This is the ninth of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.
The next ten chapters culminate in a gam with the second foreign whale ship, this one from France—a major political and military power in Europe, but not in whaling. The French had always been landsmen, unlike the Spanish, the English, and the Americans.
Ishmael’s jibe at the falsehood of prophecy, following his more extensive debunking of science (the pride of modern Germany) in the previous chapter, proves a prelude to a more extensive satire on religion, rather along the lines of Voltaire, that quintessential French Enlightener. He begins with a chapter on “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” (glancing slyly at the last words of the Lord’s Prayer?), in which he playfully cites “the gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter,” as “the first whaleman.” He then proposes that the Christian hero, St. George, slayed not a dragon but a whale. More jovially still, he announces that “by the best contradictory authorities” we learn that the story of Hercules and the whale is said to derive from “the still more ancient story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa.” Ranging farther afield, he recalls that the Hindu god Vishnu manifested himself as a whale in the first of “his ten earthly incarnations,” in order to rescue the Vedas, then lying in the depths of the cosmic waters, books “whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation.” Greek polytheism, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism all amount to the same thing: vehicles for a mock-exaltation of whaling and a simultaneous undermining of religious authority.
Returning to Jonah, Ishmael remarks that a Sag-Harbor whaleman doubted the story, but in so doing only “evinced the foolish pride of reason,” a “foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy.” But “old Sag-Harbor” “had but little learning except what he had picked up from the sun and the sea”—that is, experience and commonsense thinking. After all, not only Catholic priests but “the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah.” What greater testimony do we need?
Exercising learning picked up from the sun and the sea, Queequeg prepared his whale-boat for a chase, which occurred the next morning; such learning produces more reliable predictions than alleged prophecy. This incident also provides Ishmael the chance to describe another practical way to kill whales. If a whale ‘runs’ too far and fast to make harpooning it prudent, an experienced whaler can pitchpole it instead. He takes a long lance designed for the purpose and hurls it at the whale; instead of embedding itself deeply into the whale, the lance wounds the whale, drawing blood. The whaler pulls it back and darts the whale repeatedly, causing the whale to die the proverbial death of a thousand cuts. Insofar as Ishmael has playfully compared the Sperm-Whale to a god, it might be said that his narrative aims at causing the idea of gods as handed down by prophetic tradition and orthodox churchmen to die such a death.
Nor is Ishmael done, turning next to the pretensions of philosophers. Ishmael addresses the question of whether the whale-spout is water or mist. The whale breathes through its spiracle, not its mouth; it has a network of blood vessels which acts as a storage place for the air it takes in, when on the surface of the ocean. This allows the whale to stay submerged for long periods of time, and to dive deep. “My hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist.” He bases this on no further empirical data, but upon “considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale,” a being “both ponderous and profound,” like Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil (presumably in Milton’s version), Dante, “and so on”—one must pause to admire that “and so on”—and therefore of the sort who emits “a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts.” After drinking six cups of hot tea in “my thin shingled attic,” on an August noon,” I myself, Ishmael, find moisture in my hair, if I have been “plunged in deep thought.” Not only that, but the whale-spout is often “glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal on his thoughts,” and rainbows never “visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor”—an observation gleaned from exact perception of experience, not from Scripture or scientific theory. In response to his own musings, Ishmael “thank[s] God”: “For all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” If science, religion, and philosophy all are dubious, then a cautious, overall agnosticism recommends itself to Melville’s yarn-spinner.
Ishmael then turns to an object of unquestionable power, the Sperm Whale’s tail. If whaling shares in the honor and glory owed God in the Lord’s Prayer, the unspoken third word, power, belongs to the whale, the object of the whalers’ hunt. “In the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.” “The whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof”—recall the mat Ishmael and Queequeg wove, symbol of the structure of the cosmos—”of muscular fibres and filaments” all running toward the two flukes of the tail, “contribut[ing] to their might.” “Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it,” exhibiting “a Titanism of power,” the power of the pre-Olympic gods, the pre-god gods. At the same time, even if the whale and its tail lack l’esprit de géométrie (generated by the brain), they do not lack l’esprit de finesse, as the tail undulates with ease: “Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it.” Indeed, “When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there,” very much in contrast with “the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures” of His Son, embodying “the mere negative, feminine [power] of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, for the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.” (Machiavelli concurs, commending lo Stato as the more effective preserver of human lives, if not necessarily their souls.) More, when he has seen “the gigantic tail” rising from the ocean Ishmael thinks of “majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic [Sea] of Hell”; if in a “Dantean” mood while viewing this sight, Ishmael envisions devils, “if in [the mood] of Isaiah, the archangels.” A pod of whales heading toward the sun, with their tails momentarily uplifted in preparation for a dive, recall visions of Persian fire worshippers, and, like the actions of gods, whale gestures often “remain wholly inexplicable.” “Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.” And if I cannot know the tail of the whale, how shall I comprehend his front, his face, especially “when face he has none”? Like the God of the Bible, “Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen.” Having disposed of the grander claims of science, religion, and philosophy—of systems—Ishmael here sketches a playfully proposed but seriously intended version of ‘natural religion.’ And generally, this and the four previous chapters show him treating the heavy, ponderous monster, whale or god, with a light touch, with a sort of gaya scienza that fits the Pequod‘s movement toward an encounter with a ship from France.
Before that encounter, the ship needed to pass through the Strait of Malacca, “the most southerly part of all Asia,” and the gateway to islands holding “inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory.” Although the Strait is easily navigable, real hazards abide there: pirates from Sumatra and Java. Although Ahab had no interest in the riches of the East, intending merely to get to the prime whaling-grounds on the far coast of Japan, the pirates would attack any kind of ship. And Ahab might have needed to linger there, out of token respect for his ostensible mission; the seas off Java also promise good whale-hunting.
Ishmael titles this chapter “The Grand Armada,” alluding to the Spanish expedition against England, and this seems apt. Like France (and England) Spain pioneered in building the modern, centralized state. The “armada” here consists of a confederation of whale pods. Under persistent attack from whaleships, Sperm Whales, like feudal dynasties, now often mass together; “it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection.” The Pequod‘s captain and crew found themselves in a double chase. To their rear, Malayan pirates pursued them; for their part, the American vessel chases an armada of whales. Ahab registered the irony. Whale-men, after all, amount to piratical raiders on the centrally-organized community—the ‘modern state’ or perhaps the ’empire’— of whales.
In numbers there is strength, but there is also disorder, inasmuch as the larger the community the more elements there are to coordinate. As the Pequod gained distance from the pirates and moved nearer the armada, the whales showed signs of panic; they were “gallied,” a word derived from the same root as “gallows,” and exhibiting some of the same terror gallows inspire. In one of his footnotes to his novel Melville offers an etymology of the word, arguing that it dates back to Saxon times, “emigrat[ing] to the New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth,” in a process by which “the best and furthest-descended English words”—the aristocrats of the language—”are now democratised, nay, plebeianized… in the New World.” Gallying does in fact reflect the regime of democracy, instancing the “occasional timidity… characteristic of all herding creatures,” not “outdone by the madness of men.” If the whale-armada resembles a modern state or empire, its regime resembles democracy.
Queequeg harpooned a whale, which headed for the center of the armada, dragging the boat along. The crewmen needed to maneuver through the thrashing mob of panicky whales. The whale worked its way off the harpoon, and the boat glided into the center of the whale-‘state.’ This gave Ishmael a rare look at the inner workings of the whales’ ‘regime,’ its way of life. “They say” an “enchanted calm lurks at the heart of every commotion,” and respecting the whale armada hearsay is correct. It was “as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold,” and they had found security there, “evinc[ing] a wondrous fearlessness and confidence” toward the whalers; “like household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them,” while allowing the sailors to touch them. Mating and nursing, the whales at the center of the armada form a ‘political’ inner Tahiti. Ishmael recalls “the sagacious saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish”—and it proved true, here; the Pequod‘s boats killed only one whale on this expedition. When pods band together in a large ‘modern state,’ it works as intended, providing effective defense against piratical raiders.
This ‘state’ does another thing modern states do: It sends out pioneers, called schools, some predominantly female, some consisting of young bulls. Typically, the female schools have “a male of full grown magnitude” as their escort or “schoolmaster,” whom Ishmael compares to a harem master of the Ottoman Empire, occasionally challenged by young bulls plotting a coup; “deadly battle, all for love,” ensues. If not deposed, the schoolmaster ages, if not gracefully. Gradually, the old ruler becomes “sulky,” eventually leaving the school and becoming an isolato, who “will have no one near him but Nature herself” (“and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets”). His final fate has already been described: the crippling, the blindness, the feebleness of senility. As for the schools consisting of young males, they do indeed resemble their human counterparts, “a mob of young collegians… full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard.” These schools dissolve when the collegians become old enough to go off in search of harems. Comparing the two types of whale-school, Ishmael finds that the males will ignore a stricken fellow, but if you “strike a member of the harem school… her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.” As with humans, the female is a more social animal than the male. Sociality without protection produces no isolatoes, but it can produce extra corpses.
Ishmael offers two more observations on piracy. The first concerns legal piracy. What happens if a whale killed by one ship gets loose in a storm, floats away, and another ship salvages it? American whalers have set down a pair of simple rules: A “Fast-Fish” (one tied to a ship) belongs to the party possessing it; a “Loose-Fish” belongs to “anybody who can soonest catch it.” As with all simple legal codes (as, for example, the Golden Rule, also consisting of two parts), its brevity “necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it,” to account for special cases, the vast variety of circumstances. In all this “will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence,” namely that possession is “half of the law” and often “the whole of the law.” The mansion of the criminal, the financier’s usury, the income of the clergyman of a poor congregation, the holdings of aristocrats, Ireland in relation to England, “that redoubted harpooneer”: What are all of these but Fast-Fish? And what was America in 1492, Poland to the Czar, Greece to the Turk, India to England, Mexico to the United States, if not Loose-Fish? More, “What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?”—up for grabs among political and military pirates. Or “all men’s minds and opinions,” including “the principle of religious belief in them” and “the thoughts of thinkers” to rhetoricians and sophists but Loose-Fish? Or the world? “And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?”—at times up for the taking, at other times a slave. English royals who by law claim title to the most valuable parts of every whale and even every sturgeon captured by English ships exemplify a sovereign piracy, but piracy itself is universal.
For his final observation on piracy, Ishmael introduces the Rose-Bud, a French ship which had acquired a dead whale harpooned and then lost by the Pequod‘s crew, under the Loose-Fish doctrine. France, a home of the Enlightenment critique of religion, of modern statism, of the Rights of Man, of monarchy (at this time, and for twenty years more), and finally of Romance (Rose-Bud “was the romantic name of this aromatic ship,” stinking of rotting whale-flesh), remains a land-power, inexperienced in whaling. The French are also inexperienced when it comes to Yankee bargaining. Mr. Stubb suspects that there may be ambergris in that whale-head; he talks the French captain into cutting it loose—something the French crew does quite happily, given the smell. The French go on their way, and Stubb harvests the ambergris, prize of his “unrighteous cunning” or verbal piracy. While “this most fragrant ambergris” accumulates in “the heart of such decay,” Ishmael finds no wonder in that, given that “saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonor, but raised in glory.” Having reduced the principle of grace to a principle of nature, Ishmael makes his own redemptive observation: “The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor.” Nor are whale-men. But to see more of that, piracy would need to decline, and under at least most possible regimes, and to some degree in all of them, the modern state tends only to replace one kind of piracy with another.
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