Leviathan or The Whale

fated, one day or other, to be a great voyager’.
    On both sides Melville sprang from heroes. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, was one of the ‘Indian’ raiders who tipped tea into Boston harbour in protest at British taxes; the family kept a phial of the tea leaves in his honour. His other grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, after whom his brother was named, had held Fort Stanwix in the 1777 siege against the British and the Indians; Herman would call his own son Stanwix in memory of this famous victory. The sea was in the family blood, too. One uncle, Captain John D’Wolf II, had sailed from the Kamchatka Peninsula and onto the back of a whale. ‘It was like striking a rock, and brought us to a complete standstill,’ he recorded. ‘The monster soon showed himself, gave a spout, “kicked” his flukes and went down. He did not appear to be hurt, nor were we hurt, but most confoundedly frightened.’ A fine, handsome man with white hair and a florid face, D’Wolf was the first captain young Herman had ever met. He was later lost at sea.
    With their growing family, the Melvills moved steadily uptown in a succession of grander houses until they reached 675 Broadway–a neighbourhood known as Bond Street whose gentility has long since been swept away by the waves of commerce and cheap denim. Here Herman and his brothers and sisters were taught by a governess, although a bout of scarlet fever damaged his eyesight and made it difficult to read. Life seemed stable enough, but in 1830 their father was declared bankrupt. The family were forced to move to Albany, the state capital up the Hudson River. Two years later, aged forty-eight, Allan died in a maniacal fever, leaving his wife Maria with only debt and eight children in her care.
    At the most formative point in his life, twelve-year-old Herman was cast adrift, losing all sense of security when he most needed it. He would later claim that his mother, a strict Calvinist, hated him. He left school to work in a bank, but could not settle, and after a spell teaching and working on his uncle’s farm, he went west, hoping to become a surveyor on one of the new canals that were opening up the American interior. He got as far as the frontier, St Louis, Missouri, before returning to New York, where he was declined employment as a lawyer’s clerk because his handwriting was so bad. ‘There is no misanthrope like a boy disappointed, and such was I, with the warm soul of me flogged out by adversity.’ Rejected by the land, the young man sought a new life at sea.
    On 5 June 1839 the
St Lawrence
sailed from New York with a cargo of cotton destined for Lancashire mills. Also on board was the nineteen-year-old Herman Melville. He was an outsider, abused by the crew for his middle-class manners, his dandified clothes, and his ignorance of shipboard life, ‘so that at last I found myself a sort of Ishmael…without a single friend or companion’. He found consolation in the ocean, which swelled unaccountably as if possessed of a mind of its own. Once, in a Newfoundland fog, he heard the sound of sighing and sobbing which sent him to the side of the ship. There he saw ‘four or five long, black snaky-looking shapes, only a few inches out of the water’. These were not the monstrous whales of his father’s engravings, no ‘regular krakens, that…inundated continents when they descended to feed!’ They even made him wonder if the story of Jonah could be true.
    The sights of Liverpool, the second city of the Empire, amazed the young man. He saw a Floating Chapel converted from an old sloop-of-war, with a steeple instead of a mast, and a balcony built like a pulpit. Here William Scoresby, once one of England’s greatest whalers and now a man of the cloth, preached. There were scenes of shocking poverty, too. One young man silently exhibited a placard depicting himself ‘caught in the machinery of some factory, and whirled about among spindles and cogs, with his limbs mangled and bloody’. And in an even more horrific image, a nameless shape moaned at the bottom of some cellar steps: a destitute mother with two skeletal children on either side and a baby in her arms. ‘Its face was dazzlingly white, even in its squalor; but the closed eyes looked like balls of indigo. It must have been dead some hours.’
    On 30 September Melville returned to New York on the
St Lawrence
, only to find nothing had changed but himself. He had made no money, and had to go