The number of supplies, and the variety of articles required in fitting out a whaling ship for a cruise, was, of course, prodigious. For aside from the articles required in whaling, it was necessary that a whaling vessel should sail prepared for any emergency, and equipped to be absolutely independent of the rest of the world for years at a time, housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers and bankers. Aside from the necessary whaling equipment, there were needed supplies for the men, ship’s stores and a dizzy number of incidentals: “spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and a duplicate ship.... While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves, the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had come; they would answer—‘Well, boys, here’s the ark!’” N. H. Nye, a New Bedford outfitter, published in 1858 an inventory of Articles for a Whaling Voyage: a shopping list totalling some 650 entries, useful once to whalers with fallible memories, useful now to landsmen with lame imaginations.
When, from such a port as Nantucket or New Bedford, a whaling vessel was preparing to sail, there would be no house, perhaps, without some interest in the cruise. Each took a personal pride in the success of the whalers: a pride clinched by the economic dependence of nearly every soul in the community upon the whalemen’s luck. During the time of continual fetching and carrying preparatory to the sailing in Moby-Dick, no one was more active, it will be remembered, than Aunt Charity Bildad, that lean though kind-hearted old Quakeress of indefatigable spirit. “At one time she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic back.” Hither and thither she bustled about, “ready to turn her hand and her heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.” Nor did she forsake the ship even after it had been hauled out from the wharf. She came off in the whaleboat with a nightcap for the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward. Such were the conditions in whaling-towns like Nantucket or New Bedford that there was nothing remarkable in Aunt Charity’s behaviour. In such communities, “whale was King.” The talk of the street was, as Abbot observes, of big catches and the price of oil and bone. The conversation in the shaded parlours, where sea-shell, coral, and the trophies of Pacific cruises were the chief ornaments, was, in an odd mixture of Quaker idiom, of prospective cruises or of past adventures, of distant husbands and sons, the perils they braved, and when they might be expected home. Col. Joseph C. Hart, in his Miriam Coffin, or the Whale Fishermen: a Tale (1834) offers perhaps the truest and most vivid picture of life in Nantucket when whaling was at its prime. Speaking of himself in the third person in the dedication, Hart describes his book as being “founded on facts, and illustrating some of the scenes with which he was conversant in his earlier days, together with occurrences with which he is familiar from tradition and association.” Though reprinted in California in 1872, Miriam Coffin is now very difficult to come by. It should be better known.
The extended voyages of the American whaleman were made in heavy, bluff-bowed and “tubby” crafts that were designed with fine contempt for speed, comfort or appearance. In writing of Nantucket whaling during the period about 1750, Macy says: “They began now to employ vessels of larger size, some of 100 ton burden, and a few were square-rigged.” For over a century thereafter the changes in whaling vessels were almost solely in size. With the opening of the Pacific, the longer voyages and the desire for larger cargoes led, as a necessary result, to the employment of larger vessels. The first Nantucket ship sailing to the Pacific in 1791 was of 240-ton burden. By 1826, Nantucket had seventy-two ships carrying over 280 tons each, and before 1850 whalers of 400 to 500 tons burden were not unusual. The Acushnet, it will be remembered, was rated as a ship of 359 tons.
The vessels used in whaling, built, as has been said, less with a view to speed than to carrying capacity, had a characteristic architecture. The bow was scarce distinguishable from the stern by its lines, and the masts stuck up straight, without that rake which adds so much to the trim appearance of a clipper. Three peculiarities chiefly distinguished the whalers from other ships of the same general character. (1) At each mast head was fixed the “crow’s-nest”—in some vessels a heavy barrel lashed to the mast, in others merely a small platform laid on the cross-trees, with two hoops fixed to the mast above, within which the look-out could stand in safety. Throughout Melville’s experiences at sea, in the merchant marines, in whalers, and in the navy, it appears that his happiest moments were spent on mast-heads. (2) On the deck, amidships, stood the “try-works,” brick furnaces holding two or three great kettles, in which the blubber was reduced to odourless oil. (3) Along each rail were heavy, clumsy wooden cranes, or davits, from which hung the whale boats—never less than five, sometimes more—while still others were lashed to the deck. For these boats were the whales’ sport and playthings, and seldom was a big “fish” made fast without there being work made for the ship’s carpenter.
As for the crow’s-nest, and the business of standing mast-heads, Melville has more than a word to say. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the Garden of Cyrus of “the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered,” to find, as Coleridge remarks, “quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything,” so Melville finds the visible and invisible universe a symbolic prefiguring of all the detailed peculiarities of whaling. In the town of Babel he finds a great stone mast-head that went by the board in the dread gale of God’s wrath; and in St. Simon Stylites, he discovers “a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads, who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.” And in Napoleon upon the top of the column of Vendome, in Washington atop his pillar in Baltimore, as in many another man of stone or iron or bronze, he sees standers of mast-heads.
In most American whalemen, the mast-heads were manned almost simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; and this even though she often had fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail before reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage, she found herself drawing near home with empty casks, then her mast-heads were frequently kept manned, even until her skysail-poles sailed in among the spires of her home port.
The three mast-heads were kept manned from sunrise to sunset, the seamen taking regular turns (as at the helm) and relieving each other every two hours, watching to catch the faint blur of vapour whose spouting marks the presence of a whale. “There she blows! B-l-o-o-ws! Blo-o-ows!” was then sung out from the mast-head: the signal for the chase.
As for Melville, he tries to convince us he kept very sorry watch, as in the serene weather of the tropics, he perched “a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the huge monsters of the deep, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus of old Rhodes.” There, through his watches, he used to swing, he says, “lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor.” “I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the topsail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.” According to Melville’s own representation, the Acushnet was not a pint of oil richer for all his watching in the thought-engendering altitude of the crow’s-nest. He admonishes all ship-owners of Nantucket to eschew the bad business of shipping “romantic, melancholy, absent-minded young men, disgusted with the cankering cares of earth”: young men seeking sentiment—as did he—in tar and blubber. “Childe Harold not infrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whaleship,” he warns prosaic ship-owners, “young men hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition,” and indifferent to the selling qualities of “oil and bone.” It is well both for Melville and Captain Pease, the testy old skipper of the ship Acushnet, that he could not see into the head of Melville as he hung silently perched in his dizzy lookout. “Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.”
When, from the mast-head, eyes less abstracted than Melville’s sighted a whale, the daring and excitement of the ensuing pursuit in the whale-boats left Melville less occasion, during such energetic intervals, to luxuriate in high mysteries. And it seems likely that Melville was of more value to the ship’s owners when in a whale-boat than riding the mast-head.
Through long years of whaling these boats had been developed until practical perfection had been reached. Never has boat been built which for speed, staunchness, seaworthiness and hardiness excels the whaleboat of the Massachusetts whalemen. These mere cockleshells, sharp at both ends and clean-sided as a mackerel, were about twenty-seven feet long by six feet beam, with a depth of twenty-two inches amidships and thirty-seven inches at the bow and stern. These tiny clinker-built craft can ride the heaviest sea, withstand the highest wind, resist the heaviest gale. Incredible voyages have been made in these whaling boats, not the least remarkable being the three months’ voyage of two boats that survived the wreck of the Essex in 1819, or the even more remarkable six months’ voyage of the whaling boat separated from the Janet in 1849. In Mardi Melville describes a prolonged voyage in a whale-boat. In this account Melville takes one down to the very plane of the sea. He is speaking from experience when he says: “Unless the waves, in their gambols, toss you and your chip upon one of their lordly crests, your sphere of vision is little larger than it would be at the bottom of a well. At best, your most extended view in any one direction, at least, is in a high slow-rolling sea; when you descend into the dark misty spaces, between long and uniform swells. Then, for the moment, it is like looking up and down in a twilight glade, interminable; where two dawns, one on each hand, seem struggling through the semi-transparent tops of the fluid mountains.”