Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

SOUNDING

Of published personal narrative of whale-hunting, Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Ship Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket, published in 1821, as well as F. D. Bennett’s two-volume Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, published 1833-36, were drawn from by Melville in Moby-Dick. The account of the sinking of the Essex is important as being the source from which Melville borrowed, with superb transformation, the catastrophe with which he closes Moby-Dick. The sinking of the Essex—recounted in Moby-Dick—is the first and best known instance of a ship being actually sent to the bottom by the ramming of an infuriated whale, and in its sequel it is one of the most dreadful chapters of human suffering in all the hideous annals of shipwreck. “I have seen Owen Chase,” Melville says in Moby-Dick, “who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy: I have read his plain and faithful narrative: I have conversed with his son; and all within a few miles of the scene of the tragedy.” Melville may here be using a technique learned from Defoe.

Though in Moby-Dick Melville makes several references to J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes on a Sojourn on the Island of Zanzibar, mildly praising some of his drawings while reprobating their reproduction, he owes no debt to J. Ross Browne. Melville and Browne wrote of whaling with purposes diametrically opposed. Melville gloried in the romance of whales, and horsed on Leviathan, through a briny sunset dove down through the nether-twilight into the blackest haunted caverns of the soul. Browne provokes no such rhetorical extravagance of characterisation. He sat soberly and firmly down on a four-legged chair before a four-legged desk and wrote up his travels. “My design,” he says, “is simply to present to the public a faithful delineation of the life of a whaleman. In doing this, I deem it necessary that I should aim rather at the truth itself than at mere polish of style.” So Browne made a virtue of necessity, and convinced that “history scarcely furnishes a parallel for the deeds of cruelty” then “prevalent in the whale fishery,” he sent his book forth “to show in what manner the degraded condition of a portion of our fellow-creatures can be ameliorated.” In a study of Melville’s life, Browne is important as presenting an ungarnished account of typical conditions aboard a whaler at the time Melville was cruising in the Acushnet. Useful in the same way are R. Delano’s Wanderings and Adventures; Being a Narrative of Twelve Years’ Life in a Whaleship (1846) and Captain Davis’ spirited overhauling of his journal kept during a whaling trip, published in 1872 under the title Nimrod of the Sea.

Though whales and Pilgrim Fathers would, at first blush, seem to belong to two mutually repugnant orders of nature, yet were they, by force of circumstance, early thrown into a warring intimacy. And strangely enough, in this armed alliance, it was the whale who made the first advances. Richard Mather, who came to Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635, records in his journal, according to Sabine, the presence off the New England coast of “mighty whales spewing up water in the air like the smoke of a chimney ... of such incredible bigness that I will never wonder that the body of Jonah could be in the belly of a whale.” From this and other evidence it seems undoubted that in early colonial days whales were undaunted by the strict observances of the Pilgrims, and browsed in great numbers, even on Sabbath, within the sight of land. Yet, despite this open violation of Scripture, the resourceful Puritan pressed them into the service of true religion. Believing that

Whales in the sea

God’s voice obey,

they tolerated leviathan as an emissary more worthy than Elijah’s raven. And whenever an obedient whale, harkening to the voice of God in the wilderness, was cast ashore, a part of his bulk was fittingly appropriated for the support of the ministry.

Tower establishes the fact that among the first colonists there were men at least acquainted with, if not actually experienced in whaling. And it is quite generally accepted that the settlement of Massachusetts was prompted not only by a protestant determination to worship God after the dictates of a rebellious conscience, but by a no less firm determination to vary Sunday observances with the enjoyment on secular days of unrestricted fishing. As a result of this double Puritan interest in worship and whaling, the history of the American whaling fishery begins almost with the settlement of the New England colonies.

By the end of the seventeenth century, whaling was established as a regular business, if still on a comparatively small scale, in the different Massachusetts colonies, especially from Cape Cod; from the towns at the eastern end of Long Island, and from Nantucket. With the very notable exceptions of New London, Connecticut, and New Bedford and the neighbouring ports in Buzzard’s Bay, every locality subsequently to become important in its whaling interests was well launched in this enterprise before 1700. New London did not begin whaling until the middle of the eighteenth century. New Bedford, though almost the last place to appear as a whaling port—and this immediately before the Revolution—was destined to stand, within a century after its beginnings in whaling, the greatest whaling port the world has ever known, the city which, in the full glory of whaling prosperity, would send out more vessels than all other American ports combined.

The earliest colonial adventurers in whaling were men who by special appointment were engaged to be on the lookout for whales cast ashore. Emboldened by commerce with drift-whales, these Puritan whalemen soon took to boats to chase and kill whales which came close in, but which were not actually stranded.