Prologue: author, English
Soundings: first visit to America; NYC, beluga whale; second visit to America five years later; train from NYC to Boston; New England; Provincetown and Cape Cod; the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock; Mayflower converted to whaling ship; radical journalist Mary Heaton Vorse; Edward Hopper painting; whale watching cruise; humpback whale; breaching; toothed vs baleen whales; why whales don't suffer from the bends; whales and myths; Moby Dick four years after Wuthering Heights; "Call me Ismael"; Moby Dick;
The Passage Out: biography of Herman Melville; born into well-to-do family; father dies when Herman was 12 years old; good schooling up to a point; teaches, writes; out to sea; first voyage, Liverpool to NYC; second voyage from the Whaling City (New Bedford) itself; relating the story of Moby Dick; modern New Bedford; Seaman's Bethel; the Whaling Museum; only bull sperm whales venture to the far North Sea;
The Sperm Whale: cachalot (p 62; 93); there is the toothed whale (the sperm whale) and all the rest (baleen whale); the sperm whale in a family of its own; live in every ocean; 360,000 estimated; toothed lower jaw; toothless mandible; blowholes: odontocetes have single nostrils; mysticetes have two; remora and lampreys; suckling technique first described by Sir William Wilde, father of Oscar; most complex social structure of any mammal other than man; pods or gams, up to 20 whales; schools or shoals, 20 - 50 whales; herds or bodies, fifty whales, or more; single bulls, schoolmasters; groups of females, harems; young males, bachelor schools, "forty-barrel bulls"; worldwide sperm whales eat as much as the annual catch of the entire human marine fishery; abruptly switches to the blue whale in London's Natural History Museum; giant squid near New Zealand; the original kraken, the sea monsters of myth; cephalopods; the beak (dopa-rich proteins); two hearts; the lumen: measured from a pure white spermaceti candle, one candlepower being equivalent to the burning of 120 grains of wax per hour; spermacetic did not freeze, sperm oil could be used in lamps during the winter; "The Cassock," the " most amazing chapter in an amazing book";
A Filthy Enactment: back to the Whaling Museum in New Bedford; half-scale replica of a whaling ship; wow, Frederick Douglas began in the whaling shipyards (1838); New Bedford; LIttle Faial for its Azoreans, New Guinea; the three helmsmen (Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod); the three harpooners (Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo, the Polynesian, American Indian, and the African-American); New Bedford, a vital stop on the Underground Railroad; whaling and slavery co-existed;
Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcottt, wearing of cotton forbidden, oil lamps banned; author see Moby Dick as a metaphor for the war between the states; the year Moby Dick came out, a new Fugitive State Law passed (it gave owners extraordinary powers to re-claim their property); the whiteness of Moby Dick seemed to be a reflection of America's preoccupation with color;
Far Away Land: Nantucket; Nattick, Native American meaning far away land; Nantucket Athenaeum, 1841, island's first anti-slavery convention, 1841, Frederick Douglass spoke to a mixed-race audience; Joseph Starbuck; the island furnished the names -- Macy, Folger, and Starbuck; remember the "star" tattoo on Macy's wrist; Nantucket's whaling museum; scrimshaw; forgotten.... ...until John F Kennedy, singularly responsible for revival of scrimshaw; modern whaling began on Nantucket; nine Quakers acquired rights to the island, including Thomas Macy, Tristram Coffin, and Christopher Hussey; the right whales and native Americans; 1690's; then, in 1712, a new prey was discovered, the sperm whale; the "Right" whale vs the "Cachalot" whale; "whaling for such a noble animal was like riding with foxhounds compared to the lowly bear-baiting of right whales"; the technique for turning whale oil into the finest candles in the world (Nantucket candles) was invented by a Sephardic Portuguese Jew, Jacob Rodriques Rivera; the first pressing, the purest, was known as "winter-strained" sperm; "black cakes" and then "spring-strained" oil; and, then a third and final pressing made pure wax; whaling widows had no recourse but opium and plaster dildos known as 'he's-at-homes"; Nantucket Quakers had founded a whaling port at Hudson, NY; the Quakers; forbidden to swear oaths of office (thus no medicine, no law, no politics) --> business; center of whaling moved from Nantucket to New Bedford; death knell for whaling --> 1859, Edwin L. Drake, oil, Titusville, PA; 1869, last whaling ship left Nantucket, finally done in by the Civil War;
Sealed Orders: Mystic Seaport; one of the oldest roads in New England; 1637, Pilgrims waged war on the Pequots, the appropriated name of Captain Ahab's ship; Charles W. Morgan; the forecastle; "anonymous Orlando" is a reference to Virginia Woolf's novel; Melville sailed on the Acushnet from New Bedford on Sunday, 3 January 1841; whaleboat crews -- the captain (or mate); four foremast hands (as Melville was), and a harpooner; as few as five men left behind to run the ship; sailed for 69 days (exact route unknown); possibly the Azores; sperm whales not bound to seasonal migrations like humpbacks; 'grounds' -- where whales congregate to feed; a favorite ground was the equatorial region, the Line; a description of the whaleboat; sperm whales sound for ten minutes or an hour; for every foot of whale, whalers must wait a minute more; the longer they waited, the greater the monster they faced; description of killing a whale; recovering the oil, blubber;
The Divine Magnet:returns to his family in Lansingburgh, October, 1844; almost four years; Typee, a bestseller; Typee turned Melville into America's first literary sex symbol -- an almost disreputable figure; but next books fail; natives of Marquesas Islands; marries Elizabeth Shaw, 1845; daughter of wealthy Boston judge; part of the circle known as Young America, revolved around editor Evert Duyckinck; left family to return to London to try to peddle his books; London; homesick, back to New York; Moby Dick born of the city (New York); researched Nantucket, whaling; 1839 -- Jeremiah Reynolds's "Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific"; Reynolds, a friend of Edgar Allan Poe; Chilean island of Mocha; suicidal behavior of whales; "Man, whale, life, death: this was the story Melville had to tell. No writer, before or since, could have had such an epic gift." 1850; western Massachusetts; Monument Mountain; Nathaniel Hawthorne, age 46, his story; relationship between Hawthorne and the much younger Melville; Hawthorne had spent 12 years sequestered in an attic, coming out only at night; Hawthorne an admirer of Typee, found Melville a magnetic figure; Melville moves to a farm two miles south of Pittsfield; Melville and Hawthorne, much time together; Melville started to read again, voraciously, as if he had never read before; first book mentioned: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; [coincidence: I have just finished reading Frankenstein a few weeks ago; much of it, takes place in the Arctic; I don't know how many know / remember that]; Scoreby's An Account of the Arctic Region; Burton's eccentric Anatomy of Melancholy; essays by Emerson; Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, dreams, daemonic possession and self-sacrificing love; then a complete edition of Shakespeare's plays; Melville was liberated in America; on writing Moby Dick and Hoare's thoughts about the book; much homoerotic innuendo; play on words; starts writing during the summer of 1850, in Hawthorne's shadow; published 1851; he almost felt the book should not be written; he felt it was a book that should not be read by women; he felt it an "awful" book; publishing party; only two there; he and Hawthorne; dedicated to Hawthorne; Hawthorne had opened Melville's eyes to allegories and subtleties he had not seen in his own work; on publication, the book confounded the critics; farm at Arrowhead; moved back to NYC; 1866 -- his 18-y/o son shot himself in the head; 20 years later, his other son, died of consumption, alone in a San Francisco hotel, aged 34; Melville dies in 1891, age 72
Very Like a Whale: 1849 - 1855, researched, wrote and published Moby Dick; Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod; blackfish / pilot whales; then long piece on right whales; Cape Cod Canal and "distinctive hump" of the Sagamore Bridge; evolution of the whale; krakens -- legendary sea monsters (giant squids?); Jacob Bigelow, inventor of the term "technology"; Gloucester Harbor, Cape Ann; Herring Cove, Provincetown; Senator Daniel Webster's sighting off Plymouth cited in HD Thoreau's Cape Cod;
The Correct Use of Whales: Hull, or Kingston-Upon-Hull, Yorkshire; polar bears feared more than whales by whalers; 1822 -- Hull, England's most successful whaling port; Tunstall whale; Beale's journey, 1830, coast of South America, Cape Horn, across the Pacific to Hawaii, and on to Kamchatka Peninsula; echoed the work of Charles Darwin, whose own voyage on the Beagle was under way even as Beale reached the South Sea; J.M.W. Turner; Melville's passion for Turner almost rivalled that of the artist's champion, John Ruskin; Melville read Ruskin's Modern Painters, before his trip to England; Beale supplied Ismael's cetology; Beale to whales as Darwin to finches;
The Whiteness of the Whale: Burton Constable --> Bridlington --> Filey --> Scarborough (I hiked this area some years ago); "If the past is a contraction of what has passed, then the future exists only if we imagine it."; giant white golf balls of Fylingdales listening station; Whitby; author's great-grandfather emigrated from Ireland, ended up in Whitby; grandfather raised in Whitby; Bram Stoker living in Whitby at the time; Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; 1838, a 16-y/o stowaway sails on a mutinous whale-ship out of New Bedford; inspired by the fate of the Essex; must have been read by Melville; myth and romance of the Arctic -- the Barren Grounds, Ultima Thule, the North Pole; the Arctic whales -- bowheads, beluga and narwhals -- are the most tantalizing of all cetaceans; philopatrous -- loyal to the site of their birth; live in the Arctic throughout the year; beluga and narwhal only two species of the family Monodontidae; Russian belyy for white --> belukhas or belugas; canaries of the seas on account of their songs; from Old Norse, nar and hvalr, --> corpse whale; [note: orcus, 'belonging to the kingdom of the dead -- Orcinus orca, killer whale, more appropriately --> whale-killer, the only non-human enemy of the great whales (what about squids?); a comet / secret code / Albrecht Durer / Viola Sachs / Melville unites his melancholy theme with the story of the outcast Ishmael; the author is inordinately fond of the holarctic whales; but of all the cetaceans, the bowhead of Balaena mysticetus is the most mysterious; longest baleen of any whale (this is the whale baleen I would have seen in Barrow, Alaska, many, many years ago; the author's favorite whale though he has never seen one and probably never will; British experience with whaling; London became the best-lit city in the world due to whaling; "like the Yankee whalers, the British hunted their prey from smaller boats, modelled, in their case, on early Viking craft."; whaling and the establishment of colonies on Australia; again, Whitby; Whitby's ships sailed to Greenland; William Scoresby, age 69, suicide; Melville studied Scoreby's works from the New York Society Library; the age of whales; Scoresby became Vicar of Bradford -- where his parishioners included the Reverend Patrick Brontë of Haworth village, and his young daughters -- wow, wow, wow; "Scoresby turned his scientific attention to the mysterious forces of mesmerism; instead of dealing in oil and whalebone, Whitby now traded in jewellery carved from the shiny black jet found it its cliffs and made mournfully fashionable by a perennially grieving queen";
The Melancholy Whale: mentions Stellwagen Bank; a strand south of Skegness; the minke (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) but named after Norwegian sailor, Miencke; -optera means winged in Latin; minke, the smallest rorqual (Rorquals take their name from French rorqual, which itself derives from the Norwegian word røyrkval, meaning "furrow whale"); rorquals -- baleen whales, the largest, the blue whale, the smallest, the minke; beached whales, phenomenon; Sven Foyn's exploding harpoon, Norwegian's huge whaling "success"; killing humpbacks and finbacks; the sperm whale and right whales were depleted; Arthur Conan Doyle took passage as a ship's surgeon on the SS Hope out of Peterhead in 1880, a whaling ship; 1924, the last whaler sailed out of New Bedford; research; slaughter of whales during WWII; Mary Heaton Vorse, Herman Melville, and WH Auden;
A Cold War for the Whale: 1954, John Huston, Moby-Dick; Ray Bradbury's screenplay, he read the book nine (9) times; wrote 1500 pages of script and then cut it to 150 pages, Orson Welle's bravura cameo role as Father Mapple, Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab; staggering statistics of whale kills in the 20th century; humpbacks were particular victims of this slaughter; the Cold War; one of the last whaling ports was Dundee, Scotland; stocks are recovering; humpback and minke whales are increasing in northern and southern oceans; the southern right whale, Eubalaena australis, is breeding successfully of South Africa and South America; the Yangtze River dolphin recently declared extinct;
The Whale Watch: "Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? - Henry David Thoreau, Walden; it is interesting all the attention paid to "eyes" when writing about whales; it is interesting -- Scammon is not mentioned in this book, perhaps the biggest name in whaling and whale conservation; Macmillan Wharf, Provincetown, Cape Cod; Pilgrim Monument; Long Point, Wood End, Race Point; humpbacks spend more time at the surface than almost any other whale; most famous humpback: Salt, the first of Cape Cod's whales to be name by Al Avellar, founder of whale watching in Provincetown; still bearing calves; humpbacks remain fertile all their lives; she is a great-great-grandmother, with a family tree to rival any out of hte Almanac de Gotha; select whale-watching captain's glossary (p 373);
The Ends of the Earth: the Azores; tectonically where the earth is coming apart; three islands on the Eurasian plate; three on the African; the rest on the American plate; and then AMBERGRIS (p 392 and following);
The Chase:
Complete for now.
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