Leviathan or The Whale

new family, and a new identity for himself. Instead of his mother and his sisters, he answered to a captain and lived among men. Removed from the security of home, and freed from its confines, Melville was launched into the brutal reality of living with men united only in the common pursuit of a bloody business. He and his fellow sailors had cut all ties with civilization, sailing to islands where murderous natives with filed teeth threatened to eat their shipmates. They were boys in a boy’s own story, although they travelled on a vessel whose very ceilings kept them down, as if perpetually tugging their caps.
    Descending below the waterline to the
Morgan’s
hold, I feel as though I were within the whale, contained within wooden ribs. In the dampness, I sense the pressure of water from without, even knowing this massive chamber is braced by sturdy knees cut from live oak, like flying buttresses on a great cathedral. The church-like air is illusory, for this maritime crypt was filled with barrels of oil, a visible measure of success, an ascending scale marked up the hull as a prisoner ticks off the days on his cell wall. It was in everyone’s interests–from the captain with his magnified lay, to the seaman’s humble fraction–to see this space diminish. Each barrel represented incremental profit; its absence, potential loss.
    The
Morgan’s
timbers are still stained with decades of oil. Like the candle works of Nantucket, whose infused floorboards oozed when they were removed, the years have left this vessel saturated with the products of the animals she had processed. As a whale’s skeleton retains its sap, so these soaked knees and ribs became the bones of her prey, transforming this death ship–this whale widow-maker–into a simulacrum of the creatures she pursued. In 1941, when she was brought to Mystic for restoration, objects were found between the
Morgan’s
bilges: bits of clay pipe, coins, whale’s teeth, and strange shell-like bones–the inner ears of a whale–archæological relics that had rattled around for decades in the belly of the vessel. It was as if the ship had become a repository of herself.
    Back in the staterooms, sitting at the captain’s table as the wind sways the ship to and fro on her moorings, breaking the ice around the bows which promptly refreezes into abstract shards, I try to imagine life lived in this wooden box filled with more than forty men and boys and the rendered fat of tens of whales. Perhaps such conditions merely merged men into the visceral business in which they were engaged; perhaps they gave up their humanity for the duration, to wallow in whale oil for its own sake; to live and die for the whale.
    Melville sailed on the
Acushnet
from New Bedford on Sunday, 3 January 1841. He may have been no greenhand–despite what it said on his shipping papers–but his earlier passage to Liverpool, carrying cotton rather than oil, bore little resemblance to the adventure that lay ahead of him.
    Once at sea, the mates made their selection for the whaleboat crews. Mustered aft, men were interrogated about their experience as the mates checked their hands and feet and felt their muscles in an inspection that resembled a slave auction. Ships had three or four such crews, comprising the captain, or a mate, four foremast hands (as Melville was), and a harpooneer; fewer than five men might be left behind to run the vessel when the boats were lowered from the divots on which they hung on the ship’s side, ready for action. As with everything in whaling, periods of frenetic energy alternated with soporific inaction or numbing drudgery. Time itself was different at sea. Far from land, the levelling ocean flattened out the days to be recreated in nautical dispensations, reordered from noon to noon.
    First part, noon to 8 pm
Middle part, 8 pm to 4 am
Latter part, 4 am to noon

    Four hours on, four hours off,
watch and watch
regulated the crew’s life. When no whales were seen, the ship would sail in and out of as yet undetermined time zones. When the chase was on, time would accelerate, or even disappear. And all this–all these men, all their efforts, all their aspirations–existed for those few minutes when a whale might be won. All this human striving–from recruitment and requisition to searching and finding a distant disruption, followed by the frenetic hunt–all in order to fill wooden barrels that would ensure only a brief stay on land till the call to sea came again.