Ch. 31

ISHMAEL

Blue Environmentalist and Climate Refugee

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Ishmael, “The Chase—Third Day”

As part of a crew of twenty-four students, a captain, a chief scientist, and ten professional mariners and assistant scientists, I sailed aboard the SSV Robert C. Seamans one summer, twenty-five years after my first voyage around the Pacific aboard the Concordia. This time I regularly stood aloft looking for whales in the equatorial Pacific, where Moby-Dick ended.

Our voyage this time was a round-trip out of American Samoa, an island that was once a provisioning stop for American whalemen and is now a harbor dominated by the StarKist tuna cannery. We traveled from there up to one of the equatorial archipelagoes of the vast island nation of Kiribati, within a day from the navel of the planet where the dateline and equator intersect. Our primary mission, as we taught university students about the ocean, was to traverse and survey the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. This is one of the largest marine reserves on Earth, spanning 119,000 square nautical miles, nearly the area of the entire state of California.

Sailors have always thought of home while out at sea, but I found myself disappointed during this particular voyage in my inability to fully separate myself from life on land, to fully slow down my mind and forget the “carking cares of Earth.” Some of that is simply the reality of our world today. The Robert C. Seamans has an engine and modern technologies, which means the program can have a tighter schedule in order to collect more data, faster. Even on a square-rigged sailing ship in the middle of the Pacific, we remained in limited electronic contact with interests ashore.

From my perch aloft, about one hundred feet above the surface, I could theoretically see whales over eleven miles away on a clear day. I calculated this distance from a formula in the ship’s copy of Bowditch. Ishmael muses in “The Mast-Head” about how easily one could step off the crosstrees and fall to one’s death, but I was clipped in with two separate carabiners tethered to a four-point harness. I did notice, though, that during my shifts aloft the ship’s rig began to disappear. Standing on those spreaders and looking forward, even with the wire of the topsail lift angled in my view or the tip of the foremast just above, I felt as if I were standing on the ocean itself. The sea, especially during a calm day with few whitecaps, appeared simply, mundanely, like a flecked carpet. On days of low or moderate breezes, the ocean’s color from aloft appeared nearly uniform, uninterrupted. I was so high that depth perception was blurred. It felt as if I could step right onto this blue mat and in a few long strides lean over to the edge of the horizon, peel it up, and sweep the clouds back underneath. In other words, standing up at the masthead for hours at a time, I loosened my grasp on scale.

While I looked for whales, I sifted what I’d learned over the course of this natural history of Moby-Dick. The novel offers a benchmark for how Americans understood the ocean in the mid-nineteenth century. Melville wrote Moby-Dick out of his vast experience at sea, as well as from his reading of popular science books, encyclopedias, narratives of sailors and naturalists, and even the scientific papers of his time. His narrator Ishmael cares about scientific thought and inquiry, values it, even makes an occasional earnest correction or adjustment to the knowledge of his day, but he also questions when this inquiry becomes too distant from the observable, emotional, or spiritual world of humans and God. When in doubt, he preferenced the viewpoint of whalemen who had seen the wonders of the ocean so intimately. Though Moby-Dick is a gloriously messy book filled with contradictions, mistakes, and digressions, Melville was surprisingly careful with his marine biology, oceanography, geology, meteorology, and navigation to what seems to be the best of his ability as a self-taught naturalist. He crafted a presciently varied viewpoint of marine life, which included an awareness of human impact on ocean animals, both as species and as individuals—including the qualification that we shouldn’t be too hypocritical in how we judge the people out at sea killing in order to satisfy human demands for food and products. In many ways, in our twenty-first century, we may justly read Moby-Dick with a three-faceted environmental moral: a story that is proto-Darwinian, proto-environmentalist, and one in which Ishmael serves us now as the symbol of a climate refugee.

MOBY-DICK AS A PROTO-DARWINIAN STORY

At least twice a day during our voyage toward the equator that summer, we conducted a range of biological and oceanographic sampling as part of the ongoing monitoring of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. As required for the safety of the ship, we posted lookouts on deck twenty-four hours a day. From sunrise to sunset, an additional student stood lookout for fifteen minutes of each hour to record seabirds or other visible fauna. Every day that we were underway, usually midmorning and usually at some peril to my breakfast, I went aloft. Each day I stayed up there for two-hour shifts, which, by the time we returned to the dock in American Samoa, totaled forty-eight hours in the rig searching for whales. When not aloft I searched the horizon for marine life, and, Ahab-like, I ate all my meals on deck. In other words, if anything flew, floated, or dove within several miles of our vessel during daylight hours, someone aboard was going to see it. If it was at night—there was a likely chance someone would hear it.

Alas, though, we had only a few sightings of whales. The voyage had started off fortuitously. Shortly after leaving American Samoa, we saw a few dolphins and then a humpback whale. But for the rest of the voyage we saw only one minke whale and a few other shoals of dolphins, perhaps bottlenose dolphins and long-nosed spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris). When we returned a month later, we saw one last puff, likely a humpback, off American Samoa.

I had wanted to see sperm whales in particular, of course, but recent surveys suggested that we should not have expected to see any large whales at all. The reserve has dozens of steep seamounts and trenches that presumably support enormous fish and squid populations, just like that of Kaikōura Canyon, New Zealand, but while we were drinking kava under a small thatched meeting hut on Kanton Island, the current reserve manager, Tuake Teema, told me that he did not think many whales transited through this region. Five separate surveys within the Phoenix Islands conducted by the New England Aquarium between 2006 and 2013 observed only one whale, which they believed to be a beaked whale.1

Yet I had gone into the trip with some reason to hope to see sperm whales: during a similar voyage of the Robert C. Seamans two years earlier, the crew saw a unit of some thirty to forty sperm whales, which included females with at least two calves.2 Historical accounts also recorded sperm whales in this area. Though the Charles W. Morgan cruised the equator around here in the early 1850s without much luck, Maury and Wilkes both mapped this area with high sperm whale abundance. Tim Smith and his colleagues of the World Whaling History Project, in their map that compiles whaling activity from the late 1700s to the 1920s, revealed concentrations of sperm whales at the north end of the reserve in our month of July. This was also one of the regions where Captain Lawrence aboard the Commodore Morris drew his clumps of whale flukes. When he sketched his cruise track on that Norie chart that’s held at Mystic Seaport, he drew his ship’s track back and forth across the exact waters in which we sailed. Lawrence’s crew caught several sperm whales among the “shoals” of them. He sighted dozens if not hundreds more than he killed. Yet despite this historic precedence, we still saw no whales beside the one minke in this equatorial ocean.3

It’s an important challenge for modern marine biologists, oceanographers, and environmental historians to determine with confidence whether the nineteenth-century sea, Ahab’s sea, was indeed more prolific, more “lively,” than it is today—or even as compared to “Noah’s time.” Professional research reveals more and more that the answer is yes: the global ocean in the mid-nineteenth century simply had more and larger life in it. This is based on mariner’s journals and published narratives by sailors and naturalists and passengers, as well as anthropological evidence and foundational recent studies in genetics and modeling. In the 1790s Captain James Colnett regularly wrote of abundant fish, birds, and dolphins in the eastern Pacific. He wrote off Mocha Island of “the sea being then covered” with sperm whales. A half-century later Dr. Frederick Bennett wrote of the vast single schools of sperm whales in the Pacific, numbers of sperm whales “beyond all reasonable conception.” Recent scholars have applied the concept of shifting baselines to the ocean environment to reevaluate what we might consider normal to see at sea. We should not just brush off as exaggerations or propaganda the reports by early explorers and whalemen who reported voluminous schools of large fish, thousands of enormous sharks, larger and longer marine mammals, and cloud-like colonies of seabirds by comparing these reports to what seems credible to us today, especially to those of us who don’t actually spend much time on the water. Douglas McCauley and his colleagues have found that globally since the 1970s, marine vertebrates in the ocean have declined on average by over twenty percent. Fish in particular have declined by nearly forty percent and some of the baleen whales by between eighty and ninety percent. Seabirds as an ecological group are the most endangered of all birds on Earth.4

I’m not trying to suggest that the fact we didn’t see whales in the Phoenix Islands region of the equatorial Pacific during July of one recent year is any indicator that the sperm whale will perish as a species. Nor does the gradual decline of sperm whales off Kaikōura in recent years necessarily signal problems for sperm whales worldwide. If our ship had traveled just another day north to straddle the equator, our odds would have increased tremendously based on primary productivity and historical data. We also sailed during a neutral year between El Niño and La Niña phases, in which the waters were a bit warmer than normal for July. The plankton diversity and concentrations were light compared to other years when the ship conducted the exact same cruise track, suggesting we sailed in a less productive moment for squid and fish and thus for sperm whales.5

In our lifetime and our children’s, sperm whales will almost certainly not be significantly diminished by hunting. There is too little demand for their meat and oil. Moby-Dick and other works of art have greatly helped raise the status of sperm whales all over the world. The majority of humankind has elevated the sperm whale, along with all whales, to the point where they are icons of conservation. Only the governments of Norway, Japan, and Iceland sanction any killing of large whales for food for humans and farmed animals. The United States, Russia, Canada, and Greenland (Denmark) also allow a small number of cetaceans to be killed by their indigenous Arctic populations. Japan is the only country that has declared rights to a quota of sperm whales as part of a hunt they say is for scientific purposes. Though they have reported killing other species of whales, Japanese whalemen have not reported killing a sperm whale since 2013. Unlike right whales and other baleen whales, the habits of sperm whales tend to keep them out of the path of ship strikes and only occasionally in conflict with fishing gear. Among the other large whales, the southern right whales and minkes, for example, seem to have been steadily recovering since the late 1980s after the international moratorium on industrial-scale hunting. But the North Atlantic right whales and North Pacific right whales remain in grave danger, on the precipice of extinction, with each hovering around only five hundred individuals remaining on Earth.6

I do not want to suggest that sperm whales as a species are safe, either. Sperm whale populations seem to have been recovering slowly after the moratorium—but in truth it’s hard to know. For example, sperm whales in the Caribbean, the clans that are perhaps the best studied, do not seem to be recovering as well as was expected. Physeter macrocephalus might be eradicated entirely by the same slow motion anthropogenic vectors that could kill us all off. These are the insidious threats: the harpoon lines we hurl at the ocean ecosystem that were beyond Melville’s imagination in 1851 and even beyond my own imagination in 1993 when I first climbed aloft in the rigging of the Concordia. The prevalence and increase of manmade ocean noise—naval exercises, seismic survey blasts, wind turbines, and the noise of engines across oceans—affect sperm whale behavior and perhaps have even caused the death of individuals and caused mass strandings. Anthropogenic ocean noise is perhaps even more hazardous to smaller, more coastal toothed cetaceans, such as dolphins and beaked whales. More significantly, we now understand that the Ahabian bights of rope that we regularly string around our necks could harm the large whales, too: our addiction to fossil fuels, the prevalence of plastics in the ocean, the seeping of industrial pollution into seaways, and the man-made shifts in ocean chemistry that might begin to crash primary and secondary productivity up and down pelagic and coastal food webs.7 (See fig. 56.)

More and more, we are learning how essential the large whales are to the ocean environment, as consumers and predators, as movers and distributors of nutrients, and even how much the whales provide in their death to support micro-ecosystems and carrion habitat. Sperm whales with no human predators and no real ocean-dwelling competition other than an occasional killer whale, were limited only by their own species and cephalopod and fish abundance. Today, their primary food of deep-sea squid has little global market for humans, yet Whitehead believes that sperm whales as a population, even at their reduced twenty-first-century populations, probably eat in one year roughly about the same biomass as all of the world fisheries conducted by humans.8

In Moby-Dick, on the third and final day of the chase, after Ahab stands aloft and takes in his final vision of the sea—the “old, old sight” that is the same to Noah as it is to him—the captain sinks another harpoon into the White Whale. Moby Dick rolls and nearly capsizes the small craft. The animal snaps the line and in his pain rushes not back toward Ahab’s boat but instead turns to charge at the nearby Pequod itself. Ishmael declares: “Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect.” The sperm whale with his “predestinating head” bashes into the broad starboard bow of the whaleship. Seawater rushes in. The White Whale surfaces back near Ahab’s boat. Ahab stabs the animal once again, a third time, but ends up killing himself with the line of his own harpoon:

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.9

(This was a common accident. For example, during the first lowering for a whale at the start of the 1859 voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, a man named Francis Leacock was dragged out of a whaleboat by the line and drowned.10)

After the White Whale smashes into the Pequod, the ship sinks quickly. All three of the harpooners stand atop each masthead. Tashtego and the frigatebird, flailing at the tallest main mast, are the final living things dragged down with the ship. Ahab, the demagogue, has driven a floating nation of men of all races and walks of life to their death so that he could try to fulfill a personal and existential vendetta. He kills himself and causes the death of everyone else. That is, except for Ishmael, who, flung out of Ahab’s boat and beyond the sinking Pequod, now watches in horror from afar as he clings to Queequeg’s coffin. Ishmael is now a Pip-like castaway.11

While I stood aloft aboard the Robert C. Seamans, I often thought about the closing drama and what a floating Pip or Ishmael might look like when first coming into view on the horizon. One afternoon only a few days north of Samoa, we conducted our first man-overboard drill. We recovered a fender that Captain Chris Nolan threw over the side. Nolan, a former officer of the US Coast Guard, explained to us just how quickly our little coconut heads would disappear in the waves, particularly if any kind of sea was running. For part of his career, Nolan had coordinated search and rescue efforts in a sector of ocean covering more than twelve million square miles, a gargantuan triangle between Samoa, Guam, and Hawaii. The Coast Guard uses computer models with which they punch in local conditions to predict the drifting of a floating object—or human—on any given day and place.12

“Survivability is governed mostly by water temperature,” Nolan told us. “In Alaska, the North Pacific, the North Atlantic, you lose dexterity in about fifteen minutes.”

I thought about Melville on his way to London in 1849, watching that man let go of the rope and drift astern—with a grin.

“In really cold water you’re dead in pretty much an hour,” Nolan said. “When we were searching for people, if we were confident that they were not in a boat or in a survival suit, the search didn’t tend to last too, too long. But in warmer waters, you can sometimes survive up to forty-eight hours, or even longer. Even in ninety-degree waters, like right around here, you’re still losing heat and you’ll get hypothermia. I’ve certainly heard of people surviving for days—the will to live is big in that. But if you’re in the water, you are going to die.”

After the drill, I asked Nolan about sharks—whether that was something for which the Coast Guard plans.

“No. There’s no biological discussions in that training,” he said. “I think the sharks are more about curiosity. They are scavengers around bodies. I’ve never heard of any rescue of someone alive in the water where the rescuers had to fend off sharks.”

Our narrator of Moby-Dick is not the only survivor of the wreck: Ish and fish survive. Melville wrote nothing to suggest the White Whale dies, despite at least five new harpoons in his body from the previous three days—and whatever physical trauma he sustained from thumping his spermaceti melon against the boats and the oak hull of the Pequod. In “The Fossil Whale” Ishmael had envisioned that whales will live on “after all humane ages are over.”13

It’s worth reemphasizing that it is not the White Whale that kills Ahab. The last words we hear Starbuck say to his captain are: “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” Then Ahab hangs himself with his own rope in the act of attacking the animal.14

Thus one of the potential readings, one of the morals to be derived today from Moby-Dick as advanced by scholars such as Bert Bender, Eric Wilson, and Dean Flower is that the story prefigures On the Origin of Species—or at least anticipates a modern ecological sensibility. Melville demonstrated two major drivers of evolution by natural selection that Darwin was still percolating in 1851: fitness and chance. Moby Dick, the sperm whale, uses his strength and cunning to survive to swim away and potentially pass on his genes, while Ishmael, the human, by dumb luck beyond his control, drifts alone and survives to one day potentially pass on his genes. (Darwin or Melville didn’t mention genes, of course: no one knew the mechanism of inheritance at the time, even as Mendel was beginning to putter away in his monastery garden in the 1850s.)

“The unharming sharks,” Ishmael says, “they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.” The next day, after nearly twenty-four hours in the water, he is rescued by the whalemen of the Rachel, who are looking for the captain’s son but instead find Ishmael.15

Melville wrote in his journal when sailing across the Atlantic before composing Moby-Dick about that new friend with Coleridgean sensibilities—a man who accepted the Scripture and the Divine, but was willing to consider scientific advances. So it goes with Ishmael, who in retelling his story, opens himself up to the transmutation of species, to the interconnectedness and irrationality and unimportance of all species, and to the powerful, cannibalistic, seeming immortality of the far larger, longer, deeper, and older ocean. Moby-Dick is a novel after the eco-philosopher’s heart: a proto-Darwinian fable.

ISHMAEL AS A PROTO-ENVIRONMENTALIST

The steel-hulled two-masted Robert C. Seamans is equipped with a diesel engine, single propeller, radar, GPS, depthsounders, diesel generators, refrigerators, freezers, and two reverse osmosis units to convert seawater to potable water. The ship has scientific equipment that is equivalent, if at a smaller scale, to the most advanced oceanographic research vessels operating today. Although we never sent it down this far, the Seamans can lower nearly 9,000 feet of wire. We daily attached to this wire a carousel of pressure-activated bottles to capture water samples from different depths. We had computerized sonar equipment, the CHIRP, which pings from the ship’s steel hull what sounds remarkably similar to the clicking of a sperm whale. This equipment recorded our depth at all times, tracing and mapping the profile of Ishmael’s “undiscoverable bottom.” Another suite of equipment, the Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler or ADCP, constantly recorded surface and subsurface currents—and this, too, uses acoustic signals to collect its information. We replicated the sampling sites from previous voyages to the Phoenix Islands. The students worked in groups to answer their own specific questions. Three students, for example, under the guidance of Chief Scientist Deb Goodwin, sampled plankton from surface tows and monitored ocean chemistry for pH and aragonite saturation in order to learn more about how global and local ocean acidification is affecting the growth and resilience of coral reefs and calcifying zooplankton, such as pteropods and foraminifera. Ocean acidification also affects the shell-building ability of larger invertebrates, such as oysters, mussels, and even the paper nautiluses, which scientists believe might be exceptionally vulnerable to climate change, even to the point of extinction because of their thin, brittle shell. When the Commodore Morris, Charles W. Morgan, and the Acushnet sailed these waters in the 1840s and 1850s, the ocean seems to have been less acidic than it was when we dragged our plankton nets across the seas around the Phoenix Islands. The burning of fossil fuels and the industrial removal of the rain forests over the past dozen human generations has apparently accelerated a shift in ocean chemistry so quickly and dramatically that paleo-oceanographers believe this current rate of acidification has not been seen on Earth since fifty-six million years ago, conditions unknown to the evolution of most living marine organisms.16

We anchored off three island atolls. We snorkeled the seemingly pristine reefs and lagoons, within an area that scientists and managers believe to be one of the few remaining “intact” coral archipelago ecosystems, even possibly the “last coral wilderness on Earth.” The Phoenix Islands were originally settled sparsely by nomadic groups of Polynesians and Micronesians who seem to have rarely stayed on these islands for more than a few years due to lack of fresh water. Most of the islands of Kiribati were first definitively recorded and identified for Western mariners’ charts by American and English whalemen in the early 1800s, who named collections of islands here as part of the Kings Mill Group and the Gilbert Islands. One island to the south was named Starbuck Island. Our first anchorage, near where we saw a floating large squid at the surface, was at Enderbury Island, named in 1823 for the English whalemen Samuel Enderby, whom Ishmael mentions and who helped sponsor Colnett’s voyage. In the lagoon of Kanton, an island named after a New Bedford whaleship that wrecked there in 1854, we snorkeled over enormous corals, Pip’s “colossal orbs.” In a small boat over these reefs, I thought of the American whalemen rowing over these corals, also looking wide-eyed over the gunwale. In recent decades the reefs of Kiribati have suffered from two massive bleaching events due to unusually warm El Niño events. Scientists have been amazed to see, however, that the corals seem to be showing signs of recovery far faster than expected.17

One day at anchor the captain and I were scouting out snorkeling sites for the following morning. As I was swimming back to the boat, Nolan said there were three large whitetip reef sharks (Triaenodon obesus) circling around me as I obliviously swam along at the surface. The coastal sharks around these islands are still recovering from a few months of shark-finning by a single shark long-lining boat in 2001 that nearly decimated the entire local population.18

Whenever I had free time at anchor, I explored the beaches. I wanted to find a whale skeleton or a lump of ambergris. On Nikumaroro, the atoll on which scholars believe Amelia Earhart and her navigator crash-landed and died as castaways, I turned a corner and saw a beach of plastic bottles. I saw other plastic trash, too: flip-flops, fishing floats, and polypropylene rope. It’s hard to express how remote the islands of Kiribati are. Next time you have a globe—your flat phone won’t achieve the proper effect—try to find these islands and just look how far away they are from anywhere. On the windward side of Nikumaroro, plastic bottles at various sun-brittled stages will crumble into smaller and smaller pieces and degrade. At sea, the plastics tend to sink eventually and then persist at the sea bottom, we think, for centuries. On that windward stretch of Nikumaroro, plastic bottles sat on the sand on average every two or three paces, more plentiful than coconuts.19

We collected a few garbage bags full of plastic trash, but we did not make a dent. Nearly all of this plastic trash must have floated from discards thousands of miles away. There was just too much plastic on these desolate beaches for it to be otherwise.

About six months earlier and over a thousand miles to the west in a bay of the Philippines, a 38-foot juvenile male sperm whale had washed ashore. Biologists believed the cause of death to be his stomach crammed with plastic products, fish hooks, rope, wood with nails, and steel wire. In the spring of 2018 another male sperm whale washed ashore on the coast of Spain, with a likely cause of death a clog in his stomach and intestines of some sixty-four pounds of garbage, primarily of plastic bags and rope.20 (See fig. 57.)

Once on another voyage of the Robert C. Seamans, I sailed across the Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific to the east of Hawaii. Our plankton nets dragged up microplastics invisible to the eye, while often we watched larger pieces of garbage drift past, including buckets, Styrofoam flats, and children’s toys. One day our ship was entirely, dangerously disabled when a clump of stray fishing gear wrapped around our propeller, requiring two of our crew to scuba dive mid-ocean to cut it free.21

The pervasiveness of ocean plastic, yet another derivative of petroleum and thus a contributor to excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, is altering the global ocean and its coastlines even in ways that are entirely unexpected. After the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that obliterated the northeast coasts of Japan, killing more than 15,890 people, melting down a nuclear power plant, and at least partially destroying one million buildings, scientists found that marine species that never would have otherwise been able to survive rode on plastic substrate for trips of months and years across the Pacific. Some species survived on floating docks and debris and settled on the coast of North America. The impacts of these invasive species are still playing out. Invasives used to travel among the weedy hulls of whaling ships, as well as in the storage holds down below, and then later in twentieth-century tanks of ballast water, but this is an entirely new and surprising vector.22

Herman Melville never put his fingers on anything during his lifetime, from 1819 to 1891, that was not made from something that occurred in nature—iron, clay, wood, minerals, and rock. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that humans invented an entirely synthetic polymer. Though Melville was not what we call an environmentalist in the sense of the word today, he did see habitat degradation, knew of extinctions, witnessed human populations booming around him, and lived in areas where the forests had been stripped bare. Melville watched and read as railroads unrolled across marshes and prairies. He bought a farmhouse and moved up near the Berkshire Mountains in the middle of his writing of Moby-Dick surely, at least in part, to get away from the rush of New York City and the expansion of the Industrial Age.

So another moral of Moby-Dick for the twenty-first-century reader is the novel’s prescience as a blue fable that decenters man, revealing how messing with the forces of the natural ocean world will end poorly for humans. Ahab’s hubris seems mostly a personal, fatal madness, but his actions can be a symbol for any broad anti-environmental human drive. As scholar Elizabeth Schultz explained in 2000, the death of Ahab anticipates “the desire, if not the design, of twentieth-century environmental activists for the annihilation of forces antagonistic toward marine conservation.” Ahab on his ivory leg serves as a symbol for modern consumerism and the trampling of nature that can never curb its sharkish, sea-hawkish appetite. More specifically, Ahab easily stands in for Big Oil, the ceaseless quest for fossil fuels. Moby-Dick as a proto-environmentalist fable came up especially in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. This was the largest spill in the history of the United States, caused by technologies digging deeper and farther to extract oil at sea. Even as oil-soaked seabirds dominated the photography of news media and the oil continued to flow into the ocean, the New York Times ran an article on Ahab, Moby-Dick, and “its themes of hubris, destructiveness and relentless pursuit.”23

Do you want to know what happens now on these ocean trips when a thoughtful young person climbs aloft on a school ship and inhales what Melville wrote in Redburn as “the very breath that the great whales respire”? The student is now, say, a week from land in the middle of the North Atlantic or the South Pacific or anywhere else on the global ocean. She is finally away from the eco-guilt and everything else she’s run away from ashore. She looks at the horizon, all of its 360˚ of boundlessness. The sea to her seems immortal, timeless, the same to her as Noah’s, everything she’s been taught to imagine. After some peaceful time, she sees a speck off the bow. It floats half-submerged on the surface. At first she thinks it is the slippery back of a whale or the mottled shell of a sea turtle. She wants to shout out to her shipmates. She berates herself for not bringing up her phone to take a photograph. As it approaches or they are sailing toward it—she can’t quite tell which—she then identifies that it is in fact but a sun-faded, falsely pink, coffin-like Styrofoam cooler, half-sunk. It is out of the reach of a boat hook. The captain denies her shouted request to launch a small boat to fish it out.

Does this sight shatter everything she thought about the wild and pristine sea beyond the hand of Homo sapiens? I’m telling you that it does: it does, it does, it does.

ISHMAEL AS A CLIMATE REFUGEE

As I cited to open this study, Lewis Mumford predicted in 1929 at the start of the twentieth-century revival of Melville’s works: “Each age, one may predict, will find its own symbols in Moby-Dick. Over that ocean the clouds will pass and change, and the ocean itself will mirror back those changes from its own depths.”24

Herman Melville died in obscurity. His masterpiece was a flop. Yet now as we celebrate the bicentennial of his birth in 2019, his novel inspires new readers each year with a thriving, continually growing core of professional scholars and recreational Moby-Dickheads. Moby-Dick is now in every Great American Novel discussion. All types of readers in dozens of languages have found in the story rebellions and truths about narrative form, about God, about Melville’s parents, children, lovers, about Freudian obsessions, about American democracy, about the Civil War, about labor, about fascism, about communism, about racism, about cultural relativism, about gender, about homosexuality, about ecofeminism, about American economic history, and on and on and on. As early as 1950, the phrase “Moby-Dickering”—meaning too much time spent trying to find the meaning in the novel—appeared in the New York Times. This project here before you is no better and hopefully no worse. In 1994 literature professor Paul Lauter wrote: “As is perhaps always the case, what the critics of the 1920s made of Melville tells us more about them than about him.” Lauter’s point extends far beyond the ivory towers. Moby-Dick survives, as strong as ever. Aside from the stories of the Bible, and now perhaps Harry Potter, I cannot think of another written work that is so widely known and referenced in American popular culture, even if only a small percentage have actually read the novel in full. This is similar to the poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or even the phrase “sea change” from The Tempest. Newspaper and magazine articles regularly compare obsessions and distant and difficult goals to the White Whale and compare whoever is doggedly in power, wherever, to Ahab.25

When I stood aloft in the middle of the South Pacific aboard the Robert C. Seamans, I imagined Ishmael floating, thirsty, hypothermic, perhaps resigned, still passive, still inquiring, still philosophical. He is now a lesson for environmental conservation. Though open-minded, scholarly, and often funny, Ishmael is not a typical environmental hero. Ishmael is not the Lorax. Ishmael advocates no position. Ishmael takes no action to try to correct injustice. In her fable “The Afterlife of Ishmael,” Margaret Atwood wrote that Ishmael had sinned by doing nothing. Ishmael, however, chosen by chance—but taking on the challenge in full—does, at least, bear witness to the tragic events. A new ancient mariner, he tells his tale, preaching against arrows, against harpoons, slung at the ocean and at its animals. Perhaps Ishmael convinces us to love all creatures great and small, from sperm whale to brit. Perhaps it really doesn’t even matter whether you believe these creatures to be the creations of God or not.26

Sometimes during my hours aloft looking for whales, students came up to talk with me, or we had conversations looking over the rail or in our classes on the quarterdeck. Since my first teaching position aboard the Concordia, undergraduate perceptions seem, taken crudely on the whole, to have shifted toward focusing activist energies on issues of social justice, not so much on the innate rights of animals or the type of environmentalism of the Earth Day variety with which I was raised. After watching and participating in and occasionally organizing over twenty years of in-class debates about commercial and indigenous whaling, it seems the rising generation sees the “Save the Whales” movements as mostly quaint, even nearing naïve, despite research that continues to reveal even more intelligence in marine mammals, advanced age, and evidence of social behaviors that we can only name as aspects of a culture. Saving whales purely for their own sake, for their own intrinsic individual worth, is not the driving force of the newest environmentalism. For most of the students I’ve met, it’s usually not enough to make economic or policy sacrifices to save a whale for the animal’s life or well-being alone. Yes, it’s awful to murder the whales in Moby-Dick, but what also about the cruelty imposed on Tashtego, as a Native American; Daggoo, as an African; Fedallah, as a Southeast Asian/Middle-Eastern fantastical devil; or the human hero in the story, Queequeg, the Pacific Islander? The face of environmentalism in Moby-Dick for the next generation is not the sperm whale but Pip or the harpooners. Students today are more inclined to support indigenous rights to hunt whales, for example, and to embrace Iceland or Norway or Japan’s claim to hunt whales if these nations can defend their claims to cultural necessity. Just as Ishmael teaches, the new generation has learned to tune in to the gray areas, to not rank humans or nonhuman animals, and, as a colleague who regularly runs these debates puts it, “students reel a bit from the cultural imperialism.” The rising generation wants a collective environmentalism without one culture telling another what to do. So in many ways today the face of the climate change crisis and the ocean is often not the polar bear or even the harp seal, but, and, the Inuit way of life.27

Though we wanted the waters and beaches of Kiribati to be an untouched antediluvian Eden, we learned that the people throughout the island nation of Kiribati see themselves as the frontline of climate change. The approximately 113,000 citizens of Kiribati, most of whom live on the island of Tarawa, have had absolutely nothing to do with creating this global crisis. The republic is made up now of thirty-three islands. Two small, uninhabited islands effectively disappeared under the sea in 1999. Most of the islands are less than 1.2 statute miles wide, with an average height of six feet above sea level.28

The US Global Change Research Program predicted that with “the lowest emissions scenarios” and with no major loss of ice from the polar citadels of Greenland and Antarctica, sea level rise will go up at least another foot by 2099. Their high-end projection is possibly an additional four feet of sea level rise by the end of this century. The melting polar ice, the rising water, and the associated rising temperatures will mean not only a loss of physical land in Kiribati, but also continued damage to the coral reefs that encircle the atolls, upon which so much of their sustenance and economy depends. Before the waves completely submerge the sand and soil, it’s more likely the islands will first become uninhabitable for humans because of a lack of freshwater.29

In 2017, referencing the famous line from Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” the World Bank published an article titled, “Water, Water, Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Drink: Adapting to Life in Climate-Change-Hit Kiribati.” The author explained that this island nation is one of the most vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change. The shallow water sources are already at risk of sewage contamination. The citizens of Kiribati will almost certainly, in our children’s lifetimes, represent one of the first, if not the first, entire nations to be without a claim to land. The people of Kiribati will lose their physical home entirely, with no legal claim to sovereignty on any terra firma. For the first time in recorded human history, a people, an entire culture, will be a stateless republic of climate refugees: of Ishmaels.30

The former president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, supported the establishment of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area for conservation measures. Evidence from other reserves around the world suggests that the ocean ecosystem both inside and outside the reserve will improve enormously and quickly. President Tong saw an opportunity to elevate awareness of his country on the world stage and to increase revenue from fishing rights that will likely become more valuable just outside the reserve boundaries. In addition, Tong allocated a large portion of his nation’s budget to purchase land in Fiji to be reserved for future emigration. “Migration with dignity” were his rallying words. He led a variety of initiatives, such as planting mangroves around their coasts and creating economic and educational incentives for young I-Kiribati to establish roots in countries abroad. Tong wrote: “Yet the people of Kiribati recognize that they are still stewards of the ocean that now threatens their way of life.”31

This essential idea would be foreign to Melville or Ahab or Ishmael or Noah: that the ocean in all its fury and force would need or welcome human stewardship.

During our voyage we learned what we assumed was excellent news: that the president of Fiji had declared officially that his nation would welcome those from Kiribati. One of our students aboard was Kareati Waysang, a citizen of Kiribati who was studying biology in New Zealand. “The Fijians look down on us,” she explained. She had visited Fiji several times. If in a restaurant Fijians learn she is from Kiribati they serve her differently. The international attention that Kiribati has received as a face of climate change, as victims, has turned out to be a mixed blessing. “I don’t want to go live in Fiji,” Waysang told me.32

Up at the masthead, I began to think of Ishmael in Moby-Dick as a climate refugee, of which there are now tens of millions of people on Earth. In the Bible, Ishmael is an orphan, an unwanted castaway, who goes on to found a new religion. Groups of people from Louisiana to Papua New Guinea have already been permanently relocated because of sea level rise.33

During our voyage to the equatorial Pacific, as during every long trip at sea, seabirds were the most visible fauna. We observed and counted boobies, tropic birds, and terns. It was the frigatebirds, however, which were by far the most dynamic fauna that we saw consistently throughout the trip. Even over Pago Pago harbor in American Samoa, frigatebirds soared over the water and up over the volcanic peaks. Sometimes near the islands frigatebirds swooped threateningly low and close, while other times when I was aloft I saw them in the distance at truly stunning heights, mere specks flying higher than I’d ever seen any bird, floating up at elevations, it appeared, far into the clouds. While at anchor off Nikumaroro we saw one frigatebird swoop down on a sooty tern (Sterna fuscata), stealing its fish midair. When I was aloft at the masthead one morning near Enderbury Island, a frigatebird swooped down and pecked at the radio antennae at the tip of our foremast, only an arm’s length away from me. I could’ve grabbed him if I had the courage—and a helmet.

The nation of Kiribati declared independence from British rule in 1979. They designed a flag that consists of a blue sea, a stylized yellow island on a red sky, and a bird, which is meant to be a frigatebird. According to I-Kiribati historians it is “a symbol of our old people and our dance patterns” that in legend, like the whalers’ albatross, carries messages from island to island.34

In 1978 an I-Kiribati poet wrote “The Song of the Frigatebird,” verse that was eerily prophetic. The song is about a mother frigatebird who flies away to find food for her young. When she returns, her island is underwater. It translates to:

I am searching for my home

I call you by name—Kiribati

Where are you?

Hear my call—hear my song

I have no one to help me

I have been alone for so long

I have no one to help me

I have been alone for so long

Rise up—you, the centre of the world

Rise up from the depths of the sea

So, you may be seen from afar

Rise up! Rise up!35

Melville never knew or imagined any of this—the first concerns of the global effects of atmospheric carbon were not raised until the 1890s, and sea level rise as a result of global warming wasn’t in the public sphere until the 1960s.36 Yet this song is inseparable for me now when I read Moby-Dick. The sky-hawk goes down, drowns, with Tashtego and the Pequod. Then another frigatebird hovers, leaving Ishmael in peace to float alone on the surface.

IN CONCLUSION, OR THE IMMORTAL SEA—THE SAME AS AHAB’S WITH A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY FLIP SIDE

After Tashtego and the frigatebird sink and drown, Ishmael ends the final chapter: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” An additional twenty-first-century moral of Moby-Dick, along with the proto-environmentalism, proto-Darwinism, and the image of Ishmael as a climate refugee, seems to be that no matter the rage and folly of humankind, it will be nature, the ocean, that will look after its own residents. Nature will restore itself to an unspoiled state. The American nineteenth-century sea, harkening back to that of Noah, is immortal and indifferent to man’s small, temporary endeavors.37

A century after Moby-Dick, in her first book about the ocean, Rachel Carson wrote of the ecological lives of ocean animals by way of marine and planetary rhythms rather than human linear storytelling. She ends Under the Sea-Wind with the same final message as Moby-Dick: “For once more the mountains would be worn away by the endless erosion of water and carried in silt to the sea, and once more all the coast would be water again, and the places of its cities and towns would belong to the sea.” Carson, even in 1941, was only just beginning to imagine a world where the ocean would need human stewardship, or at least some self-management.38

Today, even though we recognize all of the damage that Homo sapiens has inflicted on the sea, we still know and understand that the ocean is bigger and longer-lived than us, if not as a collection of individual animals and plants, then certainly as a body of water and as our planet’s most dominant ecosystem. The sea is still rolling into the land, whether slowly by sea level rise or catastrophically with tsunami, hurricanes, and typhoons. We live now with a profound paradoxical relationship with the ocean. On one side of the ship, the sea is immortal and overwhelming and sharkish, while on the other side, we feel we must care for the sea and its inhabitants, which are vulnerable and fragile.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy, the most powerful hurricane on record to hit the American northeast, flooded New York City, entirely submerging the docks and streets where Ishmael roamed in the opening scenes of Moby-Dick. During Sandy, cars floated down Wall Street. Up to six feet of water surrounded the site on Pearl Street where Melville was born. Reasonable projections for 2099 have lower Manhattan as its own separate little island during major storm events.39

Thankfully only a few of us are Ahab. But most of us are Ishmaels or Starbucks or Stubbs or Flasks or Pips in our complicity or fear or powerlessness to take individual or collective action aboard our human ark. Most of us are unable to inspire or organize or even participate in the type of social mutiny that might cease our Western societies’ desire to hurl harpoon after harpoon after harpoon after harpoon, putting at risk and even killing our future human generations. I’m no better. We’ve now got solar panels and an electric car, but I still fly all over the place and the computer on which I type this is loaded with mined metals and plastics from all over the world, not to mention my plastic pen, and my coffee—albeit fair-trade organic and in a ceramic mug—is still flown from another hemisphere. I try to eat vegetarian, but I do love a tuna-fish sandwich, and on and on and on with a carking eco-guilt that makes a person just want to go out to sea and get away from it all.

Which brings me back to standing up at the masthead at the top of the foremast of the Robert C. Seamans. I was about as far away on this blue Earth as I possibly could be from my home in Mystic, Connecticut, from those hoops aloft of the last American wooden whaleship, which is still tied up to the dock there.

What I’ve aimed to learn in this natural history is how today we might read Moby-Dick to reveal how our American perceptions of the ocean have changed—and how they have not. From experience and from his research, Melville knew a great deal about the marine sciences. Tens of thousands of nineteenth-century American whalemen, including young Melville, had a hunter’s intimate knowledge of the ocean. Few people even approach this knowledge today, beyond some fishermen, like Linda Greenlaw, or whalewatch captains, like J. J. Rasler, or the rare scientists like Hal Whitehead or Marta Guerra who are able to spend day after day out on the water—even though those two have never actually placed their palm on a living whale. We may now read in Moby-Dick a watery reflection of our American society, living in the slow-motion crisis of climate change. Ishmael floats alone, rescued, and then, like the Ancient Mariner, compels us to sit us down and listen to his story. If we can bless the sperm whale and appreciate its honest wonders—or revel in the ecological role of the right whale, the cormorant, the albatross, the swordfish, the copepod, the giant squid, the cyamid, the barnacle, the shark, the coral, the storm petrel, the sea lion, the paper nautilus, and the frigatebird—if we could spend more patient time in awe of all this, might we be just a little better off?

Melville ended Moby-Dick with a nod to Noah, dating his age of the Earth based on the Bible. He knew enough geology, however, to know that the Earth was at least millions of years old. Melville wrote his masterwork on the ocean a full century before radiocarbon dating, before the understanding of plate tectonics, and before Tharpe and Heezen’s map of the global ocean bottom. Melville wrote Moby-Dick a century before the detonation of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the development of commercial underwater color photography, both of which revealed in very different ways just how capable we are of eradicating our own species as well as doing immense, irreversible harm to other extraordinary life on the planet. Melville wrote Moby-Dick a century and a quarter before December 7, 1972, when astronauts from Apollo 17 sent down photographs of the Earth from space, an image now known as the “Blue Marble,” a photograph that had a profound impact on how we see our world as one dominated by saltwater. This inspired the cartoon on the Earth Day T-shirt that I wore as a child in the 1970s.

Yet even with all these social, technological, and cultural shifts in our perception of the watery natural world, Herman Melville’s understanding of the ocean in Moby-Dick is, as Ahab puts it standing aloft looking on the waters of the equatorial Pacific: “the same to Noah as to me.” Despite our intellectual understanding of our significant negative impacts on the sea and all our new knowledge and access to its ecology, physical characteristics, and weather, we still emotionally, existentially—when we stand on the beach, on a dock, or on the deck of a ship—fear the ocean as immortal, all-powerful, and indifferent to our petty human endeavors. Even when we see that plastic coffin of a cooler float by, we know the ocean will roll on just as it will roll long after the ecological reign of our species, post-Anthropocene. I try to find a comfort in that—as does Ishmael.