Ch. 2

NUMEROUS FISH DOCUMENTS

Though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale.

Ishmael, “Cetology”

In the spring of 1851, having left downtown Manhattan for a farmhouse in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Melville was reenergized about the potential of his novel about the White Whale. Shut upstairs in his study for long hours with his window looking out toward Mount Greylock, Melville read, scribbled notes in the books he owned, and scrawled page after page of his manuscript. He was surrounded by dozens if not hundreds of volumes, some of which he owned, and most others he borrowed from libraries, friends, and family in New York and Boston.

In “Cetology,” Ishmael declares, “I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands.” So in addition to recalling his own experiences, he turned to his books for more inspiration, factual reference, and ideas on the novel’s style to help boil the sap. Melville knew his novel was not the first about a whaling voyage. Melville mashed and whirred all of these influences into a slow-burn-story-stew of immense depth of flavor and force. Melville’s messy madness did have a method. It was intricately connected to his sea narratives and what he was reading of natural history.1

Part of the method derives from the reality that whaling voyages in the nineteenth century regularly lasted between two to five years. They were tedious and slow. Men stood hours each day at the masthead. The novel’s digressive girth and meditative, explorative meandering matches the pace of life on a whaleship. Notice how Melville punctuated his long-winded expository chapters with the chaotic catching of whales and the nine evenly spaced sightings of other vessels. Melville’s masterpiece is large and long to match not just the whaling voyage, but also his subjects of the whale itself and the long, meditative life at the masthead. As the Pequod sails farther and farther out to sea to confront the White Whale, the whalemen aboard conduct their business and kill whales: approximately ten sperm whales and one right whale over the course of the story.

After showing how to find and capture whales, Melville physically and metaphorically dissected the sperm whale, both over the course of his novel and the course of the Pequod’s voyage. Ishmael moves from Ch. 67, “Cutting In,” on down to Ch. 103, “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton.” Melville often guided his reader through this process by creating tidy chapter pairs. In the first chapter of a pair, he wrote in a narrative style, describing events with his characters in order to explain how things worked on a whaleship or about animal life. Then, in the very next chapter, he zoomed out from the adventure and used an essay style to further explore the philosophy, history, or science of the same topic.

With books piled at his desk and on shelves, Melville stated his references outright through Ishmael, especially in “Extracts” and “Cetology.” The novel’s narrator regularly refers to a half dozen or so authors and their recent books, which Ishmael dubs his “numerous fish documents.” Three nonfiction accounts about American whaling voyages were published within the decade before Melville finished his: Incidents of a Whaling Cruise (1841) by Yale graduate Francis Allyn Olmsted, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise by Browne, and The Whale and His Captors (1850) by a reverend named Henry T. Cheever. Even before these American works, three narratives of life on English whaleships were published by three authors who placed more emphasis on describing whales and other marine life. These were: An Account of the Arctic Regions, with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery (1820) by the whaleman-naturalist Williams Scoresby Jr., The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839) by the ship’s surgeon Thomas Beale, and Narrative of a Whaling Voyage Round the Globe (1840) by another whaleship surgeon named Frederick Bennett. All six of these nonfiction accounts provided factual information and stylistic influences for Melville when he sat down to write his fictional voyage. Ishmael completes his list of whale authors—and there were still many more out there—by declaring that even Beale and Bennett only touched on the life of the sperm whale. “The sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature,” Ishmael says. He steps forward as the man for the job. Sometimes Melville copied material outright from one of these authors or he cribbed their structures or arguments. Sometimes, however, what we read now in these other sources seems just like what Melville wrote not because he copied it, but because he and the other author experienced similar events.2

For reference material on the biology of sperm whales and other pelagic sea life, Melville seems to have turned most often to the narratives by the surgeons Beale and Bennett and to an entry on whales in The Penny Cyclopædia (1843), which in turn took much of its material from Beale and from Scoresby. Most of Beale and Bennett’s observations on sperm whale biology and behavior have held true for modern whale ecologists.3

In February 1834, the surgeon Thomas Beale had recently returned from a voyage on two whaleships, upon which he’d served as the ship’s doctor. He had been home for a year, was about twenty-seven years old, and was working at a post as assistant surgeon at St. John’s British Hospital in London. Beale worked on his monograph of the sperm whale, which he would publish the following year, earning an award among his peers. During that same February 1834, Frederick Bennett was still out to sea sailing aboard the whaleship Tuscan as their ship’s doctor. Bennett’s ship had rounded Cape Horn while Darwin’s HMS Beagle rested nearby at anchor off Tierra del Fuego.

In 1839 Beale published his revised and expanded book-length version, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale. A young man trying to earn his place in London’s scientific community, toiling away at a hospital for the poor, Beale was obsequious in his bowing to the expertise of other naturalists of his day. He quoted large swaths of their work directly into his book. Beale loved to slip in his Latin anatomical terms, and he was regularly the hero of his own story. For example, he writes of how he healed native people around the South Pacific rim and even how at one point his keen memory for geographic details rescued a boatload of his shipmates. Bennett, meanwhile, had returned home in 1836 and presented material on sperm whales in public scholarly lectures, which Beale incorporated verbatim into his natural history. Bennett then published his own book the following year.

Historians don’t know much else about these two surgeons.4 Bennett strikes me as less self-righteous, and far more curious and empirical about absolutely everything: whales, birds, fish, invertebrates, seaweeds, and human cultures. Bennett captured fish and examined their stomachs to expand his inquiries into the nature of bioluminescence. Bennett described getting a tattoo in French Polynesia, which he seemed to have endured purely just to see what it was all about: “I gratified a wish to observe the process and effects of the tatoo [sic] by having a figure thus impressed upon myself.” He chose a circular pattern that he saw on the body of his Tahitian tattoo artist and asked for it on his upper arm. He described the process clinically, with a stiff upper lip.5

Melville’s method of tidy chapter pairs, along with the entire format of Moby-Dick, is in many ways a direct combination of the well-established structure employed by Beale and Bennett, who both wrote sections and chapters devoted to matters of natural history while also writing companion material devoted more broadly to the voyage and the adventure. Beale’s first part is devoted to anatomy, including chapters titled “Of the Brain,” “Of the Ear,” and “Of the Sexual Organs,” while his second part is a “Sketch of a South-Sea Whaling Voyage,” which includes chapter headings such as “Storm ensues” and “we kill a female Whale.” Bennett flipped this structure for his book. His first part is the chronology of his adventure. His second has an appendix with sections on “Cetaceans,” “Birds,” “Fishes,” “Mollusca,” and “Marine Phosphorescence.”

Melville slurried these two forms together—the scientific descriptions and the voyage narrative. Harvard’s library has Melville’s own copy of Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale. Several of Ishmael’s comments and ideas in Moby-Dick can be traced directly to this volume. For example, in “Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales,” Ishmael declares, “All Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter.” In Melville’s actual copy of the book he put an “x” under the picture and scrawled in pencil at the bottom: “There is some sort of mistake in the drawing of Fig: 2. The tail part is wretchedly crippled + dwarfed, & looks altogether unnatural. The head is good.”6 (See fig. 4.)

Beale and Bennett are hard to keep straight—I’ll refer to them throughout as Surgeon Beale and Doctor Bennett—and really all of Melville’s fish documents and their authors tend to run together for the modern reader. See Figure 5 if you’d like some help. But getting all these guys and their books confused is part of the point. Melville created Moby-Dick within a crowded market of popular sea voyage narratives in which copying pages of others’ writing was common and even scholarly.

Moby-Dick is often a laborious, digressive mess. But it is a stew of ingredients and styles from various well-known and reliable chefs of his day, and there’s a lot more to the stew and its progression than just throwing it all into the pot. There is a method to his madness, which was centered on the imaginative, careful, and exhaustive exploration of ocean life, especially whales. In 1851 most of his readers weren’t ready for a work of fiction like this. A critic for the Southern Quarterly Review wrote: “In all the scenes where the whale is the performer or the sufferer, the delineation and action are highly vivid and exciting. In all other respects, the book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous.”7

The novel did not sell out of the first printing. Today, it is often the chapter “Cetology” that first puts a bone in the reader’s throat.