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🎤054 Moby Full Text Chs94-96

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Contents

CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand. CHAPTER 95. The Cassock. CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works. FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.

That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath1 of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! no wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition2 that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.3

Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.

First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—but still contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.4

Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros5 might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.

There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion;6 an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.

Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.

Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan’s tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.

But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally go in pairs,—a pike-and-gaff-man and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is similar to a frigate’s boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants’, would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.

CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.

Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,7—longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah8 in Judea; and for worshipping which, king Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the first book of Kings.

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus,9 as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.

That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves;10 what a candidate for an archbishoprick,11 what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!

Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.

CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.

Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works.12 She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.

The try-works are planted between the foremast and main-mast, the most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels’ capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them—one man in each pot, side by side—many confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time.13

Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.

It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.

“All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works.” This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr,14 or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the carcase; 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 lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.15 The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris,16 issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.

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 harpooneers, always the whale-ship’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, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were 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; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided 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.

But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!17

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp,18 nor Rome’s accursed Campagna,19 nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.20 “All is vanity”. ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau,21 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 tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i. e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead”.22 Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle23 in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

FOOTNOTES

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Footnotes

  1. Constantine’s bath: The Baths of Constantine — one of the great imperial public bathhouses of ancient Rome, built by Emperor Constantine I (r. 306–337 CE) on the Quirinal Hill. The Roman thermae were vast communal bathing complexes with cold, warm, and hot pools, and the largest of them could accommodate thousands of bathers simultaneously. Melville uses it as a shorthand for a large, communal, warm, pleasurable immersion — which is precisely what the spermaceti tub becomes. ↩

  2. Old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: Melville connects the calming effect of working with spermaceti to alchemical tradition — Paracelsus (1493–1541) and his followers believed that substances derived from living things carried residual vital properties that could influence the body and emotions. Spermaceti was used medicinally through the 18th century as an emollient and wound treatment; the “superstition” that it cooled anger and passion was part of this broader humoral-alchemical framework. The joke also works on the literal level: Ishmael has forgotten Ahab’s oath, which is the most dangerous anger on the ship. The sperm literally dissolves it, temporarily. ↩

  3. Long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti: One of the most celebrated images in the novel — and one of the funniest. The chapter has been building toward genuine transcendence, and Melville lands it here in a vision that is simultaneously absurd and genuinely beautiful. Angels in paradise doing what Ishmael just did: squeezing spermaceti with one another in communal, sensory, blissful labor. This is Melville’s answer to Ahab’s hellfire vision of the try-works two chapters later — here is what heaven looks like. Worth B-block time: the chapter enacts the experience it describes. Reading it, you actually feel the warmth and the slowness. ↩

  4. Berkshire marble: Marble quarried in Berkshire County, Massachusetts — the same region where Melville was living and writing Moby-Dick at Arrowhead in Pittsfield. Berkshire marble is white to grey, fine-grained, and was widely used in New England building and sculpture in the 19th century. It’s a quietly domestic, local image in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. ↩

  5. Louis le Gros: Louis VI of France (1081–1137), called “the Fat” (le Gros) — one of the most corpulent kings in French history, known for his appetite and his prodigious physical bulk. Melville is imagining what a prime cut of this particular royal carcass might have tasted like — it’s a spectacularly tasteless joke delivered with complete deadpan, comparing whale flesh to a king of France. ↩

  6. Slobgollion: A word Melville presents as original to the whalemen — and it apparently was. No earlier documented use of “slobgollion” appears in the literature outside of whaling contexts. It joins “gally,” “nipper,” “drugg,” and “waif” as part of Melville’s sustained argument (see the “gally” footnote in Ch. 87) that working-class maritime vocabulary preserves a living, inventive linguistic tradition that polite society misses or dismisses. ↩

  7. That unaccountable cone: MEL is explicit here: this is the whale’s penis. Melville never names it directly — he approaches the subject “darkly,” as he says of the biblical text he’s about to cite, through allusion and euphemism. The strategy is characteristically Melvillian: say the outrageous thing by not saying it, trusting your reader to follow, and using the indirection itself as a form of comedy. Modern readers sometimes miss the joke; 19th-century readers who caught it would have found it either very funny or very offensive. ↩

  8. Queen Maachah and King Asa: 1 Kings 15:11–13 — “And Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord… And also Maachah his mother, even her he removed from being queen, because she had made an idol in a grove; and Asa destroyed her idol, and burnt it by the brook Kidron.” MEL’s annotation notes that the idol in question was a phallic idol — the biblical text handles it obliquely (“an idol in a grove”), but commentators had long identified it as such. Melville is pointing to a biblical passage that itself treats the subject “darkly” — exactly what he is doing in Ch. 95. He is imitating scripture’s own decorum while winking about what both texts are actually describing. ↩

  9. Grandissimus: The sailors’ term for the whale’s penis — “the great one” or “the greatest one,” from Latin grandis (great) with the superlative suffix. MEL confirms this is the term as used in the actual fishery, not Melville’s invention. The word is deployed with maximum dignity and minimum explanation. ↩

  10. Bible leaves: The term the mates shout at the mincer to cut the blubber as thinly as possible — thin slices render their oil more quickly and completely in the try-works. The phrase works on two levels: literal (thin as Bible paper, the thinnest paper most people handled regularly) and satirical (the mincer, in his cassock, standing at his pulpit, cutting Bible leaves, is a complete clerical parody). Melville includes this as his own footnote in the text. ↩

  11. Archbishoprick: Melville’s spelling — with the anatomical pun on “prick” — is deliberate. MEL cites scholar Dennis Berthold’s argument that the final lines of Ch. 95 may contain an allusion to Archbishop John Hughes of New York, who was a polarizing figure in 1850–51 for his support of Catholic institutional power at a moment of intense anti-Catholic sentiment. Whether or not the specific allusion holds, the punning title is entirely intentional: the whole chapter builds to this word, and Melville knew exactly what he was doing. ↩

  12. Try-works: The brick furnace and iron try-pots built permanently into the deck of a sperm whaling ship, used to render blubber into oil at sea. The innovation of at-sea rendering was what made long-voyage sperm whaling commercially viable — rather than salting blubber and carrying it home to render (as the Greenland right whale fishery did, with the results Ishmael described in Ch. 92), Southern whalers could render, cask, and store the finished oil on the same voyage. The try-works sat on a water-filled metal tray to prevent the wooden deck from catching fire. They were fired first with wood, then fed with the rendered blubber “fritters” — the whale burning in its own fat, as Ishmael notes. ↩

  13. All bodies gliding along the cycloid will descend from any point in precisely the same time: A real mathematical fact — the tautochrone property of the cycloid, proved by Christiaan Huygens in 1659. A cycloid is the curve traced by a point on the rim of a rolling circle. On a cycloidal surface, a ball released from any point will reach the bottom in the same time, regardless of starting height. Melville presents Ishmael having this genuine mathematical insight while polishing a try-pot with a circular soapstone — it’s a perfect Melvillian moment: profound geometry discovered during menial labor in an iron pot on a whale ship. ↩

  14. A plethoric burning martyr: MEL documents that the British Bentley edition removed this phrase — “plethoric burning martyr” was considered verging on blasphemy, with its implied comparison of the burning whale to Christian martyrs burned at the stake. “Plethoric” (meaning an excess of blood, pathologically full-blooded) was also considered objectionable. The American edition keeps both the image and the word. This is one of the cleaner examples of British editorial censorship in the novel. ↩

  15. Greek fire: Greek fire — the incendiary weapon developed by the Byzantine Empire, first used in the 7th century CE, which burned on water and could not be extinguished. Its exact formula remains unknown; it was probably based on naphtha or petroleum with quicklime and other additives. It was deployed from ships through bronze siphons and was one of the most feared naval weapons of the medieval Mediterranean. The image of the Pequod’s rigging lit by the try-works as if by Greek fire makes the ship itself into a Byzantine weapon — burning, unquenchable, sailing through darkness toward destruction. ↩

  16. Canaris / the Hydriote fire ships: Konstantinos Kanaris (c. 1793–1877), the celebrated Greek naval hero of the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829). A native of the island of Psara, he became famous for his fire-ship attacks on the Ottoman fleet — most notably in June 1822, when he stealthily brought a fire ship alongside the Ottoman flagship at Chios, set it ablaze, and destroyed it along with its admiral and hundreds of crew. Hydra and Psara were the great fire-ship islands of the Greek war. Melville’s European and American readers would have recognized Canaris immediately as a romantic hero of a cause that had attracted enormous sympathy in the West, including Lord Byron. The burning Pequod driving on through midnight darkness is Canaris’s fire ship bearing down on the Turkish fleet — beautiful, terrible, and doomed. ↩

  17. Brought by the lee: A sailing emergency in which the wind suddenly shifts to the opposite side of the sails, violently throwing the boom across the deck and threatening to capsize the vessel. It is one of the most dangerous accidental maneuvers on a sailing ship. Ishmael, hypnotized by the try-works fire, has fallen asleep at the helm and turned himself around — he is steering blind, facing the wrong direction, the ship rushing toward catastrophe. The physical near-disaster is also the chapter’s central metaphor: stare into the fire too long and you lose your direction entirely. ↩

  18. Virginia’s Dismal Swamp: The Great Dismal Swamp, a vast swampy wilderness spanning the Virginia–North Carolina border — roughly 112,000 acres of dense forest, peat bog, and dark water. It was a notorious refuge for escaped enslaved people before and during the Civil War era, and a place of genuine danger and myth. Melville lists it alongside the Campagna and the Sahara as things the sun illuminates but cannot cure — places the light falls on that remain dark. ↩

  19. Rome’s accursed Campagna: The Roman Campagna — the flat, marshy plain surrounding Rome, which in Melville’s era was notorious for malaria (literally “bad air”), poverty, and desolation. Once the agricultural heartland of the Roman Empire, it had become largely depopulated and disease-ridden by the medieval period and remained so into the 19th century. The contrast between Rome’s imperial grandeur and the malarial wasteland surrounding it was a stock image of romantic pessimism. ↩

  20. Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe: MEL’s annotation: “Jesus, as prefigured in Isaiah 53.3, is the Man of Sorrows. The book of Ecclesiastes is attributed to King Solomon. Steel, hard yet flexible, can be hammered into a fine sword that will bend without breaking.” Ecclesiastes opens: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Melville quotes “All is vanity” in full caps — it is the novel’s thesis statement about consciousness and meaning, held against Ahab’s monomania, and it is Ishmael’s deepest anchor. The book of Ecclesiastes — which claims that all human striving, wisdom, and achievement is hevel (breath, vapor, vanity) — was Melville’s book. He called Solomon “unchristian” as a compliment: Solomon knew too much to offer false comfort. ↩

  21. Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau: Four writers associated with a melancholy or tragic view of human life. William Cowper (1731–1800) — English poet, suffered severe depression and religious despair; author of “The Castaway” (see Ch. 93 footnote). Edward Young (1683–1765) — English poet, author of Night Thoughts, a long meditation on death, grief, and immortality. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) — French mathematician and philosopher, author of the Pensées, which meditate on human wretchedness and the need for faith. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) — Genevan philosopher who wrote Reveries of a Solitary Walker and other works from a position of paranoid isolation and personal suffering. Ishmael’s point: the man who dismisses all of these as “sick men” and prefers cheerful Rabelais has not lived enough to know the truth. MEL also notes that Cowper appears in the “Extracts” section at the opening of the novel. ↩

  22. “The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead”: Proverbs 21:16. Melville attributes it to Solomon — who is traditionally the author of both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. The verse lands as a warning: to give yourself up to the fire (Ahab’s path) is to wander from understanding and remain among the dead. Ishmael knows this because he nearly demonstrated it at the tiller. ↩

  23. A Catskill eagle: The Catskill Mountains of New York state — a landscape Melville knew well. The eagle image is the chapter’s final note and one of the novel’s most quoted passages: some souls can dive into the deepest darkness and still soar out of it, and even in their lowest dive they are higher than ordinary birds in their highest flight. It is Melville’s description of Ishmael — the consciousness that can look into the try-works fire, almost capsize the ship, and still find its way back to the compass. It is also, by contrast, a description of what Ahab cannot do: he enters the fire and cannot return. ↩

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