The thieves there, they are thicker
Than the other side of Hell.
They tell you of the whaling ships
A-going in and out.
They swear you’ll make your fortune
Before you’re five months out.
The second half of this ballad celebrates the hardships of life aboard ship: the poor food and the brutality of the officers. With this side of whaling we know that Melville was familiar. But of the usual preliminaries of whaling recounted by Browne and summarised in the chantey, Melville says not a word, either in Moby-Dick or elsewhere. Nor does tradition or history supplement this autobiographical silence. On this point, we know nothing. Surely it would be intensely interesting to know how far egotism conspired with art in guiding Melville in the writing of the masterful beginning of Moby-Dick.
No matter by what process Melville found his way to the Acushnet, the whaling fleet was, indeed, at the time of his addition to it, “a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy.” J. Ross Browne was warned before his sailing that New Bedford “was the sink-hole of iniquity; that the fitters were all blood-suckers, the owners cheats, and the captains tyrants.”
Though the arraignment was incautiously comprehensive, Browne confesses to have looked back upon it as a sound warning. The boasted advantages of whaling were not selfishly withheld from any man, no matter what the race, or the complexion of his hide or his morals. The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, English, Scotch, Irish, in fact, men of almost every country of Europe, and this with no jealous discrimination against Asia, Africa, or the Islands of the Pacific, were drawn upon by the whale fleet during the days of its greatest prosperity. “And had I not been, from my birth, as it were, a cosmopolite,” Melville remarks parenthetically in Redburn. It would have been difficult for him to find a more promising field for the exercise of this inherited characteristic, than was whaling in 1841: and this, indeed, without the nuisance of leaving New Bedford. “In thoroughfares nigh the docks,” he says, “any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest nondescripts from foreign ports. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and in Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.” It will be remembered that Ishmael spends his first night in New Bedford in bed with one of these very cannibals; and on the following morning, in a spirit of amiable and transcendent charity, goes down on his knees with his tattooed bed-fellow before a portable wooden deity: an experience fantastic and highly diverting, nor at all outside the bounds of possibility. It is a fact to chasten the optimism of apostles of the promiscuous brotherhood of man, that as the whaling crews grew in cosmopolitanism, they made no corresponding advances towards the Millennium. Had Nantucket and New Bedford but grown to the height of their whaling activities in the fourth century, they might have sent enterprising agents to the African desert to tempt ambitious cenobites with offers of undreamed-of luxuries of mortification. These holy men might have worked miracles in whaling, and transformed the watery wilderness of the Pacific into a floating City of God. But in the nineteenth century of grace, the kennel-like forecastle of the whaler was the refuge not of the athletic saint, but of the offscourings of all races, the discards of humanity, and of this fact there is no lack of evidence. Nor did Melville’s ship-mates, on the whole, seem to have varied this monotony. There survives this record in his own hand:
“What became of the ship’s company on the whale-ship ‘Acushnet,’ according to Hubbard who came back home in her (more than a four years’ voyage) and visited me in Pittsfield in 1850.