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.
These scenes, part nightmare and part romance, are some of the most memorable in Victorian literature, so vividly written one might almost believe the author had experienced them himself. But when he arrived at the wintry port in the Christmas of 1840, Melville stayed on the opposite side of the river, at Fairhaven. He was accompanied by Gansevoort, who bought his younger brother the items he needed: an oilskin suit, a red flannel shirt, duck trousers; a straw tick, pillow and blankets; a sheath knife and fork, a tin spoon and plate; a sewing kit, soap, razor, dirty bag; and a sea chest in which to store them.
30 December 1840
LIST OF PERSONS
COMPRISING THE CREW OF THE SHIP ACUSHNET OF FAIRHAVEN
Whereof the Master, Valentine Pease, bound for Pacific Ocean
| NAMES | PLACES OF BIRTH | PLACES OF RESIDENCE | OF WHAT COUNTRY CITIZENS OR SUBJECTS |
| Herman Melville | Fairhaven | New York | US |
DESCRIPTION OF THEIR PERSONS
| AGE | HEIGHT FEET INCHES | COMPLEXION | HAIR |
| 21 | 5 9 ½ | Dark | Brown |
Of the twenty-six men about to sail on the Acushnet, all had a share or lay in her future–fractions as eloquent as any amount of gold braid. Captain Pease, master and part owner, claimed 1/12 of all profits; the first officer, Frederic Raymond of Nantucket, 1/25. As a foremost hand, Melville’s lay was 1/75; while lowly Carlos Green of New York–a true greenhand–could expect just 1/190. For some, even that was welcome, not least William Maiden, the cook, and deckhands Thomas Johnson and Enoch Read, whose complexions were recorded as black or mulatto. They had ever laboured under a master; now they had signed away their lives to the whale.
The Acushnet was fresh off the production line; at the peak of the whaling boom, new whale-ships were said to be built by the mile, ‘chopped off the line, like sausages’. Others were converted liners or packets. ‘Thus the ship that once carried over gay parties of ladies and gentlemen, as tourists, to Liverpool or London, now carries a crew of harpooneers round Cape Horn into the Pacific’. Quarterdecks where the gentry once took the sea air now reeked of whale oil. ‘Plump of hull and long of spar’, the Acushnet was 104 feet long, 27 feet wide and 13 feet deep.