Leviathan or The Whale

for a livelihood!
    Nantucket,
Moby-Dick

    Off-season Hyannis is deserted, closed for the winter. This morning’s storm has cancelled ferry sailings; the evening’s schedule may be called off as well, the seas too high for a safe crossing. It seems that, like Ishmael, I will be frustrated in my attempt to make Nantucket tonight. It is the coldest weather of the year, and the wind is picking up. In the ferry office, the woman delivers the expected news. But what about the plane? she says. There’s fifteen minutes to the last flight.
    On the darkened runway, the light aircraft rumbles along until its wings seem to stretch and straighten. Soon the sodium flares of the town fall away, to be replaced by the silver-black waves far below. I’m sitting in the co-pilot’s seat; the young pilot wears a baseball cap, and the cockpit smells of his sandwiches. The dual controls tick and turn in my lap. Through the windscreen I see a shape on the horizon, bracketed by flashing lighthouses. A clutter of stars bursts around Orion. Twenty minutes later we are falling through the clouds, twin beams meeting in the mist, guiding us down. With a bump the tyres bite tarmac, and as we few passengers step out onto the airstrip, Flint the boxer dog scents home.
    When Ishmael and Queequeg arrive in Nantucket, by schooner from New Bedford, they put up at another inn while they search for a suitable whale-ship. As they do so, Ishmael takes the opportunity to delineate the island in great detail, from its remarkable history down to its clam chowder–even though his creator had never actually been there. Such was Nantucket’s fame: it already lived in the American imagination, a name that summed up the pioneering, heroic spirit of the new republic. Early cartographers even saw the shape of a whale in its harbour, as if its myth were incarnate in the island’s very geography. But like its neighbour, Cape Cod, Nantucket was both part of America, and set apart from it at the same time.
    The word is Native American,
Nattick
, meaning far away land; and from far away, its wharves once stank so much that visitors could smell the island before they saw it. Now they bob with expensive boats gleaming with brass and veneer. The town’s Main Street is unevenly paved with hefty stone setts, undulating as if to shrug itself of unwanted visitors. Smart shops and old-fashioned drugstores with high counters serving sodas and sandwiches give way to sandy lanes lined with clapboard homes. Many have doorknockers and weathervanes in the shape of whales, ‘but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with
“Hands off!”
as Ishmael complains, ‘you cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.’ Nearby is the Athenæum where, in 1841, Frederick Douglass spoke to a mixed-race audience at the island’s first anti-slavery convention; a second meeting the following year ended in a riot. It would be hard to imagine such insurrection here nowadays.
    The higher up the hill you go, the more the houses increase in size. Unlike New Bedford’s showy homes, however, they announce their wealth quite quietly. Three identical buildings, built in the 1830s by Joseph Starbuck for his three sons, were the first brick houses on the island; they speak of a fantastical New England. Even a century ago Mary Heaton Vorse saw Nantucket as ‘some beautiful old woman sitting dreaming in a garden…proud of her faded and excellent beauty’; its summer visitors already outnumbered year-rounders, and ‘no immigrants swarmed through the wide houses of the old whaling captains, as in New Bedford’.
    Nowadays, an island which furnished the world with the names of Macy, Folger and Starbuck rejects commerce. There are no supermarkets selling cheap postcards, no homeboys’ stores with piles of jeans. It all adds up to a faintly unreal perfection. The cold light turns each streetscape into an exquisite composition of towers and trees laid bare by an acid-blue sky. Colours shade into each other; flat grey shingle and dusty green lichen; roots disrupt brick pavements with slow-motion earthquakes.
    These lanes also lead back to one place. New Bedford’s mansions were dragged up from the ocean; these houses were landed at the harbour in barrels; came totalled in copperplate figures in bound books; were marked in ivory teeth over years spent on the other side of the world. They may look innocent, but they too were built by