Why Read Moby-Dick

gore.” A “Quaker with a vengeance,” he also has no qualms about exploiting the whalemen under his employ. Bildad, Ishmael opines, “had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.”
    The compartmentalization of spiritual and worldly concerns is a temptation in every era. In Melville’s day, it was most apparent with the issue of slavery, and Bildad, the Bible-reading Quaker whaleman, illustrates the truth of Frederick Douglass’s observation that the most brutal slaveholders were always the most devout. “For a pious man,” Ishmael says, “especially for a Quaker, [Bildad] was certainly rather hardhearted, to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them.”
    Melville’s years on a whaleship gave him a firsthand appreciation for the backbreaking reality of physical labor. Politicians might speak patriotically about the principles of liberty and freedom, but it was repetitious, soul-crushing work—a form of bodily punishment to which most white Americans refused to submit—that was responsible for the country’s prosperity. Once a whale was killed, it took an entire day to process it, a task only to be repeated when another whale was sighted. “Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing!” Ishmael laments. “Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when— There she blows!— the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.”
    The crew of a typical whaleship was made up of men from all over the world. In addition to white sailors from America and Europe, there were Native Americans, African Americans, Azoreans, Cape Verdeans, and South Sea Islanders. The harpooneers aboard the Pequod include Queequeg, from the Polynesian island of Kokovoko (“It is not down in any map,” Ishmael tells us; “true places never are”); Daggoo, the “imperial negro” from Africa; Tashtego, a Wampanoag from Martha’s Vineyard; and Fedallah, the mysterious fire worshipper dressed in a Chinese-style jacket. What distinguishes the thirty crew members of the Pequod, Ishmael notes, is that almost all of them, including the officers, many of whom hail from Nantucket, are islanders, what he calls “ Isolatoes . . . each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel . . .”
    This demographic diversity was not typical of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, when to be an American was to be white and, if not already rich, on the way to wealth as the nation proudly took its place as a global power. A century and a half later, we have a very different perspective on the role of other peoples and cultures in America’s rise. As Ishmael notes, the white American “liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.” Because of his exposure to these various peoples aboard a whaleship, Melville was one of the few authors of his time to have firsthand experience with where the future lay for America in a demographic sense, and his portrayal of working people is never stereotypical or condescending.
    Melville was well aware of the great gift he had been given when he shipped out on a whaler. His contemporaries didn’t recognize it, but he knew that his experiences in the Pacific had better served his artistic purposes than any education he might have received at a traditional university. Whatever future reputation he might enjoy would depend on his exposure to whaling: “[I]f hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone,” Ishmael tells us, “if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
    Melville’s time aboard a whaler also left him with an