Ch. 9

PHOSPHORESCENCE

A mariner sat on the shrouds one night,

The wind was piping free;

Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,

And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,

As it floundered in the sea.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “The Drowned Mariner,” Western Literary Messenger: A Family Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, Morality, and General Intelligence, 1846 (in “Extracts”)1

Bioluminescence, known more often in Melville’s day as “phosphorescence,” is one of the most compelling and memorable natural phenomena at sea. It’s a magic irresistible to ocean writers and artists. Yet in a novel so probing of the contrast between light and dark and so profoundly interested in the otherworldliness of the ocean environment compared to that of the land, how and why did Melville, other than the citation of the poem above in his “Extracts,” write only two brief images in Moby-Dick that barely evoke bioluminescence? Did Melville somehow never see it during his years at sea? Or if he did, was it to him not as stunning as it is to us today?

For his part, Charles Darwin saw plenty of bioluminescence and wrote of it with that honest wonder identified in Melville by scholar Jennifer Baker. In December 1833, about two years into his voyage, the Beagle cruised along the coast of Patagonia. Darwin wrote in his narrative of a makeshift plankton net that he made of bunting, the material they used for signal flags. He towed the net astern and “caught many curious animals.” Of one dark night Darwin wrote:

The sea presented a wonderful and most beautiful spectacle. There was a fresh breeze, and every part of the surface, which during the day is seen as foam, now glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright, and the sky above the horizon, from the reflected glare of these livid flames, was not so utterly obscure as over the vault of the heavens.2

Bioluminescence is light created by living things. It is caused by chemical reactions occurring within the body of the organism, whether that’s inside a firefly, a lantern fish, or a speck of bacteria. Most of the flashing visible in the wake of boats on the surface or in the crashing waves on the coast is produced by dinoflagellates, which are their own phylum of phytoplankton. One especially common species of dinoflagellate, found coastally worldwide, is known as “sea sparkle” (Noctiluca scintillans). About the size of a pen point, these gas-filled orbs each have a tiny tentacle for gathering food. Within this dinoflagellate’s cytoplasm are speckled scintillons that make brief pulses of light when agitated.3

Many of the naturalists in the age of Darwin and Melville, those who were not focused on putrefaction or electricity as the cause of bioluminescence, correctly theorized that a large percentage of ocean organisms could make their own light. With the recent improvements in microscopes, nineteenth-century naturalists classified and illustrated these bioluminescent “animacules,” notably the dinoflagellates. Experts such as C. G. Ehrenberg in Berlin did so from samples of sea water sent over land, sloshing about in horse-drawn carriages. Today, biologists estimate that not only are the producers of bioluminescence extremely diverse, but some three-quarters of all species in the ocean can make light. And 90 percent of those organisms that live in the aphotic zone, meaning beyond the reach of solar light and deeper than about 650 feet, are capable of bioluminescence.4

Most of Melville’s fish documents described this sparkling in the ocean, including those narratives of Surgeon Beale and Francis Allyn Olmsted. Dr. Bennett devoted an entire section to its analysis, considering its potential utility to the animals themselves. He also told a story in which the blubber from a sperm whale held a bioluminescent glow below decks for two full nights, something that even the “oldest whalers on board had never before witnessed.”5

Yet even before consulting his books to write Moby-Dick, Melville saw marine bioluminescence himself. He saw it during his long night watches. He saw it over the gunwale when in small boats at night. He surely saw bioluminescence around sharks as they scavenged the flesh of a dead whale alongside. Aboard the Acushnet and the United States, Melville sailed through the waters off the coast of Patagonia that Darwin described, as well as through other areas known for bioluminescence.

In Moby-Dick, the first and most likely nod to bioluminescence is in “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Ishmael muses as to why sailors are so afraid of “a midnight sea of milky whiteness—as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him.” Over the centuries, mariners have reported this sort of sea state, in which the surface is so densely full of opaque bioluminescence that the ocean has a consistent glow for miles, a milky cloud from horizon to horizon.6

For example, a few years after the publication of Moby-Dick, Lieutenant Maury received a letter from Captain W. E. Kingman of the American clipper ship Shooting Star, which the captain included when he mailed in his abstract log. When approaching Java from the southwest—a route similar to the Pequod’s—the sea was so white that Captain Kingman felt compelled to slow the ship and take a sounding, to make sure there was no hidden reef. But they had plenty of water beneath them. He wrote to Maury that the surface appeared “like a plain covered with snow.” As he sailed along for hours, he ultimately measured the milky sea to be some twenty-three nautical miles wide with only a half-mile dark strip interrupting the center. In all his years Captain Kingman had seen “nothing that would compare with this in extent or whiteness.” He ordered his crew to fill a sixty-gallon tub with glowing seawater, from which he examined several species of gelatinous zooplankton. Although he peered into the tub with the little telescope on his sextant, Kingman did not have on board the magnification nor the late twenty-first-century knowledge to understand that the zooplankton he saw likely swam among a vast bloom of bioluminescent bacteria. Captain Kingman wrote to Maury: “The scene was one of awful grandeur, the sea having turned to phosphorous, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world.” For the captain, as for Ishmael, bioluminescence held a dangerous apocalyptic portent.7

The second mention in Moby-Dick that just might be Ishmael describing bioluminescence is in “The Spirit-Spout,” in that same dismal, foreboding scene with the sea-ravens as his whaleship approaches the Cape of Good Hope. Ishmael says: “When the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks.” Perhaps Melville meant to evoke more than foam, but also bioluminescence? This would be another nod to “The Ancient Mariner,” since the Pequod encounters the Goney in the next scene. Coleridge had written of bioluminescence in his ballad, describing “elfish light” and “hoary flakes” falling off the water snakes. And Coleridge’s Pacific seas burn green, blue, and white.8

Yet even if these two scenes in Moby-Dick were meant to describe bioluminescence, Melville hardly wrote of it in the fashion or length that we expect for a novel so dripping with the unique mysteries of the ocean. We know Melville saw bioluminescence. He read about it in narratives and in fictional works. And the scientists, sailors, and readers of his time were fascinated by bioluminescence.

So, the answer might be, as with Melville’s avoidance of Cape Horn in Moby-Dick, that he simply felt he had too recently and regularly drawn from this quiver of marine metaphors. A year earlier, in his novel White-Jacket, he had his fictional crew caught in a squall off Cape Horn. The men struggle to hold on as the “phosphorescence of the yeasting sea cast a glare” into their terror-stricken faces. In Redburn Melville wrote bioluminescence into a scene as gruesome and Gothic as anything conjured by Edgar Allan Poe: a dead sailor’s flesh begins to glow as it rots in the dark of the forecastle. And then in Mardi, Melville wrote about bioluminescence to the extent that a modern reader expects in Moby-Dick—a mixture of dark magic and awestruck analysis. In a chapter of Mardi titled “The Sea on Fire,” Melville’s narrator and his fellows are in a small open boat traveling through the waters of the South Pacific when “we beheld the ocean of a pallid white color, corruscating all over with tiny golden sparkles.” Sperm whales nearby spout “a bushy jet of flashes.” (This, er, isn’t possible; Melville corrects this in Moby-Dick.) As the sperm whale swims off, the narrator considers the various theories on the sources of bioluminescence, including electrical impulses from the atmosphere, decomposition of organic matter, its connection to small organisms, its possibility as a tool of communication among living “fire-fish,” and even the sailor superstition that it was composed of strands of golden hair from mermaids. In this scene in Mardi, the milky sea lasts for hours. Of previous experiences with this phenomena, which illuminate our reading of “The Whiteness of the Whale” and perhaps “The Funeral,” Melville wrote in Mardi:

Whereas, in the Pacific, all instances of the sort, previously coming under my notice, had been marked by patches of greenish light, unattended with any pallidness of sea. Save twice on the coast of Peru, where I was summoned from my hammock to the alarming midnight cry of “All hands ahoy! tack ship!” And rushing on deck, beheld the sea white as a shroud; for which reason it was feared we were on soundings.

Now, sailors love marvels, and love to repeat them. And from many an old shipmate have I heard various sage opinings, concerning the phenomenon in question.9

In short, Melville likely wrote so little of bioluminescence in Moby-Dick because he had done so recently in his other fiction. For Melville and other mariners and authors of his time, “phosphorescence” and milky seas were often a Gothic sign or symbol of danger, decay, and black magic—and even one of Judgment.