Ch. 30

SKY-HAWK

So the bird of heaven . . . went down with his ship.

Ishmael, “The Chase—Third Day”

At the end of the final chapter of Moby-Dick, “The Chase—Third Day,” the White Whale strikes the hull of the Pequod with his “solid” forehead. Clinging to the main topmast, Tashtego, the lone Native American on a sinking ship named after a tribe of Native Americans that Ishmael thought to be extinct, nails a red flag to the masthead. The ship is sinking. From the highest point of the ship, Tashtego hammers until the water rises to his chest. Ahab had ordered Tashtego aloft there to replace a long thin flag, a wind vane for the helmsman, which was also used as a signal to their men in the boats and other ships. In addition, hammering a ship’s flag to the mast was a symbol in the navy that a ship would not surrender.1

As the water rises over Tashtego’s head, Ishmael says:

A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-grasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.2

Melville chose not to drown a majestic white albatross as his bird of heaven. He instead wrote of a sharp-winged, predatory seabird—an ideal symbol for Ahab’s dark rage against nature and God. Ahab evokes the banished archangel Satan as he shakes his fist against the sun and hunts God’s finest white specimen of the largest and deepest-diving of predatory mammals. It was the same type of “black hawk,” perhaps even the same “red-billed savage,” that had snatched the captain’s cap in the approach to the meeting of the White Whale, when Ahab is first hoisted aloft.

Melville’s sky-hawk is a frigatebird (Fregata spp.). Dr. Bennett penned a full section on “The Frigate-bird” in his Narrative of a Whaling Voyage, in which he explained that this bird is also called the “Sea-hawk,” which Ishmael does, too, in the “Epilogue” and “The Hat.”3

Ornithologists today recognize five separate species of frigatebird, which all look similar yet each have subtle plumage differences in various stages of development, regionally within species, and between males and females. Bennett wrote that frigatebirds are “the most remarkable sea-birds frequenting intertropical regions,” with an average six-and-a-half-foot wingspan. The wingspan of the largest of these, the magnificent frigatebird (Fregata magnificens), common to coastal South America and the Galápagos, can be as long as eight feet. (See plate 12.) Frigatebirds have the largest wing area to body weight ratio of any bird, at sea or on land, even more than albatrosses. They soar effortlessly on trade winds that take them higher than local thermal breezes. With sharp wings and a scissoring tail, a frigatebird can drop quickly like a hawk and then change direction like a swallow. John James Audubon, who knew them as “Frigate Pelicans,” wrote in the 1830s that they have “the power of flight which I conceive superior to that of perhaps any other bird.” Audubon described them diving for fish “from on high with the velocity of a meteor.”4 (See fig. 55.)

Frigatebirds earned their name, along with “Man-of-war birds” or “Sky-hawks,” because of a practice now called kleptoparasitism, a behavior of attacking and scaring other species to give up what they’ve just caught. Frigatebirds cannot dive under the water. They can barely walk on land and rarely even rest on the surface of the ocean. But they are exceptionally skilled at swooping down and plucking a flying fish out of the air or scaring a tern out of a fish which that bird had just caught. Ishmael alludes to this in “The Pequod meets the Virgin” with the screeching bird trying to escape the “piratical hawks.”

This final scene with Tashtego matches Dr. Bennett’s own descriptions of the frigatebirds. Bennett wrote that this bird soars higher than any other, until it is “a mere speck in the sky.” He told a sailor’s yarn about an exceptionally tall landsman who while standing aloft grabbed one of these birds with his hands. “They apparently take a delight,” Bennett wrote, “in soaring over the mast-head of a ship, from which they usually tear away the pieces of coloured cloth fixed in the vane.”5

Melville did not need Bennett, or even Audubon, to be inspired by frigatebirds, however. He had his own experiences. Magnificent frigatebirds were common throughout the southeastern Pacific. Lesser (F. ariel, likely named for the character in The Tempest) and great frigatebirds (F. minor) are found throughout the islands of the South Pacific, where before human settlement, fisheries depletions, and the introduction of rats, cats, and pigs to their island rookeries, seabirds were more prolific than they are today. A couple years after Moby-Dick, in “The Encantadas,” Melville wrote of the far-ranging “man-of-war hawk” soaring near the Galápagos.6

He wasn’t always accurate here, though. Despite Ishmael’s poetic desire for the blood-red sword imagery, the frigatebird’s long thin beak is actually gray, if at most occasionally pinkish. The frigatebird does have a sharp hook at the end of its beak to grasp fish, and during the mating season adult males of all five species have a bright red gular pouch beneath the beak, which puffs out like a balloon as a mating display. This gular pouch is perhaps what Melville confuses or misremembers as its red beak. To be fair, however, even his Penny Cyclopædia described the frigatebird’s bill as red.7

Regardless, frigatebirds had been on Melville’s poetic palate since the opening scenes of his very first novel Typee:

As we drew nearer the land, I hailed with delight the appearance of innumerable sea-fowl. Screaming and whirling in spiral tracks, they would accompany the vessel, and at times alight on our yards and stays. That piratical-looking fellow, appropriately named the man-of-war’s-hawk, with his blood-red bill and raven plumage, would come sweeping round us in gradually diminishing circles, till you could distinctly mark the strange flashings of his eye; and then, as if satisfied with his observation, would sail up into the air and disappear from the view.8

So even in his first book, Melville was thinking about the black criminal frigatebird violently ousting the white harmless albatross for poetic immortality. His sky-hawk is crucified and drowned in Moby-Dick with the Native American of the Pequod.

Today, a black seabird, grounded, soaked, instead evokes another type of wreck: the oil spill.