Leviathan or The Whale

absence of men. ‘Aye and yes, Starbuck,’ as Ahab confesses to his first mate, ‘out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore…leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow.’ Whaling separated sexes; and in this isolated place, as isolated as any ship, and yet bleaker in midwinter, whaling ‘widows’ had recourse to opium to cope with the loneliness. Others used plaster dildos known as ‘he’s-at-homes’.
    The American war with Britain complicated matters for Nantucket whalers. The island was officially neutral–not least because of the pacifism of its inhabitants. They were only allowed to sail from New England if they proclaimed themselves on the side of the rebels; but if they did, the British would claim their whale-ships. Some moved to Newfoundland or Canada to pursue their trade. Others sailed to the Falkland Islands to exploit its newly discovered whaling grounds on behalf of the British.
    In the aftermath of revolution, Nantucket grew richer than ever on the wealth of whales. It also exported its trade and expertise. Nantucket Quakers had founded a whaling port at Hudson, New York, where, despite being a hundred and twenty miles from the sea, a thirty-five-strong fleet prospered. Other colonies were founded in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, by Timothy Folger and Samuel Starbuck, and in 1785 Starbuck, Folger and William Rotch Senior made approaches to Britain about setting up a whaling port there. Rotch and his son Benjamin travelled to London for talks with the Prime Minister, William Pitt. After lengthy negotiations–Rotch wanted £20,000 removal costs and naturalization for thirty ships and five hundred of his countrymen, but during the talks Rotch set up at Dunkirk, having been offered better conditions by the French–the British finally invited the Nantucketers to create a new station at Milford Haven in 1792, granting them ‘the rights and privileges of natural-born subjects’. Here, in a pre-echo of the Welsh who would settle in Patagonia, an enclave of Nantucketers was founded, complete with New England architecture, a Quaker meeting house, and a Pembrokeshire cemetery populated with Starbucks and Folgers.
    Like other religions, Quakerism owed its power to its restrictions. Forbidden by their beliefs from swearing oaths of office, Quakers were debarred from professions such as the law and medicine. This had the effect of directing their talents into business, at which they succeeded pre-eminently. And while Quaker ethics also precluded the flaunting of wealth, they did allow fine materials to be used in simple designs; hence the unadorned architecture of Nantucket’s ‘Golden Age’, an æsthetic that still shapes the island today.
    Such wealth stood in sharp contrast to the growing black population that serviced it–initially slaves, then, with the Quakers’ early abolition of slavery in 1773, free men and women. Some prospered in their own right: in 1822 Absalom F. Boston sailed on the
Industry
with an all-black crew, returning as the island’s richest African-American, his success explicit in the thick gold earrings he wore in each ear. None the less, the island’s ruling class remained resolutely white, reiterated in a roll-call of industrious names: Coffin, Chase, Folger, Gardner, Macy, Starbuck, Hussey The street maps show house after house of them, a freemasonry of spermaceti; a territory divided between families and manufactories on an island-whale made out of whales, telled and ledgered and decanted from barrels and beaten into silver, the only precious metal acceptable to a Quaker.
    Nantucket’s skyline announced its own fortune. It was spiky with ship’s masts, studded with lantern towers topped with whale-shaped weathervanes, and animated by windmills with cart-wheel props which gave the appearance of ‘huge wounded birds, trailing a wing or a leg’. This little island was one big machine: processing whales and wind to create candles and flour. Stern, stalwart and blessed, Nantucket was a nation of its own, existing in the hearts of its men at sea and in the work of its women at home.
    For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billow; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds