Ch. 6

WIND

For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim).

Fart joke by Ishmael, “Loomings”1

Melville wrote little about wind in “The Chart.” His reader at the time understood this to be essential. Until quite recently, for the entire history of human passages across oceans and along coasts, the wind has been the beginning, the wind has been the end, and the wind has been everything in between. Today, the wind has some impact on modern shipping and air travel, but rarely anything significant to the general consumer or traveler. Unless you commute on a ferry to an offshore island, anything below a hurricane is usually at most an annoyance or a call to the barf bag compared to the way the wind impacted the lives of mariners and travelers in Melville’s mid-nineteenth century and millennia before. Maury and Wilkes spent far more time researching, theorizing, and planning around wind than they did on whale abundance and migration.

Ahab’s Pequod is powered entirely by wind. The ship does not have an engine. No characters in Moby-Dick encounter any boats or ships at sea that have an engine to propel their vessels. Before the development of commercial aircraft and underwater photography, the greatest single influence on our relationship to the ocean is likely the development of the marine engine.

Melville read of the well-publicized introduction of trans-Atlantic steam travel even before he went on his first voyage to Liverpool in 1839. Louis Agassiz, for example, arrived in Boston Harbor from across the Atlantic aboard a steamship in 1846. By 1856, Melville’s third and final trip across the Atlantic, he traveled on an ocean steamer to Scotland. Although whaleships in Melville’s day often got steamboat assistance to get in and out of harbors, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the technology was available for ocean-crossing cargo ships or for whaleships to have their own engines. It was rarely cost-effective or safe for these types of vessels, nor was it logistically practical to store or find the amount of coal necessary for deep-ocean meandering voyages.

The hull of a whaleship like the Acushnet is shaped above the water like a bathtub, so historians always assumed the ship sailed like one. Then in the summer of 2014 the sailing performance of an American wood whaleship was tested. Much to the nail-nibbling of curators and insurers and museum management—who all dreaded sending the museum’s most important artifact out into harm’s way—the Charles W. Morgan spent a summer touring southern New England for the first time under sail since 1921. (See plate 1.) It was far faster and far more maneuverable under sail than anyone expected. Yet regardless of her agility, the Charles W. Morgan, like most square-riggers, still could not get closer than sixty degrees to the wind, even in the most favorable conditions. In other words, if the wind was coming from due west, and that’s the direction a whaleship captain wanted to go, then he’d have to zigzag roughly north-northwest and then roughly south-southwest, back and forth, to make a ship like the Pequod travel toward its destination.

Captain Lawrence of the Commodore Morris wrote of how they steered by the wind outbound on their way to the island of Flores in the Azores in September 1849:

Monday the 17th first part fresh gales from the Eastward and cloudy weather tacked ship at 4 oclock and at 6 at sunset Flores bore about ESE distant 30 miles middle part stood to the NE until 2 oclock Pm tacked ship latter part headed S by W Flores and Corvo [Island] in sight to the SSW.2

Lawrence wanted to sail directly to the anchorage, but with the wind from the east he couldn’t. So he steered the Commodore Morris as close to the wind as possible, northeasterly and then just to the west of south, far enough off the wind that the ship could keep up speed as it zigzagged back down toward its destination.

Tacking a big ship with three masts and more than a dozen potential sails is an operation requiring a lot of people hauling and easing lines in order, especially with sails suspended from heavy horizontal yards that must be shifted from one angle to another with some precision.

During the New England tour in 2014, the sailors of the Charles W. Morgan soon appreciated the whalemen still more as mariners, who in historical discussions and comments by authors such as Richard Henry Dana Jr. were usually denigrated as careless and lazy in managing their ship. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael tries to defend the whalemen as sailors and navigators in the chapter “The Advocate.” Whalemen sailed a complicated rig, they sailed back and forth around Cape Horn, and they often sailed farther and to new places before any European or American explorers had even properly charted the area.3

In the days before engines, the inability to go in every direction affected ships in other ways, too—especially a whaleship. A whaleman of the mid-nineteenth century, for example, would have been perfectly happy to harpoon his prey from the safety of his deck. Larger vessels were not fast or nimble enough or could not follow if a whale swam off directly to windward. So at great risk to the men, they deployed small rowboats, often equipped with their own sails, to try to get close enough to a whale to harpoon it.

When the Pequod first sails from Nantucket, the ship is almost immediately hit with a contrary wind, one of so many omens. Melville used this in his first truly dramatic chapter, “The Lee Shore,” which is his definitive declaration that this story about a white whale is bound for far deeper water than the traditional yarn. A lee shore is a coastline upon which a ship is driven by wind, current, waves, or a combination of all these. A ship might not have enough speed or room to safely tack off the beach or rocks. This situation sets up Melville’s metaphor—the irony of how much we might cherish a port, value the safety of land—and yet once a ship is underway and in rough weather, land is actually the terror of navigators, whether that be a harbor or an uncharted or misidentified rock in the middle of the Pacific. Melville used “The Lee Shore” to set up one of his favorite big themes of Moby-Dick, put well by scholar Howard Vincent, who wrote of Melville’s “favorite antithesis of the sea, symbol of the half-known life, against the land, symbol of the known, the secure.”4

Because of the limitations of a sailing ship, finding the global trade winds was essential to whalemen. Trade winds are bands of gentle, consistent breezes in different regions on Earth. With some seasonal variability, trade winds blow in the same direction with remarkable consistency. Trade winds have been well-known for centuries. Columbus sailed the trade winds and ocean currents to and from the Caribbean four times. Every sailing vessel crossing oceans looks for trade winds. Like you do in your car to get on a highway, captains under sail travel far beyond the most direct route in order to utilize these consistent winds. Ships today are not as concerned with these winds, but in order to save fuel, modern mariners still cruise on ocean currents, which are often driven by and thus coincide with these winds.

The locations and directions of some of the global trade winds were still being compiled as Melville wrote Moby-Dick, and the meteorological and physical factors that created these winds were also still very much an active debate. Maury had helped publish maps of global trade winds, and tried to explain them in his The Physical Geography of the Sea, but his theory on trade winds was possibly his most misguided in the entire text. To be fair, though, scientists struggled for centuries to fully understand what we do today: that global wind circulation is caused by shifts in air pressure due to the sun’s heat and what we now call the Coriolis effect, the shifts due to the speed and direction of the Earth’s rotation.5 (See fig. 19.)

In Moby-Dick Ishmael is not as concerned with the scientific causes of the trade winds, but more with them as a metaphor as he tells of how this wind, especially its consistency, steady force, and invisibility, drives the Pequod. By the final hunt at the climax of the novel, Ishmael uses wind to indicate the hand of fate or chance or God. On the second day of the chase, a favorable wind from astern rushes the Pequod in the direction of the White Whale. “The wind that made great bellies of their sails,” Ishmael says, “and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.” Captain Ahab continues beating upwind to try to capture Moby Dick. “Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” Starbuck says as he’s coiling down line after the Pequod tacked. “I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him.” Starbuck believes as they steer upwind, they steer against God’s wishes.6

Meanwhile, the wind inspires Ahab to deliver one of his most moving and powerful soliloquys. On that final day of the chase, Ahab tries to understand what drives him so relentlessly onward to avenge the loss of his leg. He gives human traits to the wind as he does the White Whale, arguing about its courage and questioning whether it is indeed a creation, an agent of God:

Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? . . . Would now the wind but had a body; but all things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there’s something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along!7