In his ocean home will be
A giant in might, where might is right,
And King of the boundless sea.”
Rather than conventionally distribute his quotations throughout the book as chapter headings, Melville offers them all in a block at the beginning of the volume, somewhat after the manner of Franklin’s grace said over the pork barrel. And extraordinarily effective is this device of Melville’s in stirring the reader’s interest to a sense of the wonder and mystery of this largest of all created live things, of the wild and distant seas wherein he rolls his island bulk; of the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds. Even before the reader comes to the superb opening paragraph of Moby-Dick, the great flood-gates of the wonder-world are swung open, and into his inmost soul, as into Melville’s, “two by two there float endless processions of the whale, and midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”
The literature of whaling slopes down from Moby-Dick, both before and after, into a wilderness of several hundred volumes.
There is but one attempt at a comprehensive history of whaling: Walter S. Tower’s A History of the American Whale Fishery (Philadelphia, 1907). This slender volume first makes a rapid survey of the sources and proceeds from these to a cautious selection of the outstanding documented facts which by “economic interpretation” it presents as a consecutive story. Devoid of literary pretension, it is admirable in accuracy, compactness and clarity. The most comprehensive popular treatment of American whaling is to be found in Hyatt Verrill’s The Real Story of the Whaler (1916): a more exuberant but less workmanly book than Tower’s. Representative shorter surveys are to be found both in Winthrop L. Martin’s very able The American Merchant Marine (1902) and Willis J. Abbot’s American Merchant Ships and Sailors (1902).
Although the literature of whaling extends by repeated dilutions from “economic interpretations” to infant books, the classical sources for this extended literature tally less than a score. The great work on the Fisheries and Fishing Industries of the United States, prepared under the direction of G. Brown Goode in 1884, contains two articles on whaling of the first magnitude of importance: Whalemen, Vessels, Apparatus and Methods of the Whale Fishery and a History of the Present Condition of the Whale Fishery. The facts presented in these last two encyclopædic treatments are drawn principally from Alexander Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1874, published in 1876, and C. M. Scammon’s Marine Mammals of the North Western Coast of North America, with an Account of the American Whale Fishery, published in 1874. Lorenzo Sabine’s Report on the Principal Fisheries of the American Seas, published in 1870, while prior to the monumental works of Starbuck and Scammon in date of publication, enjoys no other priority. The most complete and detailed treatment of the origin and early development of whaling is to be found in William Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions, dated 1820. Scoresby—“the justly renowned,” according to Melville; “the excellent voyager”—was an English naval officer, and in his discussion of the whale fishery he deals solely with the European and principally with the British industry. But Scoresby’s book is principally a classic as regards the earlier history of whaling. Scoresby seems to have convinced all later historians in this field of the folly of further research. Melville knew Scoresby’s book—“I honour him for a veteran,” Melville confesses—and drew from its erudition in Moby-Dick. Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket, published in 1836, is one of the few important original sources for the history of whaling, and the most readable. Melville expresses repeated indebtedness to Macy. Macy’s record has the tang of first-hand experience, and the flavour of local records. Because of the fact that many of the records from which this fine old antiquary of whales drew have since been destroyed by fire, his book enjoys the heightened authority of being a unique source. According to Anatole France, the perplexities of historians begin where events are related by two or by several witnesses, “for their evidence is always contradictory and always irreconcilable.” The fire at Nantucket blazed a royal road to truth. Daniel Ricketson, in his History of New Bedford (1850) attempted to emulate Macy. And though Ricketson’s sources, as Macy’s, have been largely destroyed by fire, his authority, though irrefutable in so far as it goes, is less detailed and comprehensive.
THROWING THE HARPOON
