Ch. 28

NOISELESS NAUTILUS

But the moon’s bright wake was still revealed: a silver track, tipping every wave-crest in its course, till each seemed a pearly, scroll-prowed nautilus, buoyant with some elfin crew.

Melville, Mardi1

At last! Wild Ahab finally finds the White Whale! In “The Chase—First Day,” Ishmael, the crew, and the reader see the famed sperm whale, in person, on the equator, for the very first time.

Ishmael says that Moby Dick is “seemingly unsuspecting” of the battle that is to come. The White Whale glides through “fleecy, greenish, foam.” White bubbles dance on the smooth equatorial seas, filling around his dazzling, glistening white hump and forehead. Hundreds of flittering seabirds hover around the White Whale in a cloud, dabbling on the surface with their feet. One of the birds stands at the end of a shattered lance shaft still stuck into the whale’s back. You can reasonably imagine this as a tropic bird (Phaethon spp.), a bright white seabird that Melville had written about in previous novels, and here in Moby-Dick it “silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.”2

Melville’s description of the first vision of the White Whale is one of those paragraphs you can read aloud again and again, purely for the poetry of the prose. One especially lovely reference here for the natural historian is the line that opens the paragraph. The men of the Pequod are in their small, light whaleboats, sails set, and paddling toward the whale: “Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only slowly they neared the foe.”3

While writing Moby-Dick Melville marked up the page of Surgeon Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale that cited a long passage about the argonaut, or the paper nautilus (Family Argonautidae). In the margins Melville scribbled two ideas on the poetic connection to these tiny ocean octopuses, most of which is illegible, but it was something to do with Sinbad’s sea anchors from The Arabian Nights (1706). Beale’s passage was a quotation from Peter Mark Roget’s The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as Manifested in the Creation: Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered (1834), one of nine popular books of science commissioned by the Earl of Bridgewater upon his death in order to advance natural theology. Roget explained that just like a tiny sailboat this cephalopod has a paper-thin shell, “almost pellucid,” from which extends two specialized “tentacula” with membranes that catch the air. The paper nautilus rows and steers with its other arms, Roget said. And if the wind gets too strong, it dives and pulls the shell down under the surface.4

Paper nautiluses apparently sailing on the surface like boats had inspired naturalists and writers ever since Aristotle, leading Linnaeus in the early 1700s to name them after the Greek myth of the hero-sailors, the Argonauts, who voyaged aboard Jason’s ship Argo. In 1807 William Wood wrote in his three-volume book of natural history that some believed the “ancients” got the very idea of the art of sailing from these animals. (See fig. 50.) Wood, like Roget, seems to have used these octopuses and their sails as evidence to prove that God is the ultimate designer and creator, and that any transformation of species, any evolution of form, would be impossible.5

Soon after came the French naturalist Jeannette Villepreux-Power, who first studied paper nautiluses in the 1830s. Many credit her with the invention of the aquarium, because in order study these animals she anchored wood cages in the sea and then pumped sea water through hoses into tanks into her small coastal laboratory in Sicily. Her foundational experiments, which Melville could have read about in a detailed illustrated entry in his Penny Cyclopædia, advanced what would later be confirmed by twentieth-century marine biologists: these paper nautiluses are females only—the males are but tiny shell-less functionaries—and the female’s egg-case shell is secreted and repaired during its lifetime by the sail-like membranes at the end of the two arms. Villepreux-Power did not discount the “sailing” behavior, but she did not witness it for herself. It turns out that the membranes do not serve to propel the animal by the wind at all. Illustrations, like those in Wood’s natural history, seem to have been pure fiction.6

For Melville, who tucked this legend into a brief reference to open a crucial scene of the novel, the paper nautiluses were just one of thousands of rare ocean wonders, unknown to those ashore, witnessed almost exclusively by the fishermen and whalemen who traveled quietly along the surface. Apart from shell collecting, public interest in subtidal invertebrates had only just begun in the 1850s. The first public aquarium opened in London as part of the Regent’s Park Zoo in 1853; this was followed in the United States by the collections of P. T. Barnum, who set up aquaria at his American Museum in New York City.7

At the end of this stunning pivotal paragraph in “The Chase—First Day,” Ishmael connects the opening allusion of the men in their quiet whaleboats like tiny paper nautilus to the White Whale himself, now first seen as a glorious Greek ship flagged by a tropic bird: “the painted hull of an argosy.”8