Leviathan or The Whale

refined men and their noisome business. Bicknell–who held the monopoly on the British sperm whale fishery in the Pacific–was a well-known patron of the arts who commissioned Huggins to paint his whale-ships–works that would in turn inspire J.M.W. Turner, another beneficiary of Bicknell’s patronage. In this complex web of connections, whales linked writers, artists, scientists and businessmen in a manner that reflected the reach of the British Empire and the very size of the animals themselves. Whales lent a romantic focus to their gruesome industry. Indeed, Turner, the greatest artist of the age, realized that vision in paint, just as Melville attempted it in words.
    In 1845 and 1846 Turner exhibited four scenes of whaling at the Royal Academy, along with a catalogue attribution:
‘Whalers. Vide Beale’s Voyage p.175’
. They portray the heroic hunt for the whale in luminous, almost abstract forms; the whales themselves are the merest, ghostly suggestions. It is likely that Melville had heard of these famous pictures on his visit to London. Certainly, back in New York, having bought his copy of Beale’s work–for three dollars and thirty-eight cents–he in turn wrote on its title page, ‘Turner’s pictures of whalers were suggested by this book’.
    Melville’s passion for Turner almost rivalled that of the artist’s champion, John Ruskin. (Critics themselves drew the comparisons: one reviewer of
White-Jacket
declared, ‘Mr Melville stands as far apart from any past or present marine painter in pen and ink as Turner does from the magnificent artist vilipended by Mr Ruskin for Turner’s sake–Vandervelde.’) Turner appealed deeply to Melville’s sense of the romantic. In his book,
Modern Painters
–which Melville read before his trip to England–Ruskin described how Turner had himself tied to a ship’s mast to paint his
Snowstorm at Sea
. Perhaps the painter had more than a little of Ahab in him.
    The influence of Turner’s sublime vistas, numinous with storms and shadows, emerges in
Moby-Dick
from the first. When Ishmael arrives at the Spouter Inn, he sees ‘a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something…floating in a nameless yeast’. Through the gloom, he makes out a whale launching itself over a storm-tossed ship, seemingly about to impale itself on its masts. ‘A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted,’ Ishmael allowed, with ‘a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant’. It was a dream version of Huggins’s graphic scenes; a fantastical Turner, seen through Ishmael’s ostensibly amateur eyes.
    From these colourful scientists and eccentric artists, and from his own visit to Liverpool and London, Melville’s enterprise acquired an English anchor. Their personæ, as much as their efforts, were integral to the intricate tapestry of cross-references and diversive threads from which
Moby-Dick
was woven. Above all, it was Beale who supplied Ishmael’s cetology, and who sought to correct those erroneous pictures of whales, applying true science and firsthand experience to the natural history of the sperm whale. He criticized the respected French naturalist Baron Cuvier, for instance, for claiming that the whale struck fear into ‘all the inhabitants of the deep, even to those which are the most dangerous to others; such as the phocæ, the balænopteræ, the dolphin, and the shark. So terrified are all these animals at the sight of the cachalot, that they hurry to conceal themselves from him in the sands or mud, and often in the precipitancy of their flight, dash themselves against the rock with such violence as to cause instantaneous death.’
    To Beale–as to anyone who had seen sperm whales in the wild–this was so much hogwash. ‘For not only does the sperm whale in reality happen to be a most timid and inoffensive animal…readily endeavouring to escape from the slightest thing which bears an unusual appearance, but he is also quite incapable of being guilty of the acts of which he is so strongly accused.’
    Beale comprehensively addressed every aspect of the whale, point by point, fin by fluke. Yet no matter how many facts and figures, how many observations he assembled, no matter what physiological detail–from the function of its stomach to how much blubber its carcase