Even for most who have yet to read this novel, people know that it is about a whale. Melville takes massive deviations from his plot, which is, at heart, a whale hunting voyage, to digress on the anatomy and history of the sperm whale, the details of the construction and everyday mechanics of a whaling ship, the ethnicity, background, personalities, and responsibilities of its crew, the culture, history of warfare, and dietary habits of Polynesians, and much more. But in the end, this is a novel about one man, Captain Ahab, and his obsession with one white sperm whale, Moby Dick, who took his leg in battle on the high seas.
The novel is told by Ishmael, a former merchant marine, who is on his maiden whaling voyage. “They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though…. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!”
Most American whaling ships, in Melville’s time, launched their multi-years voyages from Nantucket. “Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and rests on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.”
Melville stressed that the whaleman was born from particular stock. “And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm richer.” Melville describes Ahab’s ship in the midst of its hellish journey, “Then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.” It is not until the last thirty pages of the novel that the Pequod, finally, gives chase to Moby Dick, “They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltlessness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.”
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