Leviathan or The Whale

other ideas were forming in his head.
    ‘Vagabonding’ through alleys and ‘anti-lanes’ from the new Blackwall Tunnel to Greenwich and back to Tower Hill, Melville passed the place where a well-known beggar, a former sailor with one leg, wore a painted board displaying the circumstances of his loss. The scene was an echo of the unfortunates in Liverpool, only here the picture was more terrifying: ‘There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale’. London itself was a whaling port. The south-eastern docks at Rotherhithe were home to whale-ships and processing plants, while famous entrepreneurs of the trade ran their businesses from the more genteel address of the nearby Elephant and Castle.
    Whales were on Melville’s mind; sometimes it seemed they were swimming down the city’s streets. The visceral butchery of Fleet Market reminded him of a blubber room; returning home at two in the morning from a ‘snug’ evening with some young Londoners, he ‘turned flukes’ in Oxford Street. It was as if the imperial metropolis were rousing the spirit of Moby Dick. In his attic room, high above the gas lamps shining on the midnight streets, Melville mourned his elder brother, who had worked and died in this city. ‘No doubt, two years ago, or three, Gansevoort was writing here in London, about the same hour as this–alone in his chamber, in profound silence…’ That night he was plagued by ‘one continuous nightmare till daylight’. He blamed it on strong coffee and tea; but perhaps whalish monsters were stirring in his dreams.
    After a brief trip to the Continent–his intention to travel to the Holy Land circumscribed by London’s refusal to pay more than a reduced sum for his book–a homesick Melville sailed from Portsmouth to New York, where he set to work on a new novel–an unashamedly commercial venture. It was to be ‘a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries’, he told his English publisher, Richard Bentley. In what may have been an almost desperate move, Melville turned to his whaling experiences to capitalize on a new commercial empire at home, one that combined the American talents for heroism and consumerism.
    New York was more prosperous and bustling than ever, a rival to London’s imperial sway. The profits from whales funnelled through this city, too. It was a place of import and export, its masts and piers reaching out to other lands, even as it sent its equal sons and equal daughters around the world. Close to Wall Street, where his brothers worked, was Nassau Street and its publishing and newspaper offices, Manhattan’s equivalent of Fleet Street and the Strand. Nearby were the luxurious new Astor House Hotel, and the Shakespeare Tavern where writers such as Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe drank. Around the corner was Barnum’s American Museum which, that summer, was decorated with a huge canvas banner advertising the whale that lay within.
    As much as
Moby-Dick
was a product of Melville’s adventures at sea, it was also born of the city; its opening scenes state as much, set as they are on the quayside at the end of Pearl Street. In a strange, allusive manner, New York itself became the White Whale, just as Joseph Conrad would see Brussels as a whited sepulchre built on human bones, and as Gansevoort Melville had seen London as the modern Babylon. Even the island of Manhattan was whale-shaped, a pallid behemoth, both fascinating and appalling. Here, on what purported to be dry land, Melville’s desires were ambivalent. Expounded in his book, they represented both liberation and dread, deep longings and profound fears. And symbolic above them all was the whale: the leviathan that had risen from the deep to take hold of his imaginings.
    In his years at sea, Melville heard tales of lethal encounters between man and whale. Now, as Yankee whaling reached its peak, these incidents seemed to be becoming ominously more frequent. The whales were fighting back, breaking bones and boats, drowning men, turning on their assailants with a vengeful intelligence. On 15 August 1841, for instance, soon after the
Acushnet
left port, another New Bedford vessel, the
Coral
, encountered a school of sperm whales one hundred miles south of the Galápagos. The captain, James H. Sherman, recorded that having struck