Will Morrisey Reviews

This is the ninth of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

The next ten chapters culminate in a gam with the second foreign whale ship, this one from France—a major political and military power in Europe, but not in whaling. The French had always been landsmen, unlike the Spanish, the English, and the Americans.

Ishmael’s jibe at the falsehood of prophecy, following his more extensive debunking of science (the pride of modern Germany) in the previous chapter, proves a prelude to a more extensive satire on religion, rather along the lines of Voltaire, that quintessential French Enlightener. He begins with a chapter on “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” (glancing slyly at the last words of the Lord’s Prayer?), in which he playfully cites “the gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter,” as “the first whaleman.” He then proposes that the Christian hero, St. George, slayed not a dragon but a whale. More jovially still, he announces that “by the best contradictory authorities” we learn that the story of Hercules and the whale is said to derive from “the still more ancient story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa.” Ranging farther afield, he recalls that the Hindu god Vishnu manifested himself as a whale in the first of “his ten earthly incarnations,” in order to rescue the Vedas, then lying in the depths of the cosmic waters, books “whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation.” Greek polytheism, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism all amount to the same thing: vehicles for a mock-exaltation of whaling and a simultaneous undermining of religious authority.

Returning to Jonah, Ishmael remarks that a Sag-Harbor whaleman doubted the story, but in so doing only “evinced the foolish pride of reason,” a “foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy.” But “old Sag-Harbor” “had but little learning except what he had picked up from the sun and the sea”—that is, experience and commonsense thinking. After all, not only Catholic priests but “the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah.” What greater testimony do we need?

Exercising learning picked up from the sun and the sea, Queequeg prepared his whale-boat for a chase, which occurred the next morning; such learning produces more reliable predictions than alleged prophecy. This incident also provides Ishmael the chance to describe another practical way to kill whales. If a whale ‘runs’ too far and fast to make harpooning it prudent, an experienced whaler can pitchpole it instead. He takes a long lance designed for the purpose and hurls it at the whale; instead of embedding itself deeply into the whale, the lance wounds the whale, drawing blood. The whaler pulls it back and darts the whale repeatedly, causing the whale to die the proverbial death of a thousand cuts. Insofar as Ishmael has playfully compared the Sperm-Whale to a god, it might be said that his narrative aims at causing the idea of gods as handed down by prophetic tradition and orthodox churchmen to die such a death.

Nor is Ishmael done, turning next to the pretensions of philosophers. Ishmael addresses the question of whether the whale-spout is water or mist. The whale breathes through its spiracle, not its mouth; it has a network of blood vessels which acts as a storage place for the air it takes in, when on the surface of the ocean. This allows the whale to stay submerged for long periods of time, and to dive deep. “My hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist.” He bases this on no further empirical data, but upon “considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale,” a being “both ponderous and profound,” like Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil (presumably in Milton’s version), Dante, “and so on”—one must pause to admire that “and so on”—and therefore of the sort who emits “a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts.” After drinking six cups of hot tea in “my thin shingled attic,” on an August noon,” I myself, Ishmael, find moisture in my hair, if I have been “plunged in deep thought.” Not only that, but the whale-spout is often “glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal on his thoughts,” and rainbows never “visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor”—an observation gleaned from exact perception of experience, not from Scripture or scientific theory. In response to his own musings, Ishmael “thank[s] God”: “For all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” If science, religion, and philosophy all are dubious, then a cautious, overall agnosticism recommends itself to Melville’s yarn-spinner.

Ishmael then turns to an object of unquestionable power, the Sperm Whale’s tail. If whaling shares in the honor and glory owed God in the Lord’s Prayer, the unspoken third word, power, belongs to the whale, the object of the whalers’ hunt. “In the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.” “The whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof”—recall the mat Ishmael and Queequeg wove, symbol of the structure of the cosmos—”of muscular fibres and filaments” all running toward the two flukes of the tail, “contribut[ing] to their might.” “Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it,” exhibiting “a Titanism of power,” the power of the pre-Olympic gods, the pre-god gods. At the same time, even if the whale and its tail lack l’esprit de géométrie (generated by the brain), they do not lack l’esprit de finesse, as the tail undulates with ease: “Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it.”  Indeed, “When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there,” very much in contrast with “the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures” of His Son, embodying “the mere negative, feminine [power] of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, for the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.” (Machiavelli concurs, commending lo Stato as the more effective preserver of human lives, if not necessarily their souls.) More, when he has seen “the gigantic tail” rising from the ocean Ishmael thinks of “majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic [Sea] of Hell”; if in a “Dantean” mood while viewing this sight, Ishmael envisions devils, “if in [the mood] of Isaiah, the archangels.” A pod of whales heading toward the sun, with their tails momentarily uplifted in preparation for a dive, recall visions of Persian fire worshippers, and, like the actions of gods, whale gestures often “remain wholly inexplicable.” “Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.” And if I cannot know the tail of the whale, how shall I comprehend his front, his face, especially “when face he has none”? Like the God of the Bible, “Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen.” Having disposed of the grander claims of science, religion, and philosophy—of systems—Ishmael here sketches a playfully proposed but seriously intended version of ‘natural religion.’ And generally, this and the four previous chapters show him treating the heavy, ponderous monster, whale or god, with a light touch, with a sort of gaya scienza that fits the Pequod‘s movement toward an encounter with a ship from France.

Before that encounter, the ship needed to pass through the Strait of Malacca, “the most southerly part of all Asia,” and the gateway to islands holding “inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory.” Although the Strait is easily navigable, real hazards abide there: pirates from Sumatra and Java. Although Ahab had no interest in the riches of the East, intending merely to get to the prime whaling-grounds on the far coast of Japan, the pirates would attack any kind of ship. And Ahab might have needed to linger there, out of token respect for his ostensible mission; the seas off Java also promise good whale-hunting.

Ishmael titles this chapter “The Grand Armada,” alluding to the Spanish expedition against England, and this seems apt. Like France (and England) Spain pioneered in building the modern, centralized state. The “armada” here consists of a confederation of whale pods. Under persistent attack from whaleships, Sperm Whales, like feudal dynasties, now often mass together; “it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection.” The Pequod‘s captain and crew found themselves in a double chase. To their rear, Malayan pirates pursued them; for their part, the American vessel chases an armada of whales. Ahab registered the irony. Whale-men, after all, amount to piratical raiders on the centrally-organized community—the ‘modern state’ or perhaps the ’empire’— of whales.

In numbers there is strength, but there is also disorder, inasmuch as the larger the community the more elements there are to coordinate. As the Pequod gained distance from the pirates and moved nearer the armada, the whales showed signs of panic; they were “gallied,” a word derived from the same root as “gallows,” and exhibiting some of the same terror gallows inspire. In one of his footnotes to his novel Melville offers an etymology of the word, arguing that it dates back to Saxon times, “emigrat[ing] to the New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth,” in a process by which “the best and furthest-descended English words”—the aristocrats of the language—”are now democratised, nay, plebeianized… in the New World.” Gallying does in fact reflect the regime of democracy, instancing the “occasional timidity… characteristic of all herding creatures,” not “outdone by the madness of men.” If the whale-armada resembles a modern state or empire, its regime resembles democracy.

Queequeg harpooned a whale, which headed for the center of the armada, dragging the boat along. The crewmen needed to maneuver through the thrashing mob of panicky whales. The whale worked its way off the harpoon, and the boat glided into the center of the whale-‘state.’ This gave Ishmael a rare look at the inner workings of the whales’ ‘regime,’ its way of life. “They say” an “enchanted calm lurks at the heart of every commotion,” and respecting the whale armada hearsay is correct. It was “as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold,” and they had found security there, “evinc[ing] a wondrous fearlessness and confidence” toward the whalers; “like household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them,” while allowing the sailors to touch them. Mating and nursing, the whales at the center of the armada form a ‘political’ inner Tahiti. Ishmael recalls “the sagacious saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish”—and it proved true, here; the Pequod‘s boats killed only one whale on this expedition. When pods band together in a large ‘modern state,’ it works as intended, providing effective defense against piratical raiders.

This ‘state’ does another thing modern states do: It sends out pioneers, called schools, some predominantly female, some consisting of young bulls. Typically, the female schools have “a male of full grown magnitude” as their escort or “schoolmaster,” whom Ishmael compares to a harem master of the Ottoman Empire, occasionally challenged by young bulls plotting a coup; “deadly battle, all for love,” ensues. If not deposed, the schoolmaster ages, if not gracefully. Gradually, the old ruler becomes “sulky,” eventually leaving the school and becoming an isolato, who “will have no one near him but Nature herself” (“and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets”). His final fate has already been described: the crippling, the blindness, the feebleness of senility. As for the schools consisting of young males, they do indeed resemble their human counterparts, “a mob of young collegians… full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard.” These schools dissolve when the collegians become old enough to go off in search of harems. Comparing the two types of whale-school, Ishmael finds that the males will ignore a stricken fellow, but if you “strike a member of the harem school… her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.” As with humans, the female is a more social animal than the male. Sociality without protection produces no isolatoes, but it can produce extra corpses.

Ishmael offers two more observations on piracy. The first concerns legal piracy. What happens if a whale killed by one ship gets loose in a storm, floats away, and another ship salvages it? American whalers have set down a pair of simple rules: A “Fast-Fish” (one tied to a ship) belongs to the party possessing it; a “Loose-Fish” belongs to “anybody who can soonest catch it.” As with all simple legal codes (as, for example, the Golden Rule, also consisting of two parts), its brevity “necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it,” to account for special cases, the vast variety of circumstances. In all this “will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence,” namely that possession is “half of the law” and often “the whole of the law.” The mansion of the criminal, the financier’s usury, the income of the clergyman of a poor congregation, the holdings of aristocrats, Ireland in relation to England, “that redoubted harpooneer”: What are all of these but Fast-Fish? And what was America in 1492, Poland to the Czar, Greece to the Turk, India to England, Mexico to the United States, if not Loose-Fish? More, “What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?”—up for grabs among political and military pirates. Or “all men’s minds and opinions,” including “the principle of religious belief in them” and “the thoughts of thinkers” to rhetoricians and sophists but Loose-Fish? Or the world? “And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?”—at times up for the taking, at other times a slave. English royals who by law claim title to the most valuable parts of every whale and even every sturgeon captured by English ships exemplify a sovereign piracy, but piracy itself is universal.

For his final observation on piracy, Ishmael introduces the Rose-Bud, a French ship which had acquired a dead whale harpooned and then lost by the Pequod‘s crew, under the Loose-Fish doctrine. France, a home of the Enlightenment critique of religion, of modern statism, of the Rights of Man, of monarchy (at this time, and for twenty years more), and finally of Romance (Rose-Bud “was the romantic name of this aromatic ship,” stinking of rotting whale-flesh), remains a land-power, inexperienced in whaling. The French are also inexperienced when it comes to Yankee bargaining. Mr. Stubb suspects that there may be ambergris in that whale-head; he talks the French captain into cutting it loose—something the French crew does quite happily, given the smell. The French go on their way, and Stubb harvests the ambergris, prize of his “unrighteous cunning” or verbal piracy. While “this most fragrant ambergris” accumulates in “the heart of such decay,” Ishmael finds no wonder in that, given that “saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonor, but raised in glory.” Having reduced the principle of grace to a principle of nature, Ishmael makes his own redemptive observation: “The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor.” Nor are whale-men. But to see more of that, piracy would need to decline, and under at least most possible regimes, and to some degree in all of them, the modern state tends only to replace one kind of piracy with another.

This is the eighth of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

Ishmael has shown how a man might prudently choose to mark out and preserve his inner core within the pantheist chaos. This would make him a more tranquil isolato, but still an isolato—one of Tocqueville’s “individualists,” living precariously because alone. In the next ten chapters, he shows how such men might cooperate with like men. The sequence leads up to the Pequod‘s first encounter with a foreign whale ship, an encounter that tests whether such tentative sociality might extend to other nations, other regimes.

Ishmael had already established a friendship with Queequeg, and readers have seen the soundness of his choice. During the operation of stripping blubber from the whale, Queequeg stood on the corpse’s slippery back, attached to Ishmael, who remained on deck, by the “monkey-rope,” tied to the belt of each man. As the stripping proceeded, waves jostled the corpse against the side of the ship; Ishmael’s task was to steady his friend, to prevent him from falling and being crushed. He had every reason to take care, quite apart from bond of friendship, for if Queequeg slid off he would pull Ishmael overboard. Unique to the Pequod, the notion of the monkey-rope arose in the fertile mind of Stubb, who calculated that such a device would ensure vigilance in the man on deck by appealing to the low but solid ground of self-preservation.

Although far from incognizant of this point, Ishmael also recalled their ‘marriage’ (now indeed “for better or for worse”) and further compared their pairing to Siamese twin-ship. More, “So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.” Unjust as this interdependence might be, it precluded any thoughts of isolation, whether terrifying or tranquil. And as a matter of fact, he saw, “this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes”: “If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die.” There are no real isolatoes. Self-government of the human soul can be established, but self-government in action requires alert cooperation. “Handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I could, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.”

Chaos remained the enemy of all this, as the sharks continued to swarm around the corpse “like bees round… a beehive.” Fellow-harpooneers Tashtego and Daggoo attempted to kill as many of them as possible with their whale-spades, and while “they meant Queequeg’s best happiness,” the “indiscreet spades” they wielded “would come nearer to amputating a leg than a tail.” Is Queequeg “not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle, and peril, poor lad.” Sentiment alone cannot meet the dangers of chaos; the best friends need to bring observation, prudence, and skill with it. Ishmael ends his reflection on friendship with a glance at the other extreme of ineffectual sentiment. When cold and exhausted Queequeg returns safely to the deck, the hapless Dough-boy offers him a ginger drink, provided to the crew by teetotaling Aunt Charity, back in Nantucket. This earns a sharp reproof from Stubb, who sensibly orders grog for the man, instead. Charity, yes; foolish, Christian-temperance charity, no.

With the Sperm Whale’s head still attached to one side of the ship, Ahab ordered the crew to chase and kill a Right Whale and to tie it to the Pequod‘s other side, for balance. Flask told Stubb that he overheard Fedallah recommending this, and this moved the Second Mate to call the Parsee “the devil in disguise.” Ahab has made a deal with the devil, Stubb feared, blaming God for allowing the devil to prowl the earth, “kidnapping people.” However this may be, the Ahab-Fedallah twin-ship forms a shadow-parallel with the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg. And in a way literally so: Fedallah stood at the edge of the deck, looking at the Right Whale’s head and evidently finding an analogy between its wrinkles and the lines on his hand—that is, his fate. By chance, Ahab stood nearby at such an angle that “the Parsee occupied his shadow,” blending with it and making it longer. The superstitious crew continued its work, but “Laplandish speculations were bandied among them”; pantheists, animists, ruled by a shaman, the ancient Laplanders parallel the modern whale-ship crew, cutting up a whale in the middle of the ocean. Ishmael considers the two whale-heads in a different, more reasonable light. “By the counterpoise of both heads,” the Pequod “regained her even keel, though sorely strained”; “so, when on one side you hoist Locke’s head”—emblem of empiricism—”you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s”—emblem of idealism—”and you come back again; but in a very poor plight.” “Some minds for ever keep trimming boat,” but the better way is to “throw all these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right.” When it comes to guiding your way of life, contradictory philosophic doctrines, even if balanced, cannot substitute for prudential judgment gained by experience.

Denigration of philosophic doctrine does not preclude philosophizing. Ishmael embarks on a brief voyage into what philosophers call the ‘other minds’ problem, a problem that he has already addressed in his observations of the many different human regimes or ways of life. Themselves effectively linked by the ship, the pair of whale-heads merit consideration along with paired Ishmael and Queequeg, Ahab and Fedallah. Both whale species have eyes on the sides of their heads, which gives them two ‘fronts’ and two ‘backs,’ reminiscent of Rome’s Janus, god of doorways. This requires a whale’s brain to be “much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s,” one whereby “he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction.” These intellectual virtues notwithstanding, wall-eyed whales find themselves in a dilemma when attacked by whale-boats coming at them from several directions at once, circumstances in which their perceptions cause them “queer frights” and “helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.”

If the eye is a portal of thoughts, the ear is a portal of beliefs. The ears of both species are tiny; whales think, but do they believe? Sometimes worshipped by the likes of the crazed Shaker, they do not themselves worship. But, Ishmael remarks, the size of eyes and ears does not necessarily make vision or hearing more or less acute. He offers both a philosophic and a sermon-like lesson to members of his own species: “Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.” Then as now, educators lauded breadth of vision, all-inclusive panorama-ism of thought and sentiment. For all his wide-ranging adventures, Melville’s Ishmael prefers careful and precise thought to eclecticism intellectual or moral.

And so he supplements these comparisons with contrasts. If “the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a Roman war-chariot”—the face of Janus that looks back to the virtues of Roman aristocracy—”the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe,” likened by “an old Dutch voyager” to “a shoemaker’s last”—product and tool, respectively, of the modern commercial republic. This makes the Kant-and-Locke joke more precise; the more telling contrast remains that between aristocratic nobility and democratic embourgeoisement. Indeed, despite similarities shared by all members of the genus, “the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads”: “in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of sperm”—a lack of manly fertility; “no ivory teeth at all”—nothing rare and valuable; “no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw”—betokening a warrior-spirit—but rather a mouth fitted for skimming and straining the tiny brit, the steady but unheroic gains of commercial life. The Sperm Whale’s head even hints of philosophy, its broad brow “full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death,” its “whole head seem[ing] to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death.” Even granted the utmost nobility, the “very sulky-looking fellow,” the Right Whale, “I take to have been a Stoic.” But the Sperm Whale more resembles a “Platonian,” a man of more elevated thinking, although he “might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years,” in what one guesses to have been a move toward materialist pantheism.

But what does the Sperm Whale’s head do, when the whale moves from thought to action? In addition to devouring giant squid, it rams ships. “A dead, blind, wall,” an “enormous boneless mass” of extraordinarily tough blubber, the front of its head makes a fearsome battering-ram. “Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall… there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life,” “all obedient to one volition.” This being so, Ishmael tells his listeners, renounce “all ignorant incredulity” regarding the Sperm Whale (emphasis added). Even as he attacks what he takes to be ignorant credulity, religiosity, Ishmael equally attacks the naïve refusal to accept reality as it is. “For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth.” “What,” he asks in his rhetorical clincher, “befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s veil at Sais?” The goddess in question, Isis, symbolizes nature; she is veiled because nature has secrets. “I am all that has been and is and shall be,” the inscription at the base of her statue tells its readers, echoing the meaning of a name of  God. “No mortal has ever lifted my veil,” she warns—any more than any can see God, unveiled, and live. Ishmael has met the youth in question by reading a poem by Friedrich Schiller, telling the story of a young quester after knowledge who does lift Isis’ veil one Egyptian night, only to be found “extended, senseless, pale as death” the following morning. “Truth attained will never reward the one who unveils it,” Schiller concludes. Isis is another manifestation of the Sphinx; both represent not God but chaos-nature, terrifying as the Biblical God but, in Ishmael’s estimation, impersonal, a combination of fatality and chance, with a weak, faltering humanity making its often-foolish choices, easily swept away. And as for the youth, Ishmael, he must learn how to recover from the experience of learning the truth, having lifted the provincial and sentimental veils or conventions of his own regime. Can the “Young America” bear the truth of his witness?

The move away from social isolation, coupled with the move toward philosophy, suggests a move toward ‘Germany’—by the mid-nineteenth century home to the most celebrated philosophic critics of empiricist, ‘English’ materialism and individualism. The four chapters leading up to the next gam feature increasingly prominent references to German things and themes. The first such reference, “The Great Heidelberg Tun,” refers to a giant wine cask that Ishmael compares to the upper part of the interior of the Sperm Whale’s head. This contains substances more valuable than most German wines: The lower part, the “junk,” consists of “one immense honeycomb of oil”; the upper part, the “case,” contains the spermaceti— “absolutely pure, limpid, odiferous,” and, it might be added, white. This “Tun” must be tapped carefully, “lest a careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its invaluable contents.” Still again, Queequeg intervened heroically in the work of the ship, rescuing Tashtego, assigned to tap the cask, who slipped and fell into the huge cavity after nearly completing his task. Ishmael describes this as an act of “obstetrics,” a lesson in “midwifery.” Midwifery recalls the work of Socrates, whose philosophic way of life consisted not in elaborating a doctrine or ‘system’ (rather in the manner Germans tended to do) but to test or scrutinize the opinions of his fellow-citizens by engaging them in dialectical questioning, an exercise in logos or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, often ending not in the unveiling of truth but in aporia. Queequeg’s salvific action may thus be seen as a picture of Socratism. Had the cask still been loaded with the spermaceti, Tashtego would have drowned, “coffined, hearsed and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale.” “How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honeyed head, and sweetly perished there?” Here is another sanctuary or “inner Tahiti,” even in Leviathan itself—in this ‘case’ both sweet and fatal, not protective. Rejecting ‘Jerusalem’ even as he endorses the Biblical account of the terrifying, overwhelming cosmos described in the Book of Job, Ishmael also rejects ‘Athens’ insofar as it features philosophers like Plato who offer (or seem to offer) a philosophic doctrine. Midwife Socrates may well be another matter, however. The philosopher who converses with all manner of men and boys in the agora, long-lived and courageous, an Ishmael-like outsider even as he stays inside the walls of his city, could not be described as a doctrinaire. Whether German philosophers lived up to Socrates’ example may be doubted, as Ishmael’s reference to Kant suggests.

The following pair of chapters satirize science, specifically the “semi-sciences” of physiognomy and phrenology. In “The Prairie” (the title recalling the “prairie-like placidity of the Sperm Whale’s brow, bespeaking indifference to death), Melville delves into physiognomy. Sperm Whales don’t have noses, no facial protruberance easily pulled by demeaning jesters. Far from it: “Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their decrees,” with the legend “God: done this day by my hand.” The Sperm Whale’s “sublime” brow gives the animal a “high and mighty god-like dignity”; viewing it, “you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature,” or, as a physiognomist would say, “the mark of genius.” Continuing the joke, Ishmael intones, if you doubt the genius of the Sperm Whale, given his failure ever to write a book or to deliver a speech, why, “his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it,” in his “pyramidical silence.” He concludes, more prosaically, “Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a human fable.” Again rather like Socrates, Ishmael doubts the science of his day.

Going behind the whale’s face, and on to the semi-science of phrenology, Ishmael locates its surprisingly small brain inside the monster’s skull; indeed, “the most exalted potency” may well prove brain-weak. But consider further: “If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarf skulls, all bearing rudimentary resemblance to the skull proper.” Now, “it is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls,” and indeed a cannibal friend (presumably Queequeg) had observed much the same thing in the skeleton of a slain enemy. What is more, “I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone,” as in the expression, ‘He has backbone.’ And as a matter of fact, the whale’s backbone is big and wide—not to mention its hump, an “organ of firmness and indomitableness.” And indeed “the great monster is indomitable,” as “you will yet have reason to know.” Q. E. D., my listeners! The Germans would be proud.

All this Germanism leads to a gam with the Jungfrau, a whale ship out of Bremen. She was a virgin, indeed, having caught no whales and having no sightings of Moby-Dick. Captain Derick de Deer pulled his whale-boat alongside the Pequod with a request for some fish oil; he and his crew had yet to capture a fish of any kind at all. Celebrated as philosophic doctrinaires, the Germans are newcomers to the vast sea of experience, novices at self-government in chaos. As chance would have it, a whale pod was sighted, followed distantly by an old and feeble bull whale, slowed not only by age but by many injuries. The crews of the two ships competed in the pursuit of this shadow of the great leviathan described in Job, which “laugheth at the shaking of a spear.” But “Oh! that unfulfillments should follow the prophets”: Leviathan can indeed be killed by men.

Predictably, the Pequod‘s crew gets to him, first. There is no pity for this pitiable beast, who turns out to be blind, as well. “For all his old age, and his one arm [he had lost a fin in some underwater fight, long ago], he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness to all.” It did get revenge of sorts; the crew tied it to the side of the ship, only to be forced to cut it loose (as usual, Queequeg takes this sensible, decisive action); its sheer weight threatened to drag the ship underwater. As for the Virgin, her captain and crew were last seen lowering the boats to chase a Fin-Back whale, a species too speedy to catch. Germans lack the judgment that comes from experience, but “Oh! many are the Fin-backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.” If the Germans have rightly questioned the individualism of the English, of the Enlightenment generally, they may have hurried off in the wrong direction, on an illusory quest of their own. This gam, this dialogue, has conducted them into an aporia without the dialectical advantage of having discarded illogical half-truths. They will never catch a fish that way, and will continue to beg others for the oil that produces light.

This is the seventh of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

Having reintroduced Moby-Dick, Melville devotes the next sixteen chapters to whales and whale-hunting. This pattern—a gam between the Pequod and another whale-ship, followed by yarns of whaling, brief times of peace followed by long periods of war—will prevail for the second half of the book. It follows the refined understanding of the cosmos Ishmael introduced in the middle of his yarn, his suggestion that even chaos features a few safe harbors, a few island havens.

This set of chapters concerns bodies, and how it is the nature of things for bodies to devour bodies. He begins with three chapters on the bodies of whales as depicted in paintings and other visual media. “Such pictures of whales are all wrong”—”pictorial delusions” whose “primal source” or sources may be found among Hindu, Egyptian, and Greek sculpture. Those were “inventive but unscrupulous times” (as Melville has already asserted respecting ancient scriptures), and “ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not only in the most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him” drawn by men who were looking at beached whales mutilated and deformed by whatever catastrophes had killed them. A beached whale is the proverbial fish out of water, and so the whole of it as it is in life “must remain unpainted to the last.” “The only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself,” a hazardous expedition; “it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.” Experience is the best way of knowing, but, as Radney’s fate shows, getting close enough for detailed observation risks killing the observer. Among painters, the “less erroneous” efforts have been undertaken by the French generally, Ambroise Louis Garneray in particular. “The French are the lads for painting action,” evidently because they have long been the preeminent military power in Europe. Although Ishmael professes not to know it, Garneray, though never a whaler, served as an officer in the French navy during the Napoleonic Wars. By contrast, industrial and commercial “English and American whale draughtsman seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale.” Regimes enter into the souls of artists as much as they do the souls of whalemen.

Civilization itself may interfere with artists who attempt to capture the whale. The proof is our yarn-spinner, portrayer of whales in words. “Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage”—an outsider, an Ishmael. This matters, not necessarily (as one might suppose) because the primal, savage man best understands the primal, savage beast but because “one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry.” With that patience, “the white sailor-savage… will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield” and as “full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old German savage, Albert Dürer.” Ishmael and his maker, Melville, exhibit similar patience, similar barbarity or savagery “so-called,” similar attention to detail. Such men will show you the whale, without endangering your body although perhaps endangering your soul.

As for the whale’s body, the Right Whale nourishes it with brit, tiny crustaceans that live on the surface of the ocean. “Brit” is the chapter containing the middle pages of the book, and in them we learn that “to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling”; Columbus, for example, “sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one.” Such surface-sailing induces the illusion of mastery, seen especially in the modern attempt to conquer nature itself. But “however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make.” The illusion of modern science, of the civilization that preens itself on its supposed triumph over savagery, brings men to lose “that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.” We overlook what should be an obvious fact: “Noah’s flood has not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.” And that two-thirds of the world devours not only land and landsmen who venture onto it but itself. The sea “is also fiend to its own offspring,” “dash[ing] even the mightiest whales upon the rocks” along with wrecked ships. “No mercy, no power but its own controls it”: Where is God, Ishmael implies, on the ocean? Has He ever moved across the waters of the primeval cosmos? “The masterless ocean overruns the globe.” But more, the ocean’s power finds its match in the ocean’s “subtlety.” “Its most dreaded creatures glide under water.” Like the cosmos itself, its lovely, azure surface hides monsters, and those monsters themselves come in forms of “devilish brilliance and beauty.” Hobbes had it right: a place of “universal cannibalism,” the sea shelters creatures which “prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”

And then consider yourself, know yourself as well as a native of Lima knows his city. “Do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself” in this war of all against all, in and on the sea that surrounds the land? For as “this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti”—one place where desperate captains and their mutinous crewmen alike both find respite—”full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!” Who is the God who might preserve you in this Eden within yourself? He does not seem to be on the waters, but He does seem to be (even if only as a metaphor) in the cautionary words of Ishmael’s yarn, words both illustrating and exemplifying the deliberation and choice that can inflect if not master or rule fate and chance. Self-knowledge and consequent self-protection are still possible, even if the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate never really has been and never really will be. Central to Moby-Dick stands this challenge to the Bible and religions generally, and to American, Western, and modern rationalism, along with a classical, ‘ancient,’ and reasonable reply, wrapped though it may be in ‘Romantic’ rhetoric.

One may measure the difference between the Right Whale and the Sperm Whale by noticing that the former eats brit, the latter giant squid. As the Pequod sailed toward Java, the Spirit-Spout occasionally beckoning them on, Daggoo sighted what appeared to be Moby-Dick. It turned out to be a giant squid, basking on the surface. As with its enemy, the Sperm Whale, “few men have any but the most vague ideas concerning [the giant squid’s] true nature and form.” Sailors suppose that it clings to the bottom of the ocean with its giant tentacles, only to be pried loose and devoured by the Sperm Whale which, unlike the Right Whale, has the jaw and the teeth necessary for that task. But it is “only by inference” that “one can tell of what, precisely,” the Sperm Whale’s food consists. Ahab did not care. As soon as the squid was identified, he silently turned his boat back to the ship. Tyrant Ahab plots; he never wonders. Ever-observant, prudent Queequeg matter-of-factly remarked that where you see squid you will see the Sperm Whale.

Ishmael turns next to the business of killing whales. Each harpoon attaches to a “whale-line,” the rope that “folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction” like the deadly snakes draped around Indian jugglers. With a harpooned whale pulling it, the line may entangle a sailor and drag him overboard. This should terrorize the men, “yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?”—enables them to laugh and joke, even as the boat itself “rock[s] like a cradle,” pitching each one from side to side. Ahab understood the power of habit as a tool of everyday ruling; here it faces down the prospect of death. But consider yourself, Ishmael again recommends: “All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.” A philosopher would feel no more or less terror in a whale boat than in a chair before his hearth. The hemorrhage, the embolism, the seizure: just as each human being has his inner Tahiti, so has he his death-dealing, serpentine, inner chaos.

Queequeg was right. They sighted a whale. In the pursuit it dove, surfacing near Stubb’s boat. Ishmael provides a blood-soaked description of the kill, not omitting the whipping of the line in the boat. The whale’s “tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men,” their savage forebears in the whaling life. Stubb ordered the men to pull the whale to the surface, then took a lance and probed for its heart. “At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air”; Stubb’s lance had burst the whale’s heart. All in a day’s work for Stubb, who paused to dump the dead ashes of his pipe into the water, “thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.” It will soon transpire that he contemplated not the cosmos but the prospect of dinner.

The time between the kill and the meal gives Ishmael time to propose a modest reform in whaling practices. Harpooneers are expected not only to hit the whale but to join in rowing the whale-boat. This tires them, contributing to the poor percentage of kills—only five of fifty throws fastens the harpoon firmly on the whale. If the (as it were) spiritual side of Ishmael seeks its inner Tahiti, his practical side aims not at revolution but at reform. For him, given his assessment of nature, modest self-government prevails in thought and action.

Mr. Stubb concerned himself more with eating: brit for Right Whales, Squid for Sperm Whales, Sperm Whales for him. While Ahab viewed the kill with “some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair,” being no nearer to killing Moby-Dick, Stubb, “flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement.” (“Staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs”—a resignation to which that good man may too readily recur.) Temporarily free of rule by his two superiors, Stubb ordered Daggoo to cut him a steak from the prime section of the whale. He was not the only creature dining with relish, as the sharks swarmed around the carcass, gouging out their own filets. Ishmael sharply observed that sharks follow slave ships, too, devouring the bodies of dead slaves, tossed overboard. For his entertainment before dining, Stubb commanded the ship’s black cook, himself effectively a slave, to deliver a sermon to the sharks, to tell them to quiet their thrashing. Unamused by the command to perform what amounted to a minstrel show for the Second Mate, Christian “Fleece” had no choice but to obey, preaching very much along the lines Ishmael himself thinks. Addressing the sharks as “fellow-critters,” he admitted that their voracity “can’t be helped” because “dat is natur”; perhaps thinking more of Stubb than of the heedless sharks, he added that “to gobern wicked natur, dat is de pint,” since angels themselves are “not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.” And (again thinking of Stubb, who shared his meal with no one) could you not add a bit of charity and justice to your actions? Could the bigger sharks not bite off some of that blubber and feed the smaller ones? Turning directly to Stubb, Fleece announced that it was no use, that sharks “don’t hear one word,” and will feed until their bellies are full—except that their “bellies is bottomless.” This is the one lesson Stubb does take from the designated sermonizer: “Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion,” and so will go to dinner. After listening to several peremptory orders for more whale-meat tomorrow, Fleece judged Stubb to be no better than a shark.

Ishmael concurs, widening the lesson, Montaigne-like, to mankind generally. Just as we are all savages, beneath the civilizational surface, so we are all cannibals. “Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.” But why does that make men cannibals, rather than merely voracious?

Ishmael shows why he thinks so as he describes the “laborious” business of later generations of slaughterers decorously would call ‘processing’ the whale. Queequeg and another sailor killed some of the sharks, an effort which “brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe.” Sharks began to devour the bowels of the sharks ripped open by the whale-spades; more, the disemboweled sharks ate their own bowels “till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth.” Here is pantheism, indeed: nature is self-devouring; it cannibalizes itself and derives energy from that very cannibalism. “A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed.” No isolatoes in nature, but no sweet pantheism of peace, either: neither Percy Bysshe Shelley nor Ralph Waldo Emerson ever went to sea. Ishmael gives Queequeg the coda, a serious wisecrack: “Queequeg no care what god made him shark”—readers will recall Blake’s “tyger,” the animal to which Fedallah’s crew were compared—”wedder Feejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin”—savage, blood-red, like the faces of the sailors when the sun reflected the bloody water.

Attuned to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the whalemen ignored the Sabbath, working on the whale that Sunday, “every sailor a butcher,” bloodied. The Sabbath separates the day of rest from the days of work, even as the Creator-God of the Bible remains separate from His Creation. But in a pantheistic cosmos no genuine separation exists; one day is like another, distinguished only by the kind of actions undertaken on that day. The upper blubber-layer of the whale is called the “blanket-piece,” and indeed serves to insulate the whale in all hemispheres, and at all depths of the ocean. The blubber came off the corpse like an orange rind. This unforbidden fruit was thrown into the ship’s blubber-room. “Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands kept coiling away the long blanket-pieces as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents.” In the pantheistic cosmos, fruit and Serpent are essentially the same thing, things to be ‘processed’ and re-‘processed.’ In the pantheistic chaos, all persons, animals, and things are at least in some measure blood-red dam Ingins.

The Sperm Whale’s thick, dense blubber does act like a blanket “or, better still, an Indian poncho.” “Crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight lines” resembling hieroglyphs, the pattern reminds Ishmael of “those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids” (in Egypt, where God’s people were enslaved) and also “the old Indian characters chiseled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi.” “Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.” If God is indeed “a dam Ingin,” His inscrutable actions (whether in making tigers, lambs, or sharks) match the inscrutability of the markings He leaves. His Word is no-word, or at least no word understandable to any person now alive.  But the whale also shares with humans lungs and warm blood. The blanket protects “the great monster” from the cold of deep and far-northern waters and the tropical heat. “It does seem to me,” Ishmael testifies, “that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.” “In all seasons retain a temperature of thine own.” Here is the lesson of Fleece’s sermon, heard not by a shark but by a fellow-human. Once again, Ishmael commends defense of the inner Tahiti against chaos. Melville’s contemporary, Nietzsche, would soon call for a pessimism of strength; Melville’s Ishmael already has a (pantheistic) pessimism of strength.

He returns to his account of whaling’s laborious business. The sailors separated the body of the whale from its valuable head, cutting the body loose from the ship and leaving it to drift. It was white, like “a marble sepulcher” and of course like the living death, Moby-Dick. “Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives,” flesh consumed by sea-gulls, “the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled,” examples of the “horrible vulturism of earth from which not the mightiest whale is free.” The whale lived on, however, in the superstitious minds of sailors. Seen from afar by “some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel,” the “whale’s unharming corpse” is often mistaken for a shoal or a rock, the region set down in a log book as a danger zone, avoided for years by other ships, which “leap over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held.” Sheep bring Christians to mind, and indeed, Ishmael scornfully exclaims, “There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!” It is a funeral dirge not for the whale but for religion. “Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world”—specifically, the world of those who believe unwittingly false reports carefully written down as well-intended warnings to the flock. Ghostly horror-stories, like idealistic fantasies, like the beautiful surface of the world itself, only mask reality, diverting men from attention to what they most need to know.

Ahab thought of the whale-head as a sphinx. Reversing the legend, it never interrogated him; he interrogated it, or rather entreated and even prayed to it. “Tell us the secret thing that is in thee,” what you have learned, you who have “moved amid this world’s foundations,” the primeval water over which the God of the Bible moved. You have seen not only the foundation of the world but the human beings who have lived and died above it: the drowned sailors; the lovers who jumped from the burning ship; the murder-victims of pirates. “O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham,” the most faithful of the faithful, “and not one syllable is thine!” In the legend, the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle is “Man.” In this more real world, the Sphinx remained silent, giving no answers. Lapsed-Quaker Ahab longed for St. Paul to come, “and to my breezelessness bring his breeze,” the Holy Spirit. “O nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies!”—those parallels between the atomistic material of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the mind of man. In the materialist and pantheist chaos there is no creating Logos, no understandable Word of God. Only silence.

The next gam closes this account of cosmic cannibalism with an ironic answer to Ahab’s prayer. The Sphinx did not speak, but it had a sort of prophet. The crew sighted the Jeroboam, another whale-ship out of Nantucket. The Captain Mayhew refused to board the Pequod, as his own crew suffered from an epidemic. He preferred to converse with Ahab from a whale-boat. The original Jeroboam, the evil king of southern Israel portrayed in I Kings 11-14, has his counterpart not in the captain but in a crazed Shaker who accompanied him on the boat, a man with “deep, settled, fanatic delirium” in his eyes, who has neutralized the legitimate rule of the captain and his officers by terrifying the crew with end-times prophecies. The madman came from the “crazy society of Niskayuna Shakers,” who settled in that upstate New York village in 1774, in order to bring the sect’s founder, Mother Ann Lee, recently arrived from England via New York City, to a safe haven. (Judging from one extant portrait, Mother Lee, it might be noted, had an extraordinarily prominent forehead, rather resembling that of a sperm whale.) At Niskayuna, this man had “announced the speedy opening of the seventh vial” of the Book of Revelation, which was in this case “supposed to be charged with laudanum.”  But he soon departed for Nantucket, seized with still another “strange, apostolic whim.” “With that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common sense exterior,” enabling him to sign on to the whale ship; safely out of sight of land, he “announced himself as the archangel Gabriel [meaning “God is my strength”], guardian angel of Israel and trumpeter of the world’s doom, “command[ing] the captain to jump overboard.” Although the captain disobeyed, he found himself increasingly powerless, as “the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness” and feelings of terror. “Jeroboam” means “the people contend,” and so they did, effectively mutinying, changing the regime of the ship from a monarchy to a popularly-supported tyranny. (The name “Mayhew” might be a sly reference to Jonathan Mayhew, an eminently respectable New England clergyman of the Founding era who blended liberal Christianity with sober Lockeanism, the sort of man who may indeed influence the course of events on stable, dry land but might find himself all at sea, when at sea with a self-proclaimed prophet of God.) The epidemic only increased ‘Gabriel’s’ usurped authority, as he “declar[ed] that the plague, as he so called it” (following Biblical language) “was at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure.” After proclaiming Moby-Dick to be God, ‘Gabriel’ correctly prophesied the death of the First Mate, who had announced his intention to kill the Whale; this confirmed his authority over the “poor devils,” the crew. From then on, the crew “sometimes render[ed] him personal homage, as to a god,” of whom they begged for mercy. In the Bible, Jeroboam leads Israelites in idolatrous worship of the Golden Calf.

All of which parallels much of Ahab’s own tyranny, From his feigned sanity to gain access to the ship, to his usurpation of the authority of the owners of the Pequod once safely offshore, to his dominance over the officers by mesmeric words of monomaniacal ardor that bring the crew under his tyrannical rule, “Gabriel” does indeed answer Ahab’s prayer by holding a mirror up to him. After hearing Ahab also intends to kill the Whale, he prophesied Ahab’s destruction: “Beware the blasphemer’s end!” “The crazy sea… seemed in league with him”—a just ‘analogy,’ indeed, as ‘Gabriel’ will prove a true prophet not of God but of chaos, even as he ruled superstitious men by means of an idolatrous, self-divinizing cult. The Biblical Jeroboam waged constant war with the house of Judah, the king of Northern Israel. Both Israels finally deviate from the God of the Bible, as indeed the “houses” of the Pequod and the Jeroboam now have done. “Curses throttle thee!” Ahab shrieked in reply. The war of the two false Israels continued.