Why Read Moby-Dick Read Free

with something urgent and essential to say.
    What follows is my idiosyncratic answer to the question that serves as this little book’s title. As a resident of Nantucket Island, the holy ground of Moby-Dick, and the author of a book about the real-life nautical disaster that inspired the conclusion of the novel, I have my own prejudices and point of view. Perhaps because my parents named me for the author who served as Melville’s muse, Nathaniel Hawthorne, I am as intrigued by the events that made possible the book’s composition as I am by the book itself. I am also interested in how the novel continued to haunt Melville in the months and years after its publication. Most of all, however, I am interested in getting you—yes, you —to read, whether it be for the first time or the twelfth time, Moby-Dick .

2
    Landlessness
    I n January 1841, Herman Melville shipped out on the Acush - net from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, just across the river from the whaling port of New Bedford. His father, a well-liked but ineffectual merchant, had died when Herman was twelve, plunging the family into humiliating poverty. In the eight years since, everything Melville tried, from working as a clerk at a law firm to teaching school to making his fortune in what was then the American wilderness of Illinois and Missouri, had failed. With the economy sunk in depression and with no job prospects, Melville did what the narrator, Ishmael, decides to do at the beginning of Moby-Dick; he went to sea.
    Almost as soon as the Acushnet set sail, Melville began to hear stories about the Essex, a Nantucket whaleship that had been sunk more than two decades before by an infuriated sperm whale about a thousand miles west of the Galápagos Islands. Seven months after departing from Fairhaven, the Acushnet was approaching the very latitude in the South Pacific on which the Essex had gone down when the lookout sighted another whaleship. It turned out to be the Lima from Nantucket. During what was known as a gam, a meeting of two or more whaleships at sea, the crews were given the opportunity to mingle and talk, and Melville was introduced to the son of Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex and the author of a narrative about the disaster.
    Chase’s son offered to lend Melville his copy of his father’s book. That night Melville read the story of how an eighty-five-foot bull sperm whale crushed the bow of the Essex into splintered fragments and how after taking to three twenty-five-foot whaleboats, the twenty-man crew discussed what to do next. Given the direction of the wind, the obvious next move was to sail to the islands to the west, the closest being the Marquesas. But Chase and his shipmates had heard rumors of cannibals on those islands. Better to sail to a civilized port on the western coast of South America, even if it was against the wind and more than three thousand miles away.
    Three months later, when just five survivors were plucked from two sun-scorched, barnacle-encrusted whaleboats, they were no longer the same men who’d refused to sail to an island of hypothetical savages. They had become what they most feared. As made plain by the human bones found in the hands of two of the survivors, they were cannibals. Melville later wrote, “The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.”
    Almost a year later, Melville first glimpsed the islands that the crew of the Essex had chosen to spurn. On June 23, 1842, the Acushnet arrived at Nuku Hiva, part of the Marquesas group. Melville and the rest of the crew stared at the green spectacular peaks as swimming native women surrounded the ship. According to Melville’s later, inevitably fictionalized account of his adventures, the whaleship’s deck quickly became crowded with these beautiful young girls, who offered themselves to the sailors for bits of cloth. Not long after,