Ch. 11

BRIT AND BALEEN

Numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip.

Ishmael, “Brit”

The Pequod leaves the Crozet Islands astern, sailing eastward in the Indian Ocean. When they come upon right whales, Ahab and the mates do not lower their boats to try to catch these whales because the quality of their oil for human use was inferior to that of the sperm whale’s. Actual whalemen in the mid-nineteenth century did tend to focus on either sperm whales or right whales, but they would certainly lower for the other if within reach, or captains would switch their focus based on the region or time of year. For example, after Melville jumped ship in 1842, the sperm-whaler Acushnet sailed up into the North Pacific for right whales, eventually returning to New Bedford with a full cargo of whale oil, spermaceti oil, and 13,500 pounds of baleen.1

Ishmael opens “Brit” this way: “Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.”2

WHAT IS BRIT?

Various scholars over nearly a century have defined the word brit as used in Moby-Dick as crustaceans, krill (shrimplike aquatic crustaceans), copepods (flea-like aquatic crustaceans), pteropods (tiny marine snails), or simply plankton. Plankton is a catchall term widely used today for any small pelagic animal species and their eggs and larvae (zooplankton), and photosynthetic microscopic organisms (phytoplankton), all of which are largely subject to tides, currents, and winds. It’s worth dipping briefly into the etymological seaweeds on “brit” in order to learn more about the nineteenth-century understanding of oceanic food webs and marine ecology. Exploring this word also reveals the subtle ways that Melville again placed his sailors on a higher stage than the scientists ashore.

In Moby-Dick Ishmael does not define brit as krill—of the order Euphausiacea—or copepods, or even solely Crustacea. Beyond the “Brit” chapter, Ishmael uses the word four more times in the novel. In “The Affidavit,” he refers to the right whale’s food as “that peculiar substance called brit . . . the aliment of the right whale.” As the novel progresses, he uses the words meadow and wheat and grassy in association with brit, connoting a more plant or algae-like substance. In “The Right Whale’s Head,” Ishmael implies brit is made up of fish: “The edges of these bones [baleen] are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when open-mouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time.” Even with the caveat that Ishmael has a broad colloquial usage of “fish,” it’s clear that in Moby-Dick Ishmael does not have a specific single type of plankton (or small fish) in mind with the word brit. In Melville’s copy of his “ark,” Noah Webster defines brit as “fish of the herring kind.” Melville’s Johnson’s English Dictionary defined brit as “the name of a fish.”3

In Moby-Dick Melville never used the words shrimp, prawn, lobster, crayfish, or crustacean, all of which were available to him. But he did not have at his disposal in the mid-nineteenth century several other words in common usage today that might have been handy in describing these small organisms at sea. He would not have known the word krill, for example. Krill is from the Norwegian, meaning “very small fry of fish,” and was not in regular English usage until the twentieth century. Melville did not have access to the word plankton either. Plankton wasn’t coined until the 1890s. In short, Melville did not have the specific vocabulary to describe small pelagic organisms in the same language we do today.4

Curiously, the authors in Melville’s fish documents did not use the word brit. In 1852 Lieutenant Maury published a letter in his Explanations and Sailing Directions from a captain who used the word, but even Maury never used it himself. So brit was a term Melville surely learned from his own experience. It was kicking around on ships off New England as early as the 1720s, and American whalemen in the 1800s used the word brit often. For example, in 1840 Captain Sanford aboard the New Bedford whaleship Jasper in the southwestern Indian Ocean, not far from the Crozets, reported in his logbook that he saw “quantityes Brit” for three straight days. Captain Elihu Gifford of the New Bedford whaleship America wrote while to the east of the Cape of Good Hope in 1836: “Fine weather steering by ESE with all sail set-saw plenty of Brit.” The word brit is repeated in the margins of Gifford’s entry with a box drawn around it. The captain did this to highlight the oceanographic information for Maury.5

Thus brit, synonymous with plankton aggregations upon which whales feed, was surely a term aboard the Acushnet and among the other whalemen that Melville sailed with or met. Whalemen such as Captain Daniel McKenzie of New Bedford, the man who helped assemble abstract logbooks for Maury, wrote in a personal letter to Maury in 1849 one of the most detailed accounts of an understanding of brit—as gelatinous, globular, and “about the size of a small pea”—including its relationship to right whale ecology. Melville himself likely saw brit on the surface, notably on the Brazil Banks or the Coast of Chile Ground. For Moby-Dick he chose an accurate part of the ocean where brit and right whales had been found.6

RIGHT WHALE ECOLOGY AND THE COPEPOD

Baleen whales, such as right whales, do swim open-mouthed through patches of zooplankton, as depicted by Ishmael in “Brit.” These whales swallow millions to hundreds of millions of individuals in an hour. One way to differentiate baleen whales is by two primary feeding strategies: the “gulp feeders” and the “continuous ram feeders.” Gulp feeders, such as most of the rorquals, open their massive jaws to engulf an enormous volume of ocean. With their tongue and abdominal muscles they push out the water in order to trap swarms of krill and schools of small fish within their baleen. Gulp feeders have pleats in the skin and muscles on the lower jaw and belly so they can stretch their mouths out wide. In contrast, the right whales and bowheads are continuous ram feeders, also known as skim feeders when they do so at the surface. Ram feeders swim open-mouthed through clouds of zooplankton. Ram feeders have a big gap in the front of their mouths to let water in and then spill out through their filtering baleen fibers. Ram feeders have finer filaments and longer baleen plates than the gulpers, seemingly in order to open wide and keep their jaws agape while feeding.7 (See plate 4.)

In “The Right Whale’s Head” Ishmael declares:

Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned.8

All that Melville described here is anatomically correct. The right whales and their close cousins, the bowhead whale, have the largest mouths on Earth, even bigger than blue whales. Ishmael and his reader could never stand inside a right whale’s mouth, however, because the massive tongue fills up most of the space. (See fig. 25.) If you removed that tongue, Abraham Lincoln—who had not yet decided to run for president when Moby-Dick was published—could have stood inside of a right whale’s mouth, even while wearing his top hat. The right whale’s head, which is nearly all mouth, is indeed nearly triangular. The upper jaw bones curve narrowly beside each other. Southern right whales have between 220 and 260 baleen plates on each side of their mouth, some of which can extend to nine feet long. Bowhead whales of the Arctic can have as many as 360 plates per side, with the longest at least fourteen feet long.9

In 1855 a greenhand named Robert Weir, who I mentioned earlier regarding his observations of swordfish, began keeping a journal of a whaling voyage out of New Bedford aboard the Clara Bell. Weir was a prolific reader, earnestly religious, and a formally trained artist. (See figs. 14, 33, and 51.) A few months into the voyage he wrote of his first impression of the right whale’s head:

Got the head on deck before breakfast. And what a looking thing it was—a person could very easily stand upright in its mouth—then what a tongue—it would weigh about a ton & a quarter who can imagine what such a mass as that ever had life & animation—Oh! how wonderful—The right whale has whalebone [baleen] in his mouth in lieu of teeth—the longest length of bone from this whale is 6 ft.; from that tapering to two or three inches at the end of his nose.10

Before spring steel and plastics, the baleen, about the thickness and flexibility of your average frisbee, was cut into thin strips and used to support umbrellas, corsets, and hoop skirts, and to make tools, shoehorns, horse whips, and home crafts.

In “The Right Whale’s Head” Ishmael describes a technique by which whalemen use baleen to “calculate the creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings.” Ishmael approaches the idea, which is in his fish documents, with some caution, but he declares it has “the savor of analogical probability.” It suggests to him an exceptionally long life span for right whales. Like fingernails, baleen grows continuously. But it wears down at the ends due to normal feeding—so you can’t use it for age. Thus a slat of baleen in these whales can be at most from ten to twenty years old. I have a piece of baleen beside me as I write this. At a certain angle I can see concentric treelike growth lines, but more prominent are lines that are more straight and vertical, extending along the length of the plate, as if each line leads to a hair at the end. Twenty-first-century researchers have been analyzing baleen plates not so much for age, but to provide long-term samples of hormonal changes over a period of the whale’s life. The baleen plates reveal gestation periods, mating periods, and even the presence of stress in possible relation to injury, changes in food supply, and climatic shifts.11

We know now that all of the three right whale species around the world feed on planktonic crustaceans, especially copepods and, less so, krill. Robert Kenney, an ecologist with an Ahabian four decades of studying North Atlantic right whales, sums up for me the current knowledge of the right whale’s diet one afternoon while sinking his teeth into a beef burger at a pub in Rhode Island: “All three species of right whales feed primarily on larger copepods,” he says. “Their baleen will not efficiently filter organisms much smaller than those, although they’ll feed on smaller copepods and other organisms like barnacle larvae if those are abundant enough.”12

Phytoplankton species are too small to get caught in right whale baleen. Right whales do feed on krill at times, but to capture this large, more mobile food, they have to swim faster than normal, unlike the rorquals, which can catch krill more easily since they are faster swimmers. It becomes a question of energetic trade-offs.

“In other words,” Kenney says, “right whales will probably eat anything that aggregates into sufficiently dense patches, can be effectively filtered by their baleen, and cannot swim well enough to escape.”

In “Brit,” Ishmael recognizes the poetic irony and the ecological miracle that the largest animals on the planet survive on some of the smallest prey. Marine invertebrates such as copepods and krill reproduce by the trillions globally. Copepods—of which there are hundreds of marine planktonic species that make up the majority of all global zooplankton biomass—nearly all look like tiny teardrops, each with antennae, paddle feet, and an exoskeleton. Copepods are likely the most numerous multicelled organisms in the sea, perhaps even on Earth. Krill, which are usually much larger individually than copepods, congregate in swarms so vast and dense that in the Southern Ocean mariners have sailed through clouds at the surface that covered an area of 175 square miles. The larger rorquals, the gulpers, more commonly feed on these swarms of krill.13

In Moby-Dick Ishmael’s brit is yellow. Both copepod and krill species are more commonly pinkish-brown in their clouds at the surface, but historic and current accounts do attest they can appear yellow, green, or brown, aligning with Ishmael’s description. “Yellow or green-colored water is more likely to be caused by concentrations of phytoplankton,” Kenney says, “rather than zooplankton—which tends to be on the yellow to red spectrum.” During his years at sea, Melville certainly could have seen patches of green or brown or yellow blooms of phytoplankton—but, again, baleen whales rarely if ever skim feed through these plant-like patches for sustenance. Then again, Christy Hudak, who samples zooplankton in Cape Cod Bay in relation to the diet of right whales, told me that she has seen clouds of copepods of the genus Centropages that appear more greenish-brown at the surface.14

With our understanding that the way Ishmael describes baleen and right whales skim feeding through large patches of organic material is remarkably accurate for his time, and we know that many zooplanktonic species would’ve composed those large patches, especially copepods and occasionally krill, did the author or the naturalists and whalers of his time recognize these specific organisms within brit?

In the 1830s, when Darwin sailed aboard the HMS Beagle, he observed aggregations of tiny species at the surface. Darwin collected samples to consider the exact nature of the organic slick at the surface, the color of the water, and how patches of organisms stayed together under the influence of wind and current. Darwin witnessed clouds of krill when cruising near Tierra del Fuego. He wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle: “I have seen narrow lines of water of a bright red colour, from the number of crustacea, which somewhat resemble in form large prawns. The sealers call them whale-food.”15

Surgeon Beale in his The Natural History of the Sperm Whale had a lot to say about the food of the right whale. Beale included swaths of material from Sir William Jardine, who wrote of “the medusæ and minute fish” that supply the food for these whales. Beale wrote of “discolorations of the water caused by myriads of animalculæ which perhaps form the common black [right] whale’s food, that consists of ‘squillæ’ and other small animals.” (Melville wrote “Barley Banks” in the margin of his copy of Beale’s book.) By squillae, Beale was likely referring to shrimp, and animalculae probably meant any collection of tiny animals. Beale cited these areas as “submarine pastures” and “fields of spawn.” Unlike the deep water whaling grounds along the equatorial Pacific that attracted sperm whales, the whaling grounds around the world that were rich in zooplankton and attracted right whales were often called “banks.” These are shallower, often more coastal areas, which because of upwelling and sunlight provide exceptionally productive habitat for planktonic organisms. One of these areas was, and is, the Brazil Banks off the Rio del Plata, and another was and is, as Ishmael describes, near the Crozet Islands. These right whale regions were described and depicted by Beale, as well as by Maury in his maps of whale abundance. Ishmael references to these banks in his note to “Brit.”16 (See earlier fig. 9.)

To learn about baleen whales in particular, Melville often turned to the writings of Williams Scoresby Jr., his most trusted expert on right whales, especially because that man had actually thrown the harpoon. Although Melville poked fun at Scoresby multiple times throughout the novel, recreating him as fictional experts and mariners by the name of “Fogo Von Slack,” “Dr. Snodhead,” and “Captain Sleet,” he clearly had enormous respect for Scoresby as a hunter and a naturalist. From Yorkshire, England, and the son of a successful whaleman, William Jr. had been to sea aboard his father’s ships beginning when he was only ten. In between voyages Scoresby studied at the University of Edinburgh—more than fifteen years before Darwin did—and then he commanded his own whaleships hunting bowheads up in northern waters and into the Arctic. Scoresby wrote two popular books about his experiences, in which he included his scientific findings on whales, magnetism, and oceanography, both often cited or pirated verbatim. Scoresby was a friend of the famous naturalist Joseph Banks and named a Fellow of the Royal Society.

In his An Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), Scoresby observed and collected several species of plankton in the Arctic seas, some of which were illustrated with a plate labeled: “Medusae and other animals, constituting the principle food of the whale,” an image we know Melville saw while writing Moby-Dick (see fig. 26).17

Scoresby described a range of species at the surface, although he usually found only “squillae, or shrimps,” presumably what we now call krill, in the whales’ stomachs.18

Elsewhere in Arctic Regions and in his later Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale Fishery (1823)—both of which Melville checked out of the New York Society Library while writing Moby-Dick—Scoresby described patches of Arctic water in several shades of green, brown, and yellow. One day Scoresby scooped up a bucketful and looked at a sample under the microscope. He wrote: “These were evidently the remains of animalcules . . . I make no doubt, but they are of a kind similar to that which gives the yellowish-green colour to the sea.”19

ISHMAEL’S MORNING MOWERS

Ishmael’s description of the sound of the right whales feeding in “Brit,” the “strange, grassy cutting sound,” also suggests that he infused his own time at sea into this scene, because I haven’t read of anything anyone wrote in the nineteenth century about listening to whales feeding. As far as I’ve found so far, it wasn’t until a 1976 scientific paper by Bill Watkins and Bill Schevill, in which someone reported a sound they called “baleen rattle.” Audible from above the water and with the aid of hydrophones beneath, it was believed to be the result of the clattering of the baleen plates together due to small waves entering the mouth while skim feeding, potentially even as a way to communicate feeding success to others. The sound is not, as Melville implies in his description, the crunching through the brit like “morning mowers.” Melville likely wrote this description of the sound either purely from his imagination for fictional purposes, from a description he heard from sailors’ yarns, or, I like to think, from his own direct, close experience in the seat of an engine-less whaleboat watching and listening to right whales feeding on the surface.20

PLANKTON AS THE BOUNTY OF PROVIDENCE

Scoresby wrote quantitatively and philosophically about the enormous number of these small individual “animalcules” that inhabit the ocean and serve as whale food. In Arctic Regions, after trying to calculate the number of these individuals, Scoresby expounded from his own natural theological masthead:

What a stupendous idea this fact gives of the immensity of creation, and of the bounty of Divine Providence, in furnishing such a profusion of life in a region so remote from the habitations of men! . . . These animals are not without their evident economy, as on their existence possibly depends the beginning of the whole race of mysticete, and some other species of cetaceous animals . . . thus producing a dependant chain of animal life, one particular link of which being destroyed, the whole must necessarily perish.21

Scoresby’s commentary on whale food surely influenced Melville’s writing in “Brit,” especially in this chapter when Ishmael expands out into the significance of the sea to all global life. Scoresby, for his part, revealed an early understanding of food webs and the critical importance of what we now call primary and secondary productivity in the ocean. Two decades later, Dr. Bennett described the ocean food system in terms of a column, in which the tiny “mollusks” formed the base, while at the top of the column were the whales.22

Melville, of course, in addition perhaps to the sounds of the whales feeding, added a few splashes of fictional license to make the “Brit” chapter whole and dripping with metaphor as his Pequod sails peacefully in the Indian Ocean beside these right whales placidly feeding. Ishmael opens the scene with a view from the masthead: a vision of grassy yellow: the pastoral, the peaceful. Ishmael recognizes that brit is the base of Scoresby’s pelagic food chain, just as bread is the human staple or grass is the primary food for herds of herbivorous land animals. Melville likely wrote this scene while working on his small farm. Historians estimate that in the mid-nineteenth century about 80 percent of the American population lived on farms. Whalemen, in turn, often perceived their work at sea in agrarian terms. In Obed Macy’s The History of Nantucket (1835), the “worthy Obed,” as Ishmael calls him, explained: “In the year 1690 . . . some persons were on a high hill . . . observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed ‘there,’ pointing to the sea, ‘is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.’” In the “Nantucket” chapter Ishmael declares how the island’s whaleman hero is the most comfortable and suited to the sea, “he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation . . . He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie.” Less than a year before beginning Moby-Dick, Melville wrote a review of Francis Parkman’s California and Oregon Trail (1849), a narrative that helped inspire much of the prairie and grasslands imagery that Melville wrote into his novel. Melville was well aware, even in his time, of a sad shrinking and taming of the American West, which Ishmael contrasts with a boundless, ferocious, and forever unspoiled ocean.23

The right whales in “Brit” graze through “golden wheat,” creating a visual image of wide blue stripes expanding through yellow. Metaphorically, the land (and thus sanity: consider the phrase to be grounded) is disappearing as the Pequod and her crew progress eastward, deeper into the Indian Ocean. Melville’s baleen whales are removing the brit, like “long wet grass,” leaving only deep blue, slowly wiping clean all traces of the color that represents the safety of the shore. In “Brit,” Melville advanced that master theme of Moby-Dick, first emphasized in “The Lee Shore,” that the sea is a profoundly different place than the land. The sea is immortal and vicious and one should never be fooled by what appears to be a calm scene of whales grazing on crustacea. The sailors from the mastheads first mistake the whales feeding as stationary rocks, looking like elephants: the slow-moving, grazing, vegetarian, largest of living land animals. Quickly Ishmael pivots to state that this comparison to elephants that he just offered is misleading, even false. No. Animals at sea are entirely different from those on land. There are no direct analogies. Here Ishmael alludes to his skepticism of the “old naturalists” by first pointing out that, despite what they say, there is no comparing land animals to those of the sea. Ishmael declares that under the surface are “numberless unknown worlds” that humankind has yet to discover. His lack of clarity or specificity about what is the actual makeup of “the peculiar substance called brit” is part of the point. Our society’s knowledge of the ocean is enormously and inevitably limited—both about the sea’s inhabitants and its overall dangers—expressed in that single spiked club of a sentence with which I ended the introduction to this natural history. By choosing the sailor’s word brit, instead of Darwin’s or Beale’s or Scoresby’s crustacea, animaculae, or medusae—wonderful words that Melville resisted including—he once again sided with those who knew the vast wild ocean most empirically: the whalemen.24

To close “Brit,” Melville doubled-down on the difference between land and sea. Just as in “The Lee Shore,” Ishmael warns of a physical or existential departure from the safety of land and home. Melville’s nineteenth-century sea is merciless, “savage,” and “masterless.” For his metaphysical end to the chapter, he returns his reader back to the pastoral, the “green, gentle, and most docile earth,” the tiniest of creatures. The whales are still slowly eating away at the brit, erasing the ground, removing safety, and nibbling closer to the peaceful “insular Tahiti” in the soul of man. After the brit is chomped away, “thou canst never return.”

Ishmael, the ancient mariner, blesses these tiny creatures anyway.