Contents
CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters. FOOTNOTES
CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales1, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations.
Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. Such bands are known as schools.2 They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.
In cavalier attendance upon the school of females3, you invariably see a male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman4, swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male5. They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the whole they are hereditarily entitled to embonpoint6.
It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety.7 You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other excessive temperature of the year.
When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him8, and chases him away! High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed; for, alas! all fish bed in common.9 As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers10. Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,—furrowed heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated mouths.
But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at the first rush of the harem’s lord, then is it very diverting to watch that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines11. Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small12. As for the sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named13, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardour of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life14, forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.
Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq15, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.
The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale—as a solitary Leviathan is called—proves an ancient one.16 Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone17, he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.
The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them18, are by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout19.
The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard20. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems21.
Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey22.
FOOTNOTES
Footnotes
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Back to Ch. 87 — “The Grand Armada,” where the Pequod sailed into a vast gathering of sperm whales and Ishmael’s boat drifted into the calm center of the herd, among nursing mothers and calves. This chapter is the natural-history follow-up: how sperm whales really organize themselves. ↩
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“schools” — the chapter’s title pun rests on a linguistic accident. A “school” of fish or whales comes from Middle Dutch schole, meaning a troop or crowd (the same root as “shoal”). A “school” where you learn comes from Latin schola. They’re two different words that happen to look and sound the same, and Melville gets a whole chapter out of the coincidence: if a group of whales is a school, then its leader must be the schoolmaster. ↩
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What Melville got right, and what he didn’t — the chapter follows Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839) closely, and the broad outline holds up: sperm whales do live in groups of females and young, young males do form “bachelor” groups, and old males usually travel alone. What modern research (especially Hal Whitehead’s long-term studies) has overturned is the harem. Adult males don’t stay with a group of females as a lord and protector; they roam the cold high latitudes and visit the female groups in warm waters only briefly, to mate. The females and their young are the stable society, led and defended by the females themselves. So Melville’s “Ottoman” is Beale’s (and whalemen’s) picture, not the whale’s. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale#Social_structure ↩
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“Ottoman” / harem — MEL: “Ottoman: Turk.” The Ottoman (Turkish) Empire was still a great power in 1851. To Western readers of the time, the Turkish sultan and his harem were a byword for luxury, idleness, and sexual excess — a stereotype that historians now call Orientalism, and one that tells us more about Western fantasies than about actual Ottoman household life. Melville’s whole comic apparatus in this chapter (Ottoman, harem, concubines, Bashaw, Grand Turk) runs on that stereotype. On-air note: worth a sentence acknowledging it as a period stereotype. ↩
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Size difference — accurate. Sperm whales have one of the largest differences in size between the sexes of any mammal: adult females typically reach about 36–40 feet and roughly 15 tons, while big males reach 50–60 feet and 40–45 tons or more — so “one-third of the bulk” is about right. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale ↩
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“embonpoint” — MEL: “en bon point: enbonpoint (French), plumpness.” A polite word for a well-rounded figure. The joke builds from “delicate” ladies to “not to exceed half a dozen yards round the waist” (eighteen feet!) to the dainty French euphemism. ↩
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“Like fashionables” — the whales follow a social calendar like wealthy society families of the 1840s, who moved between city, spa, and seaside resort (Saratoga Springs and Newport were the great American summer destinations). “The Line” is the Equator, and “the promenade of the Equator” turns the ocean into a resort boardwalk where people stroll to see and be seen. Sperm whales really do make seasonal movements, though not as neatly as this. ↩
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“Bashaw” — MEL: “also Pasha; honorific Turkish title, implying, for Western readers, a proud, overbearing man.” It was a high Ottoman rank (a provincial governor or general). Later in this paragraph the chapter also uses “Grand Turk,” a Western name for the Ottoman sultan himself. ↩
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🅱️ BENTLEY CHANGE — “all fish bed in common” — MEL’s Revision Narrative 1: “Lothario is the ‘haughty, gallant, gay [carefree]’ male lover in Nicholas Rowe’s highly popular play The Fair Penitent (1703), and well before the nineteenth century, a ‘Lothario’ had become any adventurous, usually heartless, ‘love-‘em-and-leave-‘em’ libertine.” MEL explains that “Melville was on precarious ground, and knew it,” because the sexual jokes in Typee had already been cut down by his brother and his editors, and suggests that “Wary of further censorings by the British, Melville may have censored himself” in this and the next paragraph, with “three major and two minor revisions.” In the British edition this line became: “he cannot always frustrate the most notorious Lothario […]; for, alas! all fish have very vague ideas of the connubial tie.” MEL: “Melville, rather than an editor, was probably responsible.” American: whales share beds. British: whales are vague about marriage. See: https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/editions/versions-of-moby-dick/88-schools-schoolmasters ↩
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Male combat — real. Male sperm whales are commonly found with scars on their heads made by other males’ teeth, and whalers recorded bulls with broken and twisted jaws, as Melville says. The comparison to elk locking antlers is apt: rival males fighting for access to females. ↩
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🅱️ BENTLEY CUT — Solomon — MEL: “The biblical king had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, ‘and his wives turned away his heart’ from God (1 Kings 11.3–4).” See 1 Kings 11:3–4. The joke is in “pious” and “devoutly”: the Bible says those thousand women led Solomon away from God. MEL’s Revision Narrative 2: “As part of the Lothario revisions … Melville or an editor may have deleted this withering and ironical (hence disrespectful) comparison to Solomon and his many concubines.” It’s missing from the British edition. ↩
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🅱️ BENTLEY CUT — the “unctuousness” joke — the most carefully hidden sexual joke in the chapter. MEL’s Revision Narrative 3: “The joke in this deleted clause is cleverly concealed; Melville may have decided to dispense with it, although an editor may have caught on and cut it as well. The joke—that a Grand Turk whale is not worth hunting because he uses up his ‘unctuousness’ (oiliness) among the ladies of his harem—plays on the long-dismissed notion (mentioned in Ch. 32) that spermaceti is actually semen.” In other words: the harem-master has spent his sperm oil. (That same old confusion is behind the whale’s very name, and behind Ch. 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand.“) Cut from the British edition. On-air: this is a prime example of Melville saying the outrageous thing while appearing to talk about oil yields. ↩
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“roving lovers that might be named” — the obvious candidates are sailors themselves, famous for leaving children in ports around the world. Whaling crews spent months at a time in Pacific islands and ports, and Melville’s readers would have caught the implication. Some readers also hear Lord Byron (the most famous roving lover of the age) behind “might be named.” On-air hedge: Melville doesn’t name anyone; the sailor reading is the safe one. “Bower” — MEL: “woman’s bedroom.” He has “no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower”: interested in the bedroom, not the children. ↩
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🅱️ BENTLEY CHANGES — “impotent” and “amorous” — MEL’s Revision Narrative 4–5: “As part of the Lothario revisions, Melville or an editor might have made two single-word changes. ‘Impotent’ is deleted entirely, and ‘amorous’ is revised to ‘juvenile.‘” So in the British edition the old whale simply becomes “repentant, admonitory,” and warns young whales from their “juvenile errors” rather than their “amorous errors” at the end of this sentence. The American version is plainer: he preaches virtue because he can no longer practice vice. That’s a satire of every reformed rake turned moralist. ↩
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Vidocq — MEL: “In his 1828–29 ghost-written autobiography, Eugène François Vidocq (1775–1857), first a criminal and later chief of detectives in Paris, claims that disguised as a friar, he taught at a country school where he seduced his female students.” So “the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils” is another carefully veiled sexual joke. Vidocq was an international celebrity; he’s often called the first modern detective, and he inspired characters in Balzac, Hugo, and Poe. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Fran%C3%A7ois_Vidocq ↩
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The lone old bull — true to observation. The largest, oldest male sperm whales are usually found alone, often in cold high-latitude waters, which is exactly where whalers met them. Keep this solitary old bull in mind: the White Whale himself is an ancient, solitary male. ↩
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Daniel Boone — MEL: “The legendary American pioneer (1734–1820) whom James Fenimore Cooper called ‘the patriarch of Kentucky’ moved farther west as the frontier advanced, and died in Missouri.” Boone was famous for moving on whenever neighbors got too close. The old whale, like Boone, “takes [Nature] to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.” ↩
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“forty-barrel-bulls” — named for the oil they yield: about forty barrels (a whaling barrel held 31½ gallons), compared with 80–100 or more from a big old bull. MEL notes that “This paragraph and the next closely follow the descriptions in Thomas Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale” — one of Melville’s key sources, written by a ship’s surgeon who had sailed on British whalers. ↩
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“penal gout” — MEL: “painful inflammation of the joints, typically affecting older men; in this case a punitive ailment caused by rich food, and drink.” Gout was the classic disease of rich old men — the “penalty” for years of good living. The grizzled old whale is as short-tempered as a gouty old gentleman. ↩
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“a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard” — a nice bit of self-reference. Melville never went to college, and Ishmael said so proudly in Ch. 24 (“The Advocate”): “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” College students of the 1840s had a well-earned reputation for drinking, pranks, and riots. The young bulls are rowdy undergraduates. ↩
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“settlements” — MEL: “matrimony; settling down.” A “settlement” was also the legal arrangement of property at a marriage. The college boys grow up and look for wives. ↩
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Loyalty and the hunt — this closing observation is accurate and has a dark side. Modern observers have seen female sperm whales gather around an injured member, sometimes in a defensive circle with heads together and tails outward (called a “marguerite” or rosette formation). Whalers knew this and exploited it: strike one female or calf, and the rest would stay close enough to be killed too. The chapter ends its jokes on a note of sympathy — the females’ loyalty is what gets them killed. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale#Social_structure ↩