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MOBY DICK

FOREWORD

Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating Moby-Dick. My father was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh with a specialty in American maritime literature, and that big, battle-scarred book came to represent everything I resented about his job: all the hours he spent in his attic study; relentlessly reading and writing, more often than not with Moby-Dick spread out before him.

Sometimes at dinner he even dared talk about the novel, inevitably in an excited, reverential tone that only exasperated me all the more. And yet, despite my best efforts to look as bored as possible, I found myself hanging on every word. For you see, when my brother and I were very young, my father had told us a bedtime story.

The story was about a whale, a real whale that had rammed and sunk a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The men had taken to their little whaleboats, and instead of sailing for the nearby islands, they headed for South America, thousands of miles away. When a rescue ship found them three months later, only a few of the men were left alive, and in their hands were the bones of their dead shipmates. (That my brother and I grew up without permanent psychological damage is a testament to our mother's remarkable parenting skills.) I was a little hazy on the details, but I understood that Moby-Dick had something to do with that ship-ramming whale. But, of course, there was no way I was going to crack open the novel and find out for myself.

I resisted until my senior year in high school when my English teacher made it clear that I had no choice but to read Moby-Dick if I was going to graduate in the spring. By that point I had developed an insatiable love of sailing -- not your normal recreational activity for a teenager from the Steel City. For reasons too improbable and complex to go into here, I had dedicated myself to racing a Sunfish sailboat, practicing every weekend on a little man-made lake about an hour outside the city. The previous year I'd qualified for the Sunfish World Championship in Martinique. I finished near the bottom of the fleet, but I was hooked. The exotic tang of saltwater had intoxicated me; I found myself dreaming about the tide-heave of the sea. For me, a shy kid in a big urban high school, sailing seemed my only hope of escape. Then, in February of 1974, I discovered Herman Melville.

The voice of Ishmael, the novel's narrator, caught me completely by surprise. I had expected to be bored to death, but Ishmael sounded like the best friend I had always hoped to find. In the first paragraph he admits to a state of almost clinical depression -- " a damp, drizzly November in my soul" -- to which any adolescent can relate. But not to worry, Ishmael reassures us, he has found a solution to this condition. Instead of doing damage to himself or to others, he seeks solace in the sea. What's more, he insists, he is not alone: "If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me." As proof, he describes the city of New York on a Sunday afternoon, its cooped-up inhabitants lingering on the waterfront, looking out longingly toward the sea in search of "the ungraspable phantom of life."

Needless to say, this was a scene that spoke to me with a direct, almost overwhelming power. "I am tormented," Ishmael confesses, "with an everlasting itch for things remote." I found myself nodding in agreement. Then, six hundred pages later, came the final payoff when the white whale smashes into the Pequod. Here was the event that had been a part of my consciousness for as long as I could remember. And as Melville makes clear early on in Moby-Dick, a whale did, in fact, ram into a whaleship from Nantucket back in 1820. So this was the story my father had told us in our bedroom all those years ago. As Ishmael says in the very first chapter, "the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open." It was more than I could comfortably comprehend. But as I've since discovered, that is a common reaction to Moby-Dick.

***

Twelve years later, in 1986, I moved with my wife and our two young children to Nantucket Island. Melissa had always dreamed of practicing law in a small town like the one she had grown up in on Cape Cod, and when she saw an ad for a position on Nantucket, she immediately sent in her resume. At the time, I was a freelance sailing journalist and could live just about anywhere. And besides, even though we didn't know a soul on the island, I figured I was already pretty familiar with the place. I'd read about it in Chapter 14 of Moby-Dick.

It was, and remains to this day, my favorite chapter of the novel: a five-paragraph tour de force that creates a mesmerizing sense of bustling enchantment. At this early stage in the book, what will become a dark and disturbing portrayal of Captain Ahab's monomaniacal quest for the white whale is more like the literary equivalent of a buddy movie as Ishmael and Queequeg make their uncertain, sometimes hilarious way to the island that was once the whaling capital of the world.

Nantucket is, in Ishmael's words, an "elbow of sand; all beach without a background." The island's greatness has nothing to do with its beauty or its natural resources; it is a mere setting-off point -- a place wholly dedicated to an activity that occurs on the other side of the world. In fact, the island is, to Ishmael's way of thinking, a kind of joke, and the second paragraph of the chapter becomes a running gag about the island's lack of vegetation. Ishmael claims that weeds have to be planted on the island since they don't grow there naturally; that wood is so rare that tiny splinters are coveted like pieces of the "true cross in Rome"; that Nantucketers are reduced to planting toadstools in an attempt to create some shade; and that the sand is so deep that the islanders clamber around in their own sand-adapted version of snowshoes.

Once he's gotten the jokes out of his system, Ishmael plunges into an account of the Native American origins of the island. He tells of the myth of the giant bird that swooped down over a native village on Cape Cod and carried an Indian boy out across the water. The child's parents set off in frantic pursuit in a canoe. Many miles later they discover an island that would become known as Nantucket, and beneath a tree they find their son's whitened skeleton. Ishmael then recounts the amazing achievements of an island nation whose dominion is nothing less than all the oceans of the world: "Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires."

If I had stopped to think about, instead of becoming totally captivated by Ishmael's miraculous prose, I would have realized that he is not describing a real-life place as much as he is evoking a phenomenon, what he calls elsewhere "a fine, boisterous something." The Nantucket of Moby-Dick is an idea, not a town, and yet I had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I thought that nothing could be better than to live on this wondrous "ant-hill in the sea."

Not long after relocating to Nantucket I discovered that Melville had never set foot on the place prior to writing Moby-Dick. I had been hoodwinked, seduced by an author's enticing but purely imaginary construct. But the more I learned about the island's history, the more I realized that this was not really the case. Even if Melville had never visited the island prior to writing his masterpiece, he was exceedingly familiar with its inhabitants, having spent several years of his youth as a whaleman in the South Pacific. At the core of the dazzling rhetorical display of Moby-Dick's Nantucket is an imperishable historical truth. What I didn't realize then was how long it was going to take to discover just what that truth meant to me.

***

I would write two books of Nantucket history before I turned my undivided attention to the story I had first heard as a child. By that point I'd begun to appreciate the ballast of reality hidden in the Pequod's hold. For us, distanced by more than a century from the time when whale oil was the petroleum of its day, it is difficult to believe that a process as ghastly and strange as whaling was an integral part of the American economy and culture. Having grown up in Pittsburgh at a time when the city was dominated by smog-belching steel mills, I had been unexpectedly prepared to appreciate the dirty, often brutal conditions aboard a whaleship: floating factories dedicated to ripping blubber from the whale's corpse, chopping the blubber up, then boiling it into oil amid a stinking pall of sooty smoke. Moby-Dick may be, on occasion, mythic and metaphysical, but it is also an extraordinarily detailed and accurate account of American whaling in the nineteenth century. As Ishmael insists, again and again, he is not making this up.

But the novel is much more than a historical document. As I've already indicated, it can be quite funny; in its flights of language Moby- Dick can be more than a little intimidating, as if Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible teamed up to write a very weird book about whaling. Once the tale of Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick clicks into high gear, the novel becomes an adventure story. Then there are the fascinating sidebars that begin to take up more and more of the novel as Ishmael openly discusses his attempts to write a book as ungovernable as the white whale itself.

But it wasn't until the writing of In the Heart of the Sea that I came to understand that Melville had gotten much more than a dramatic conclusion from the story of the Essex. He had gotten a point of view. If nothing else, Moby-Dick is the tale of a survivor. And just as I'd analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the men who'd survived the Essex, I found myself trying to figure out who was this Ishmael and why fate, or at least MelviIle, had chosen him alone to tell the Pequod's story.

***

At the beginning of the novel, Ishmael informs us that all this happened "[s]ome years ago -- never mind how long precisely." We subsequently learn that he has been living with the story for a very long time, shipping out on a string of whaling voyages in the years since the sinking of the Pequod. All this time he has been preparing the book we are now holding in our hands. Taking a writer's fact- gathering to an unheard-of extreme, he has even had the dimensions of a gigantic sperm whale skeleton tattooed to his arm.

But if Ishmael has thrown his lot with the sea, he has done so with more than a little regret. As he knows better than anyone, the sea is a most unforgiving taskmaster. "No mercy, no power but its own, controls it," he says in the chapter titled "Brit," then launches into a simile that ends as an anguished warning: "For as the appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle; thou canst never return!"

To my mind, the novel's masterpiece is the chapter "The Grand Armada;" in which Ishmael discovers the vision of domestic bliss that he has denied himself but which is nonetheless crucial to our humanity. After being dragged through the chaotic fringes of a vast school of whales, he and his whaleboat crew come upon a lake-like still center, where whales gently copulate and mother whales suckle their young. Even if this "enchanted calm" is all too quickly destroyed by a whale entangled in the line of a cutting spade, it remains an enduring example of everything the demonic Ahab is not:

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the center freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely reveled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

The imagery of this passage anticipates the novel's final scene, in which the whale-rammed Pequod and all the chaotic plentitude of the book are sucked down into the swirling vortex of the void. The sole exception is Ishmael. Clinging to a lifebuoy fashioned from Queequeg's unused coffin, he seems to have drifted into the welcoming stillness at the maelstrom's center, where he remains miraculously immune to the sea's hazards. "The unharming sharks," he recounts, "they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage seahawks sailed with sheathed beaks." Two days later Ishmael is rescued, and as is the blessing and curse of all survivors, he must begin to live the rest of his life.

***

The publication of Maoy-Dick marked the beginning of a difficult time for its author. What is generally considered the greatest American novel ever written proved to be a critical and popular disappointment in the fall of 1851. Even Melville's friend and literary confidante Evert Duyckinck panned it in what must have been a humiliating review for Melville. The novel's poor sales put him under increasing pressure to support his large and growing family. Then, the following summer, Melville visited Nantucket for the first time.

Like the author of Moby-Dick, the island had fallen on hard times. In just a few years, Nantucket had lost more than a quarter of its voting population to the gold fields in California. Where he had once imagined Ishmael walking the streets with his cannibal cohort Queequeg, Melville found a ghost town.

He made a point of meeting George Pollard, the captain of the ill-fated Essex. Pollard had given up the sea and become the town's nightwatchman. "To the islanders he was a nobody," Melville would later record, "to me, the most impressive man, tho' wholly unassuming even humble -- that I ever encountered."

In the years to come, Melville's professional life as a novelist would go the way of Pollard's whaling career. Having lost a readership for his books, he would be forced to take a job as a customs inspector on the wharves of New York City. As if mocked by Ishmael's vision of domestic bliss in "The Grand Armada," Melville's family life proved difficult. There are indications that he drank too much, that he may have physically abused his wife; one of his sons would die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Finally, in 1885, a small inheritance allowed Melville to retire from the customs office at the age of sixty-six. After years of composing arid, intellectually complex poetry, he wrote what many regard today as one of the greatest novellas ever written, Billy Budd, about an incident aboard a British man-of-war. Pasted to the side of his wooden writing desk was a simple slogan: "Keep true to the dreams of thy youth."

What these words meant to Melville can only be guessed. But what unites his two masterworks, Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, is the watery wilderness in which Melville came of age: the sea. It is one of the ironies of history that 150 years after Moby-Dick's publication, the frontier that most Americans associate with our national identity, the West, has long since been civilized beyond recognition. The sea, on the other hand, has never been tamed, and it is the sea that, with Melville's help, we are beginning to rediscover. He is, in the end, one of our greatest literary survivors.

-Nathaniel Philbrick

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