Leviathan or The Whale

brethren, ‘the ship-yard…was our school-house’.

    Like the rest of America, New Bedford is a place made up of other places. If more white Americans were descended from pickpockets and prostitutes than from the Pilgrim Fathers, then, as Ishmael informs us, ‘not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born’. While America’s railroads were built by Irish navvies, its dirty business of whaling was done by Africans and Indians or Azoreans and Cape Verdeans. The heroes of the harpoon were more likely to be men of colour than sons of the
Mayflower
.
    By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, one in twenty New Bedfordians was black, a greater proportion than that of New York, Boston or Philadelphia. ‘In New Bedford,’ marvels Ishmael, ‘actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.’ The South End of town was known as Little Faial for its Azoreans; another downtown neighbourhood was named New Guinea after its inhabitants. On these shingled and clapboarded New England streets a dozen languages could be heard and dark figures seen, fellow countrymen of Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo, the Polynesian, American Indian and African-American harpooneers of the
Pequod
. Visiting in 1917, Mary Heaton Vorse saw an ‘illusion of the South’ about the port, with its ‘Bravas’ or Cape Verdeans and entire neighbourhoods in which white people were the foreigners; where children stared back, and ‘a splendid Negress with thin Arab features…checked her stride to wonder about us’.
    Black sailors were engaged by owners who did not ask questions, or whose Quaker beliefs opposed slavery. Some rose to become captains or mates. Others succeeded in supply industries: Samuel Temple of New Bedford invented the toggle-iron harpoon, with its ingeniously hinged head. But below deck, bunks were still segregated and conditions were such that by the end of the century only men of colour could be persuaded to sign up; hence the preponderance of black faces in photographs of whaling crews. Charles Chace, one of New Bedford’s last whaling captains, kept two loaded pistols in his cabin in case of trouble–so his descendant told me–and when his Cape Verdeans were discharged with a suit of clothes and a ten-dollar bill, many gave up their African names and, like slaves, adopted their master’s, for the sake of conformity with their new home.
    New Bedford owed at least part of its success to its communications with the rest of America; the same year that Frederick Douglass arrived, the city was connected by rail to the New England network. But for Douglass and for Henry ‘Box’ Brown–who was smuggled out of the South in a crate, emerging at the other end as a human jack-in-the-box–New Bedford was a vital stop on another network: the Underground Railroad, an invisible system secretly helping thousands of slaves to escape to the North and Canada. A port was the perfect place for such illicit trade; and whaling offered a tradition of disguise as well as employment. For Douglass and his fellow fugitives, New Bedford’s transience itself was a kind of liberty: ‘No coloured man is really free in a slaveholding state…but here in New Bedford, it was my good fortune to see a pretty near approach to freedom on the part of the coloured people.’
    In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whaling and slavery co-existed as lucrative, exploitative, transoceanic industries; while whale-ships sought to disguise themselves as men o’ war in order to forestall pirates (and sometimes harboured fugitive slaves themselves), slave ships seeking to evade Unionist blockades during the Civil War would masquerade as whale-ships. It was no coincidence that in 1850, as Melville began to write
Moby-Dick
, the issue of slavery was coming to a head. The stresses that would eventually sunder a nation also gave Melville’s book its symbolic charge.
    That year, a new Fugitive Slave Law gave owners extraordinary powers to pursue their ‘property’ over state limits. To America’s great philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, it was a ‘filthy enactment’. Meanwhile, his Concord neighbour, Bronson Alcott–whose utopian, strictly vegan commune, Fruitlands, just outside Boston, was an early example of ethical living where the wearing of cotton was forbidden because it exploited