Why Read Moby-Dick

push for more. And since Nantucket in 1850 was already past its prime, there is a nostalgic quality to his five-paragraph evocation of the island in chapter 14. Instead of writing history, Melville is forging an American mythology.
    Nantucket, Ishmael proclaims, is “a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.” He then proceeds to spin off joke after joke about how sandy and sterile the island is. There are so few trees on Nantucket that islanders carry around scraps of wood “like bits of the true cross in Rome.” They plant toadstools to provide themselves with some shade. In order to wade through all the sand, they wear the gritty equivalent of snowshoes. The sea is so omnipresent “that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering.”
    After devoting the two subsequent paragraphs to a distillation of the island’s history, taking us from the oral traditions of the first Native inhabitants through to the islanders’ current pursuit of “[t]hat Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon,” he establishes Nantucket as a nodal point of global, God-ordained ambition. “And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.”
    The Nantucketer does not just sail across the ocean; he lives upon it in his quest for the sperm whale. “ There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.” These are not people of the real world; these are the argonauts of their day, superheroes impervious to the worst that God has heaped upon humanity. Then there is the chapter’s beautiful, carefully modulated final sentence: “With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.” And so it ends, this little sidebar of miraculous prose, one of many that Melville scatters like speed bumps throughout the book as he purposely slows the pace of his mighty novel to a magisterial crawl.

5
    Chowder
    T he Nantucket of chapter 14 is a euphoric whirlwind. The “real” Nantucket, at least the town in which Ishmael and Queequeg soon find themselves, is anything but boisterous and fun. It is a shadow land made of Melville’s worst nightmares, the breeding ground of the ominous cloud out of which Ahab will eventually stump forth on his whalebone leg.
    Before we get into all that, however, we must linger over one of the more tangible gifts Melville provides in Moby-Dick: his recipe for clam chowder. Ishmael and Queequeg have just found their way to the Try Pots Inn, named for the huge iron cauldrons in which the whale’s blubber was boiled into oil. There they enjoy bowl after bowl of Mrs. Hussey’s chowder. “Oh, sweet friends!” Ishmael crows with delight. “[H]earken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.” Remember this, all ye modern-day chowder makers, forgo the cloying chunks of needless potato and go with the biscuit bits!
    Even before they enter the Try Pots, Ishmael has begun to wonder what he’s gotten himself into. The inn’s sign, made from a sawed-off topmast, reminds him of a gallows. Then there’s the name of the man who recommended this establishment, I. A. Coffin. He cannot help but suspect that these are “oblique hints touching Tophet.” While leading them to their room, Mrs. Hussey tells the story of “young Stiggs,” the whaleman who, after returning from a four-year voyage with only three barrels of oil, stabbed himself to death with his own harpoon. “[E]ver since then,” Mrs. Hussey explains, “I