Leviathan or The Whale

braid. Captain Pease, master and part owner, claimed 1/12 of all profits; the first officer, Frederic Raymond of Nantucket, 1/25. As a foremost hand, Melville’s lay was 1/75; while lowly Carlos Green of New York–a true greenhand–could expect just 1/190. For some, even that was welcome, not least William Maiden, the cook, and deckhands Thomas Johnson and Enoch Read, whose complexions were recorded as black or mulatto. They had ever laboured under a master; now they had signed away their lives to the whale.
    The
Acushnet was
fresh off the production line; at the peak of the whaling boom, new whale-ships were said to be built by the mile, ‘chopped off the line, like sausages’. Others were converted liners or packets. ‘Thus the ship that once carried over gay parties of ladies and gentlemen, as tourists, to Liverpool or London, now carries a crew of harpooneers round Cape Horn into the Pacific’. Quarterdecks where the gentry once took the sea air now reeked of whale oil. ‘Plump of hull and long of spar’, the
Acushnet was
104 feet long, 27 feet wide and 13 feet deep. Named after the river on which she was launched, she towered over the wharf at Fairhaven, her web of rigging and tall masts statements of industry and fortitude. Unlike her alter ego, she lacked bulwarks studded with whale teeth or a tiller fashioned from a whale’s jaw, embellishments that gave Ahab’s
Pequod
the air of a ‘cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies’. The
Acushnet
had her own disguise: false gunports painted on her side to ward off attacks from pirates or savages.
    She was owned by a syndicate of eighteen men, among them the agent, Melvin O. Bradford and his brother, Marlboro Bradford, both Quakers. Their captain, Valentine Pease Junior, was forty-three years old, a tall, stern, bewhiskered and sometimes profane man, not overwhelmingly blessed with luck. On his first command, the
Houqua
, his first mate, Edward C. Starbuck, had been discharged in Tahiti ‘under conditions curious and not fully explained’. Seven men drowned, two others died when their boat was stove in by a whale, and eleven crew deserted, leaving only three original members to return and claim their lays.
    This was not an unusual story. Of her original crew of twenty-six, only eleven would return on the
Acushnet
. The rest deserted or were discharged, discouraged by long and inhospitable voyages and strictures enforced by omnipotent captains. Contracts stated that men were not to leave the ship until her hold was full of oil, and that they must adhere ‘to the good order, effectual government, health and moral habits’ expected of them. ‘Criminal intercourse’ with women would be punished by the forfeit of five days’ pay; ‘intemperance and licentiousness’ earned similar penalties, if not the lash. To add insult to injury, wear and tear meant that they had to buy new clothes from overpriced onboard supplies. When the debt was deducted from their share of the ship’s profits, they were often left with nothing, or even found themselves owing money for their trouble. Given such conditions, it was hardly surprising that men jumped ship. In fact, two of the
Acushnet’s
crew had deserted even before she sailed. They had not signed up to be slaves, after all.
    There are some things a place will not tell you, as if it conspires with its past. To look at it now, you would not guess that New Bedford was once the richest city in America. This now incongruous town–at least, to anyone who has not been there–was the capital of a new economy, one that reached out across the world; the bustling industrial centre of a republic founded on the backs of whales.
    New Bedford’s roots lay in its sheltered harbour and good connections with the rest of New England, but, above all, strong ties with the Quakers of Nantucket–who had perfected the art of whaling in the early eighteenth century–contributed to the port’s unprecedented success. One of those Quakers, Joseph Rotch, developed New Bedford in the years following the Revolution. By the 1840s, when Melville arrived, the port had grown rich–more so since it was linked by a bridge with Fairhaven, its twin on the other side of the river.
    Route 6, the highway once known as the King’s road and which runs all the way to the tip of Cape Cod, still crosses the Acushnet by a nineteenth-century turntable bridge, a Meccano construction that pivots to permit more