Leviathan or The Whale

in a famous literary essay written just as the Second World War broke out.
Inside the Whale
saw something strangely appealing in the idea:
    the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought…The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality…Even the whale’s own movements would probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility.

    Allegory or tall tale, such notions merely lend more mystery to the whale; an animal so strange and savage and innocent, so monumental in man’s imagination now reduced to bits on the deck of a ship.
    So the process continued. The jaw was wrenched from its cartilaginous hinges, the conical teeth yanked out as if by some cetacean dentist. One whale could yield forty or fifty fist-sized pieces of sea-ivory, issued to sailors for scrimshanding, work for idle days when whales were few. Some teeth might be swapped for supplies; they were highly valued in Fiji, where the captain of the
Morgan
exchanged sperm whale teeth for food far in excess of their value on the streets of New Bedford, where, as young Haley noted, they’d fetch a dollar fifty at the most.
    By now the deck was awash with oil, one great slick sliding rink; men might slip off and into shark-infested waters. Life was tentative: others could be crushed by lumps of whale, or splashed with boiling oil, or sliced by flenshing knives. Compared to such perilous butchery, the sorting of spermaceti was a popular chore. Collected into tubs, sailors squeezed the lumps from the oil which coagulated as it cooled away from the heat of the body. Some climbed into the tubs themselves like grape-tramplers, pulling out the fibrous integuments which would mar the superior quality of the product.
    ‘No king of earth, even Solomon in all his glory, could command such a bath,’ wrote one whaler. ‘I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs, as I stroked the precious ointment from the skin.’ The task imparted a feminine air to otherwise grisly and dangerous duties; for the narrator of
Moby-Dick
, it induced an erotic reverie as his fingers began to ‘serpentine and spiralize’ like eels and he was lulled by the scent and sensuality. In the easily stirred Ishmael, such ‘sweet and unctuous duty’ becomes a kind of Blakean transcendence, and ‘in thoughts of the visions of the night’, he sees ‘long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti’.
    Elsewhere, a hellish scene held sway. As the try-pots were heated, the flames were fed with slivers of blubber called ‘cracklings’; thus the whale cooked itself. Naturally, such an irony did not escape Ishmael. ‘Like a plethoric burning martyr, or self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies its own fuel and burns by his own body’ And as darkness fell, the flickering red light turned it all into an infernal vision akin to Loutherbourg’s painting of the ironworks at Coalbrookedale, satanic womb of the Industrial Revolution; or something more apocalyptic:
    the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.

    Notions of horror mar these honest acts of industry in our eyes. What did Melville feel at the time, as he watched, and took part in such scenes conducted far from civilized gaze? Words had the power to conqueror memory; but they were useless in the catching and rendering of whales, save to supply captions to Victorian engravings:
‘There she blows!’, ‘Whereaway?
’
, ‘She has fire in the chimney!’
After it was all done, the ship was scrubbed; in another example of cetacean self-sufficiency, unrefined sperm oil possessed ‘a singularly cleaning virtue’, and ‘the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil’. But no sooner was the place clean and its crew with it, ‘the poor fellows just buttoning the necks of their clean