Leviathan or The Whale

avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say…Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!

    Tellingly, this is followed by the even odder account of ‘The Cassock’, in which Ishmael describes a ‘very strange, enigmatical object…that unaccountable cone…nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg’. Only the assiduous reader would realize that he is talking about the whale’s penis. In a bizarre ritual, the ‘mincer’ removes the giant foreskin, ‘as an African hunter would the pelt of a boa’, and turning it inside out, stretches it and hangs it up to dry. He then cuts two armholes in the ‘dark pelt’ and puts it on. ‘The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling,’ says Ishmael, ‘arrayed in decent black…what a candidate for an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!’ (Harold Beaver, a later editor
of Moby-Dick
, goes so far as to say that ‘this peculiar “mincer”…proves to be a mincing queer’ and ‘this “cassock,” turned inside out, spells “ass/cock” in the rigging’.)
    Whether or not such a rite ever happened on board a whale-ship–and it may well be a figment of the author’s mischievous imagination–it is ‘the most amazing chapter in an amazing book’, wrote Howard P. Vincent, although he could not bear, in 1949, to discuss it further, beyond noting that ‘ninety per cent of Melville’s readers miss entirely the meaning of “The Cassock”’. Other writers were less coy about the sexual symbolism of the whale. D.H. Lawrence had already dubbed the sperm whale ‘the last phallic being’, and in 1938 W.H. Auden wrote of Ahab and ‘the rare ambiguous monster that had maimed his sex’–a reference to an incident in which the captain was found one night sprawled and insensible on the ground, ‘his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin’. It was as if, in this entirely masculine world, men must sexualize the whale to make it submit–just as they might be subsumed by it in turn. By the 1970s Harold Beaver was declaring the same animal ‘both bridal chamber and battering ram…a true amphibium, dual-sexed as Gabriel’s “Shaker God incarnated”’. The protean whale had become a phallus itself, but also a spermatozoid, gigantic and seminal at the same time.
    Given such mysterious and symbolic attributes, such legendary enemies and such iconic status, it is little wonder that the sperm whale was a fated beast, condemned to be the quarry of man. The blue whale and the finback were too fast, the humpback unproductive. It was the sperm whale–immediately recognizable by its angled spout, by its predilection for lying at the surface and, most paradoxical of all, by its essentially shy nature–that offered itself up as a sacrifice for all other whales: a silent, honourable champion.

IV
A Filthy Enactment

    Who aint a slave? Tell me that.

    Loomings,
Moby-Dick

    Housed in its own vaulted, purpose-built hall is New Bedford’s grandest exhibit: a half-scale replica of a whale-ship. Even allowing for its reduced size, the confined lower decks of this vessel are intimidating. They resemble nothing so much as the slave ships of the age: the one designed to carry the harvest of dead whales; the other to convey living souls. In a nearby cabinet is a much smaller specimen: a framed daguerreotype of a handsome man with a sweep of sleek wavy hair, fine cheekbones and serious, querying eyes; he wears a dandy’s high-collared shirt and tie and an elegant dark coat. But this composed figure was the fomenter behind the campaign to abolish slavery–in a city that shackled men to the pursuit of the whale.
    In 1838 Frederick Douglass, the son of an enslaved mother and a white father whose name he never knew, escaped from Baltimore dressed as a sailor. He arrived in New Bedford where, for four years, he lived and worked, rolling casks, stowing ships, sawing wood, sweeping chimneys and labouring at a blacksmith’s bellows till his hands were like horn. Ishmael claimed that ‘a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard’; for Douglass and his