Free Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick Page A

tension. Like “young Stiggs” of the Try Pots Inn on Nantucket, his oldest child, Malcolm, a baby during the composition of Moby-Dick, would be found dead in his room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of eighteen. Nineteen years later, Melville’s younger son, Stanwix, died alone in a hospital room in San Francisco at the age of thirty-five.
    During the winter and spring of 1851, however, Melville still dared to believe in the possibility of familial happiness. No matter how troubling the news about the riots in Boston might be, no matter how disappointing his book sales, he could count on the unalloyed pleasures of hearth and home. “And thus,” Ishmael says of this inner circle of cetacean contentment, “though surrounded by circle upon circle of con-sternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concern-ments; yea, serenely revelled 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.”
    And then it all goes to hell. A whale tangled in the line of a deadly cutting spade works his way through the pod, “wounding and murdering his own comrades” with every agonized sweep of his tail. What Ishmael next describes eerily anticipates the gradual collapse of Melville’s own family life—not to mention America’s fated slide into war. “First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.” The hunt is on.

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    Pip
    W ith his tambourine and kindly, laughing eyes, Pip, the black cabin boy, is a favorite of the crew. Unfortunately, he is also afraid of whales. When Stubb’s after-oarsman sprains his hand, Pip is ordered to join the second mate’s whaleboat crew. It does not go well. When a harpooned whale thwacks the boat, Pip leaps up in fright and becomes entangled in the whale line, forcing Tashtego to release the whale.
    Stubb is not happy. “Stick to the boat, Pip,” he commands, “or by the Lord, I wont pick you up. . . . We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” In eerily modern words, Ishmael comments, “[T]hough man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.” Suffice it to say that Pip soon jumps again and falls into the sea.
    â€œIt was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day,” Ishmael recounts, “the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.”
    Anyone who has