Leviathan or The Whale

socialize. On one such gam with the
Christopher Mitchell
of Nantucket–the same ship whose previous captain, William Swain, had been lost to a whale, as his memorial in the Seamen’s Bethel testified–young Haley heard about one of her crew who, despite ‘showing no more fear of a whale than the bravest of green hands’, had faced jibes about his appearance. On falling ill in his bunk, was seen naked–and found to be a woman.
    This anonymous Orlando told an extraordinary story. Her lover had promised marriage, only to run away to sea. Through the services of a New York detective, she discovered he had signed up to a whale-ship. Not knowing which one, she set off for New Bedford, where she bound her breasts with calico and, being tall and slim, ‘passed herself off as a green boy who wanted to go a-whaling’. After her confession, she broke down in tears, but was comforted by the captain, who found her rather attractive, once she had sewn herself a loose dress, and as sickness and shade returned to a more lady-like pallor. When the ship called at Lima, the woman was placed in the hands of the American consul; only when the
Christopher Mitchell
returned home did her story become public.
    Such was the no-man’s-land of the whale-ship, where boys would be boys and girls would be boys, too. Life onboard was peculiar to itself and of itself: enclosed yet open, confined yet free, disciplined yet liberated. For months on end a ship’s crew knew only this world. Time was measured in the watches of the day and by the shadows of the masts; on the featureless ocean they might be anywhere on earth, living within wooden walls, a colony of men ruled over by erratic officers and determined by the wilful meanderings of whales. Yet for all the depredations, the romance remained. Why else would men volunteer for this life, if not for its sense of adventure? Hardly for the pay, or the conditions.
    It was this containedness about which Melville wrote so well in his novels of the sea, especially in the two works that preceded
Moby-Dick: Redburn
, a fictionalized account of his first sea voyage to Liverpool; and
White-Jacket
, another slice of his life story whose subtitle proclaims ‘The World in a Man-of-War’. It is set on board a naval ship, a ‘bit of terra firma cut off from the main; it is a state in itself; and the captain is its king…Only the moon and stars are beyond his jurisdiction.’ Here men lived ‘in a space so contracted that they can hardly so much as move but they touch…the inmates of a frigate are thrown upon themselves and each other, and all their ponderings are introspective.’
    Such intimacy permitted desires forbidden by the civilized world. Redburn extols the beauty of his English shipmate Harry, with dark curling hair and ‘silken muscles’, and a complexion as ‘feminine as a girl’s’; an equally handsome Italian boy plays his concertina with a suggestive enthusiasm almost embarrassing to read. The narrator of
White-Jacket
is more circumspect, although he notes that one midshipman is ‘apt to indulge at times in undignified familiarities with some of the men’. When they resist, he has them flogged–a scenario that would inspire Melville’s last work,
Billy Budd
, in which the villainous first mate, Claggart, becomes obsessed with the Handsome Sailor, Billy or Baby Budd, with fatal consequences for them both. In real life, other seamen found different outlets: Philip C. Van Buskirk, a contemporary of Melville’s, left a startlingly frank journal of his onboard addiction to self-abuse.
    Ishmael himself is never more than ambiguous on such matters; but since nothing in his creator’s work is accidental (about the only thing his critics agree on), it is impossible not to see a pattern in Melville’s emblematic titles–
RED
BURN
WHITE
JACKET
MOBY
DICK
BILLY
BUDD
    –books set in a world without women and in an age that had no name for love between men (although his peer, Walt Whitman, devised the term ‘adhesiveness’ for what he felt for his fellow man). From the fiery youth of
Redburn
to the masculine discipline of
White-Jacket
, from the phallic pallor of
Moby-Dick
to the virginal
Billy Budd
, Melville fictionalized his past and obscured his emotions in a matrix of literary intent.
    The sea was the perfect arena for such arch invention. A fatherless middle-class boy had deliberately placed himself as far from land–and female influence–as it was possible to be, creating a