Leviathan or The Whale

Ishmael puts it–the well-travelled whaler bore
    a singular air of shabbiness…His shoes are rough and foxy, and the strings trail upon the ground, as he walks. His trowsers fail to connect, by several inches, showing a margin of coarse, grey woollen sock, intervening between their bottoms, and his shoes. A portion of his red flannel drawers is visible, above the waistband of his pantaloons; while a rusty black handkerchief at the throat, fastened by a large ring, made of the tooth of a sperm whale, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, keeps together a shirt bosom…innocent of a single button.

    The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner–an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth. Whale oil and whalebone were commodities for the Machine Age, and owners and captains adopted the same punitive practices employed in mills and factories, reducing pay and provisions to pursue a better profit.
    When you’re fast to a whale, running risk to your life
You’re shingling his houses and dressing his wife
.

    It was to this often iniquitous trade that innocent young men found themselves signed up, almost unwittingly. Engaged in New York, they were shipped to New Bedford, the price of their passage deducted from the seventy-five dollars they had been promised. Sometimes the ‘landsharks’ got them drunk and virtually press-ganged their victims, who woke to find themselves aboard an outgoing ship, unable to get off.
    At worst, whalers were treated like migrant workers, little better than bonded labourers. Nordhoff spent months ‘in all the filth, moral and physical, of a whale-ship’, and returned feeling that he had thrown away two years of his life: whaling, he declared, ‘was an enormous, filthy humbug’. One young whaler came home after a five-year voyage to discover that while his friends had made their fortunes in the gold fields, he had earned just $400, half of which he owed in outfitter’s bills.
    To Ishmael, New Bedford was a ‘queer place’, a city that wore ‘a garb of strangeness’. It certainly mystified Nordhoff when he first arrived. This whaling metropolis reached out from a corner of New England to light the world, yet it was remarkably still. ‘One would never guess that he stood within the bounds of a city which ranks in commercial importance the seventh seaport in the Union, and whose ships float upon every ocean.’ The reason for this complicit silence was the confinement of the port’s commerce to a relatively small downtown area, as if it were keen to restrict its vulgar, even disreputable transactions to a whalish ghetto.
    New Bedford is still a blue-collar place, a working port; perhaps that is why I like it so well: it reminds me of my home town. It still conducts its business from the same buildings used by the whaling trade; newspapers are published and radio stations broadcast in Portuguese; and in the north end of town, Antonio’s restaurant sells salt cod and shrimp fritters to descendants of whalers and mill-workers on a Friday night. As the customers sit drinking at the bar, with an icy wind blowing down the street outside, it isn’t hard to imagine a modern-day Ishmael walking in the door; or even his creator.
    When he arrived in New Bedford on that bleak December day in 1840, Melville saw the city rising ‘in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air’, endlessly unravelling in a panorama of activity. The port was alive to the business of the whale. Scores of ships lay in dock, preparing for long voyages, taking on supplies in holds which, as they emptied, would be filled by the fruit of their hunt. It was an efficient exchange: if ‘greasy luck’ was with the
Acushnet
, she would never need ballast. Flat-pack barrels–loose staves to be assembled by onboard coopers–provided further storage. Other ships were drying their sails like cormorants’ out-held wings, their cargo unloaded by men back from tropical seas; they were easy to spot, for their sunburn glowed next to the pale faces of those who had wintered at home.

    The wharfside was a centre of industry, like the whales never still by day or night, piled high with ‘huge hills and mountains of casks on casks’ while ‘the world-wandering whale-ships lay silent and safely moored at last’. Here Ishmael listens to carpenters and coopers at work, ‘blended noises of fires and forged to melt the