“Those find, who most delight to roam
’Mid castles of remotest Spain
That there’s, thank Heaven, no place like home
So they put out upon their travels again.”
That Melville came to no very pleasant haven of refuge in the forecastle of the Acushnet is borne out by his drastic preference to be eaten by cannibals rather than abide among the sureties of the ship and her company. That he “left the ship, being oppressed with hard fare and hard usage, in the summer of 1842 with a companion, Richard T. Greene (Toby) at the bay of Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands” is the statement in the journal of his wife vividly elaborated in Typee.
Of Melville’s history aboard the Acushnet there is no straightforward account. Redburn, Typee, Omoo and White-Jacket are transparent chapters in autobiography. From his experiences on board the Acushnet Melville draws generously in Moby-Dick: but these experiences do not for one moment pretend to be the whole of the literal truth. Only an insanity as lurid as Captain Ahab’s would mistake Moby-Dick for a similarly reliable report of personal experiences. Moby-Dick is, indeed, an autobiography of adventure; but adventure upon the highest plane of spiritual daring. Incidentally, it also offers the fullest, and truest, and most readable history of an actual whaling cruise ever written. But it is not a “scientific” history. The “scientific” historian, proudly unreadable, thanks God that he has no style to tempt him out of the strict weariness of counting-house inventories; and in despair of presenting the truth, he boasts a make-shift veracity. The truest historians are, of course, the poets—and their histories are “feigned.” Melville, writing in the capacity of poet, was licensed in the best interests of truth to expurgate reality. And though Captain Ahab’s hunt of the abhorred Moby-Dick belongs as essentially to the realm of poetry as does the quest of the Holy Grail, it is, withal, in its lower reaches, so broadly based on a foundation of solid reality that it is possible, by considering Moby-Dick in double conjunction with the few facts explicitly known of Melville during the period of his whaling cruise, and the wealth of facts known of whaling in general, to block in, with a considerable degree of certainty, the contours of his experiences aboard the Acushnet.
By all odds, the chief chapter in the history of whaling is the story of its rise and practical extinction in the Southern New England States. In this limited geographical area, trade in “oil and bone” was pursued with an alacrity, an enterprise and a prosperity unparalleled in the world’s history. When, in 1841, Melville boarded the Acushnet, American whaling, after a development through nearly two centuries, was within a decade of its highest development, within two decades of its precipitous decay. The doom of whale-oil lamps and sperm candles was ultimately decided in 1859 with the opening of the first oil well in Pennsylvania, and sealed by the Civil War. Melville knew American whaling at the prime of its golden age, and taking it at its crest, he raised it in fiction to a dignity and significance incomparably higher than it ever reached in literal fact.
At the beginning of Moby-Dick, Melville culls from the most incongruous volumes an anthology of comments upon Leviathan, beginning with the Mosaic comment “And God created great whales,” and ending, after eclectic quotations from Pliny, Lucian, Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne, Spenser, Hobbes, Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Paley, Blackstone, Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, Darwin, and dozens of others (including an excerpt “From ‘Something’ Unpublished”) ends on the old whale song:
“Oh, the rare old whale, mid storm and gale