin, and walrus. ↩