Why Read Moby-Dick

to set out on another voyage and kill the White Whale.
    To assist him in his deranged quest, Ahab decided to enlist his own whaleboat crew made up of four oarsmen from Manila (“a race,” Ishmael claims, “notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and . . . supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents . . . of the devil”) and the harpooneer Fedallah, “tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from [his] steel-like lips.” Hidden in the Pequod ’s hold, Fedallah and his four oarsmen are not revealed to the rest of the ship’s crew until the first whale is sighted long after they’ve left Nantucket.
    I must admit that it wasn’t until my most recent reading of Moby-Dick that I came to appreciate the importance of Fedallah. He and his men from Manila are much more than infernal window dressing. They are essential to what makes Ahab Ahab because no leader, no matter how deranged, is without his inner circle of advisers, the handlers who keep him on task.
    We never find out the details of how Ahab first met Fedallah, but we do learn that something unspeakably strange happened to the Pequod ’s captain prior to the ship’s departure from Nantucket. Ishmael reports that he was found lying on the ground, with his whalebone leg “violently displaced” and driven “stake-wise” into his groin. The victim of an apparent accident, Ahab in his agonizing helplessness has yet another debilitating injury to blame on Moby Dick. Whether or not this humiliating mishap convinced him that he needed supernatural support, one thing does become clear: no crew member aboard the Pequod is more important to Ahab than the turbaned soothsayer Fedallah.

8
    The Anatomy of a Demagogue
    T o be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to make the darkness work for him. Ishmael says it best: “For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” In chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” Melville shows us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the seductive power of a great and demented man.
    At the beginning of the chapter, Ahab seethes with barely contained energy as he paces back and forth across the deck, the point of his whalebone leg leaving the wood “dented, like geological stones.” Stubb, the second mate, observes that “the chick that’s in him pecks the shell.” And then it begins, Ahab’s version of a command performance. Until this point, he has not revealed the secret purpose of the voyage. What he wants to do is illegal. He has not been hired by the Pequod ’s owners to revenge himself on a white whale. However, if he can win the crew and his pliable second and third mates to his purpose, perhaps he can bulldoze the first mate, Starbuck, into accepting the inevitable.
    He orders Starbuck to “send everybody aft.” Once the crew has been gathered before him, he continues to pace back and forth. Only after their curiosity has been suitably aroused does he begin by asking an unexpected question. “What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?” “Sing out for him!” is the immediate reply.
    For a demagogue, it’s the oldest trick in the book. With each question and response, the crowd cannot help but be wooed to the speaker’s enthusiastic purpose. “[M]ariners began to gaze curiously at each other,” Ishmael relates, “as if marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.” This is the dynamic of the political rally, the kind of rhetorically fueled gathering that Melville’s older brother Gansevoort, a low-level Democratic Party operative, helped organize during his abbreviated political career. It is also the dynamic of the revival meetings of the Second Great Awakening, which swept across America during the first half of the nineteenth century and which contributed, in turn, to the growing evangelical fervor of the abolitionist movement in the years prior to the Civil War.
    Now that Ahab has the ship’s crew in his power, he brings out a prop: a gold doubloon. He then orders Starbuck to give him a hammer, and as he prepares to nail the coin to the mast, he tells them that the first person to see “a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw”