Jonathan Lamb
The diseases of maritime scurvy and nostalgia were growing stronger as journeys by ship became more extensive in pursuit of discoveries, colonies, slave markets, and whales. Such journeys entailed on those involved an absence from home and the land that was equally intolerable to their bodies and their minds. Although scurvy had been considered a purely somatic phenomenon triggered by a lack of fresh food, while nostalgia was supposed to be a temperamental disorder owing to the loss of familiar domestic scenes, the etiology of both diseases lay in the want of what was native and familiar. More than this, their symptoms often exhibited remarkable similarities, especially in the dream lives and hallucinations of the victims, such as seeing green fields in the sea, dreaming vividly of fresh food, and weeping convulsively when these hallucinations failed to manifest as realities. Even the physical effects of terminal scurvy and nostalgia were alike, exhibiting clotted or breached blood vessels in the heart and brain. In the work of physicians such as William Falconer and Thomas Trotter, it had become clear that psychological symptoms associated with starvation could equally well be understood as arising from nostalgia as from scurvy, while the physical effects of self-starvation, common in cases of nostalgia, were frequently recognized as typical of scurvy. Trotter invented the hybrid genus of “scorbutic nostalgia” to account for this overlap.1
For the purposes of this essay the question is where one positions the cause in relation to its effect when talking of the obsessions of those dying for want of a certain kind of aliment and those refusing to eat because they are consumed by fantasies of home. As the narrator of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub points out in his “Digression on Madness,” the journey taken up and down the spinal column by the animal spirits of the mad begins with a deficit, then blossoms into a bright idea that, if not gratified by a suitable reality, ends up as an evacuation of the body (scorbutic sores) or mind (hopeless tears). Let us say that in Moby-Dick there is a scale of appetites, imaginative and physical, represented by Ahab and his two mates, Starbuck and Stubb. Stubb doesn’t think much beyond killing whales and eating them; Starbuck kills them for the money they will bring him and his family, eats sparingly of salt meat, and centers all his hopes on getting home. But Ahab is quite different. He eats nothing that would keep scurvy at bay and, while sufficiently familiar with nostalgia to impersonate it, no longer indulges it. He is consumed by, or consumes, a single idea and an exclusive passion—namely, to kill the whale that wounded him. Melville takes a Cartesian interest in this phenomenon. A common-or-garden empiricist such as Ishmael might hesitantly observe, “I think I see a whale”; Ahab knows without a shadow of doubt that when he thinks he sees Moby Dick, every last shred of empirical evidence yields to the dominion of thought and being. In this conviction he and Descartes are at one, for the latter declares, “It cannot be that when I see, or (for I no longer take account of the distinction) when I think I see, that I myself who think am nought.”2 The transfer of such certainty to their skipper’s singular notion about whaling and the Faustian rhetoric that conveys his sense of purpose and his outrage at anything that might obstruct it impress Ishmael and his author, and both experiment from time to time in vaulting one bright idea over another to see what happens, an exercise Melville names “Descartian vortices.”3 Ahab’s superbia (pride) is no longer in debt to a symptom or a cause for its explanation; it is self-engendered and free of any anchor in the flesh or imagination. It frames a constancy that Melville was later willing to praise as heroic. Tracing the three dreams responsible for Descartes’s daring hypothesis of supersensibility in the Meditations on First Philosophy, Ian Hacking concludes, “If the coherent life is the life of reason, then dreams are anti-reason. But suppose reason got there by anti-reason?”4 Why Melville should have jettisoned a similar query between the writing of Moby-Dick and the composition of his 1866 Battle-Pieces poem “On a Natural Monument in a Field of Georgia,” about the heroes of Andersonville who are saluted for not succumbing to nostalgia, I cannot say; except that in Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War fiction there is a similar tendency to find pointless daring and nihilist courage admirable.
I first heard Melville’s Andersonville poem recited by Jonathan Schroeder in a workshop on the cultural history of the sea, and it struck me as strangely indifferent to the plight of scorbutic and homesick soldiers given Melville’s own experience of starvation and longing for the land while serving on whale ships.5 It occurred to me that he was impersonating a common reaction to scurvy and nostalgia as unheroic malingering and failure of nerve, whereas the heroism he praises belongs to the strength of mind that greets desolation without shrinking. The character in his own fiction that fifteen years before had personified such a triumph of the mind over bodily frailty was Captain Ahab, but the reader of Moby-Dick is left in no doubt that Ahab is mad. Yet the psychological subtlety of someone who boasts of the poverty of his diet and his homeless condition while indulging an obsession that arguably is the child of just such lonely fare—this fascinated Melville, tempting him to explore how far the will might maintain the illusion of authority over diseases of which it is itself the product. He sported with various alternatives to frenetic self-control: Bulkington’s incommunicable refusal of the comforts of the “lee-shore”; Starbuck’s imperturbable acknowledgment of the danger of his trade; the possibility of pacts with diabolical agents. But in the end he found the paradox of Ahab’s proclaimed self-subsistence irresistible because it exhibited so dramatically a fullness based on emptiness, a homecoming as oceanic loneliness, a heroic purpose knit to a broken body, and a conceptual purity fueled by rage. Like his ship or a hibernating bear, Ahab requires nothing more to subsist than what he already contains. As opposed to such strength of being, the needy starvelings among the Pequod’s crew eat the flesh of their prey and survive by incorporating what they don’t already possess.
In this fashion Melville arranged around the whaling industry his own version of the opposition between rival modes of perception and cognition. Experimental knowledge garnered ideas from experience—the scientific experiment providing the model of such inquisition—gradually expanding the epistemic range of the mind. The radical skepticism of the Cartesian school believed such ideas to be unreliable and resorted to sheer thought as the source of truth. Although Ahab proclaims that he does nothing but feel, the truth is that he disdains all sensory inputs and instead knows himself to be Ahab because he thinks. What he doesn’t know is that his thinking faculty, or reason, is the ticket-of-leave captive of his frenzy. So he exemplifies, but does not understand, the reverse symmetry discovered by Hobbes in the actions of the waking and dreaming self: “In summe, our Dreams are the reverse of our waking Imaginations; The motion when we are awake, beginning at one end; and when we Dream, at another.”6 One end consists in the impressions made by matter on the sense organs (as in cases of scurvy); the other is formed by the image sent from the brain to the body (as in cases of nostalgia). Neither Thomas Trotter nor William Falconer was fully alert to the reciprocal cycle of the process of perception, the one favoring a bodily cause and the other a temperamental one, but they were aware that the cycle was considerably intensified by deficits of what was desired, whether by the mind or the body, and that in the absence of that desideratum a fatal obsession would lodge in the imagination of the victim. Ahab has been assaulted by a material impression his mind cannot accommodate, and he can free himself only by annihilating the cause of a humiliation he can scarcely acknowledge.
During their last critical conversation Ahab tells Starbuck, “For forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts” (543–44). Earlier he is compared to a hibernating bear, sucking its paws and living off its own fat, so little does he take in of outward sustenance (153). Starbuck’s meals are not much better, for despite the extraordinary ceremony with which the three mates are summoned to Ahab’s table, they are served the same salt junk every day; yet the routine seems inseparable from Starbuck’s chronometric self-sufficiency, which Ishmael calls “the condensation of the man.” With a soul like welded iron and flesh as hard as biscuit, his courage too is compared to “the staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread . . . not to be foolishly wasted” (116).
In this respect the captain and the mate, appearing to thrive with few calories and no vitamins at all, resemble their own ship. Ishmael explains the peculiar self-sufficiency of a whaler, burdened not by cargo or ballast but by provisions—prime Nantucket water, salt meat, and biscuit—and by vast amounts of replacement gear, “spare everythings,” more than proportionate to the destruction encountered in pursuit of whales (96). In fact so much have whale ships in store they are able to replace themselves and succor others. “In the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters” (110). This bold untruth is told in spite of the fact that the first whale ship to try catching whales off the Australian coast was a converted convict transport, the Britannia, whose captain, Thomas Melville, wrote a journal of his experiences in the Southern Ocean, with an addendum called “Medical Hints on the Scurvy.” The disease was rife in the new colony for the same reason it plagued Andersonville and whale ships—namely, a lack of fresh food, especially fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish.7
Elizabethan sea dogs such as Richard Hawkins and James Lancaster knew very well that something more than biscuit and salt beef was necessary if crews on long voyages were not to sicken and die.8 For two hundred years prior to James Cook’s explorations, fresh oranges, limes, and lemons were known to be vital additions to salt meat, pulse, flour, and fat if scurvy was to be prevented and, if it got a footing, as cures. Rougher greens, such as scurvy grass, sea-celery, samphire, dandelion, and sorrel did the same job and were eagerly sought along shorelines. But finding these supplements on voyages of discovery, where shoals and corals were dangerous, winds fickle, the terrain ill supplied with fresh water, and plants and indigenes generally hostile, was difficult. On a whale ship the privations were worse because, as Melville makes plain in Typee and Omoo, skippers were reluctant to land for fear of desertion, especially if the vessel was light in oil and the share of the profit too small to induce the crew to remain in quarters where the food was bad and the discipline harsh. Besides, whalemen were on a cruise, not on a trajectory of discovery. “Does Ahab touch no land?” asks Ishmael, and the answer is no. Prior to the Pequod’s foundering, no landfall is made. The green palmy cliffs of Java Head may loom on the starboard bow, and the smell of cinnamon charm the sailors’ senses, but there is no stopping. A whale ship, says Ishmael, can be three years afloat without sighting a “grain of soil” (381–82).
Ishmael has a very poor opinion of fasting, explaining to Queequeg the folly of it: “All thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. . . . Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling” (85). He finds absurd the elaborate ritual of the captain and his three mates going to dinner when it consists of nothing but the same two items day after day. On the Julia in Omoo the beef is fibrous, tough, and tasteless, and the biscuit like gunflints, honeycombed by weevils looking vainly for something to eat.9 Against that sort of scantiness Ishmael sets his idea of plenty, taken from the lading bills of Dutch whaling vessels: Friesland pork, Texel and Leyden cheeses, stock fish, soft bread, and 10,800 barrels of beer. So when he ends his meditation on these rich foods with the moral “When cruising in an empty ship . . . get a good dinner out of it, at least,” it would seem that an empty ship is such a one as the Julia, and a full one is freighted on the model of a Dutch whaler (447). How a hungry sailor is to satisfy himself in one or avoid scurvy by heavy eating on the other is never made clear by Ishmael, but it is by Tommo in Typee, who gives a fuller description of an empty ship: “Six months out of sight of land . . . weeks ago our fresh provisions were all exhausted. There is not a sweet potato left; not a single yam . . . the delicious oranges which hung suspended from our tops and stays—they are gone! . . . There is nothing left but salt-horse and sea biscuit.”10 Not until they make a landfall like the one in Omoo will oranges be available and bellies be properly full: “When we went in among the trees, the sumptuousness of the orchard was unlike anything I had ever seen . . . in a marvelously short time, nothing was left of the oranges . . . but the rinds” (Omoo, 140–41). But for his part Ishmael appears indifferent to the necessity of the antiscorbutic supplies taken on Yankee whalers, such as dried apples and peaches, apples barreled up with cider, onions pickled and fresh, potatoes, yams, and pumpkins.11 Nor is there any mention of the preventives by then common on British vessels, such as concentrated lime or lemon juice, fermented cabbage, condensed malt, portable soup, and spruce beer. Ishmael merely makes a joke about the weevils as the only fresh food on offer (445). Yet he knows what an antiscorbutic is.
It is evident from Omoo that Melville was well aware that protein, carbohydrate, and fat do not keep scurvy at bay, even on a Dutch argosy, and his frequent coy references to “sickness” are eventually specified as scurvy. He even describes one of its more remarkable symptoms—namely, the preternatural receptivity of the cranial nerves, especially those governing sight, taste, and smell. He tells of his ship being becalmed amid the aroma of flowering shrubs on a nearby island and of its effect: “Upon inhaling it, one of the sick who had recently shown symptoms of scurvy, cried out in pain, and was carried below.” He has enough experience of the affliction to add, “This is no unusual effect in such cases” (Omoo, 64). But for some reason it suits his purposes in Moby-Dick to sink this knowledge in favor of a dramatic opposition between the full ship and the empty ship: between the kind of self-sufficiency the whale ship appears ideally to exhibit and the loss that the vessel Rachel is vainly seeking to restore or the hollow casks a French crew is hopelessly trying to fill with oil extracted from a blasted whale.
There is an evident analogy between the self-replenishing ship and Ahab. Similarly Starbuck, so condensed he needs no addition, is likened to John Harrison’s timekeepers, whose moving parts were made of self-oiling lignum vitae and were practically friction free (115).12 The analogy even extends to Ishmael when the imagined feast of fine Dutch provender flatters his appetite and fills his brain with Platonic ideas. Here are three different examples of remaining entire or full in spite of the depleting pressures of life at sea, unusually acute in the whale fishery. But like the stoical repudiation of nostalgia in Andersonville, the self-sufficiency proposed by the analogy of full ships and full men, proof against all circumstances of danger, pain, and want, is no more plausible than the expectation that the human body can survive a serious deficit of vitamin C for longer than three months. There is a deficiency in all machines and all human bodies, whether it is called friction, scurvy, or sin, that cannot be catered for either by the machine or by the organism, since the one cannot perpetually lubricate itself, nor can the other synthesize ascorbate. They need help from outside. Ahab, for instance, is apparently not all Ahab: part of him, and part of the upper works of his ship, is made of whale ivory. Bedizened with the same material, the Pequod’s incorporation of alien substance may be merely ornamental or (more likely) emblematic of its quest for prey, but whalebone is exclusively prosthetic with regard to the captain’s missing leg.
Fullness is never what it seems. Take the plenitude of the ship first. We are told it is full of replacements for itself, but its bulwarks, pins, sheaves, and tiller are all of whalebone, an exotic bricolage, not standard gear. Ishmael conceives of them as cannibal trophies taken from the slaughtered body of its enemy for tools and decoration, along with the flesh for food. But at the outset, when at its fullest in terms of equipment and refreshment, the Pequod is empty of the oil slaughtered whales are to provide; nor, when oil comes aboard, is the ship to digest it, for it will be stowed in barrels. This is how a ship, no matter how well stored with spares, gets full. Oil is not its fuel but its cargo, eventually to be unloaded at the New Bedford market, where it will be metamorphosed into a commodity and then into money. This is the referent of Starbuck’s combination of skill and stoicism, the commercial business of whaling pursued with maximum efficiency in order to finance marriage and the raising of children. Everything that is hard and condensed about him at sea has this domestic purpose at its heart, and the cash nexus is the means of achieving it. There is no other reason for his tacking away from the Bulkingtonian lee shore.
The case is far different with Ahab, who knows well enough that the business of whaling has shattered him physically. The agony of his trip home, lashed to a hammock and maddened by pain and fever, has pointed to the foundation for his being more Platonic than anything quadrants and artificial legs can supply. As adjuncts to his will, he replaces the images housed in his imagination and released into his nightmares with a philosophy of annihilation—not just of a whale but of the sensible world it briefly thrust him into. Were he to remain in the empirical world of solid objects and sense impressions, the forces that contradict his will—gravitation that whirls him round and round or the winds that whip about him, named by Ishmael “Descartian vortices” (159)—would predominate. So all knowledge arriving through his five senses, especially his eye, is to be understood as delusive, with a source as suspect as the malign genie hypothesized by Descartes. This ocean of doubt prompts Ahab to reduce sensible experience to the same bare level of insignificance that Descartes achieves in the first of his Meditations. “All visible objects,” he tells Starbuck, “are but as pasteboard masks. . . . If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. . . . That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate. . . . I will wreak that hate upon him” (164). His stoicism is all in service to that one idea. “I turn my body from the sun,” declares Ahab; likewise he keeps his mouth from dainty morsels and his body from the marital bed (571). By not faltering in the face of a vision so destitute of comfort and instead implacably pursuing the object that has appeared at once to obstruct and represent it, Ahab acquires the method of knowing he is the nondeluded thinking thing called Ahab, not full of good food but replete with “his own proper and inaccessible being” (560). In his dream of being kicked by his captain, Stubb finds his commander turning from flesh into geometry—a pyramid, an indestructible demonstration of mathematical truth in three dimensions, scornful of empirical facts and meat-eating second mates.
For his part Ishmael is convinced that what a person eats, or fails to eat, will jointly affect the body and the brain and that this process is a seesaw of fullness and emptiness in which the quality as well as the quantity of the food will determine the health and temperament of anyone who eats it. For all his reticence about scurvy, he is well aware of the necessity for fresh food. Whale meat is eagerly consumed on the Pequod by Stubb and highly valued by Ishmael: whale steaks from the taper-end of the tail, blubber fritters, “plum pudding” (blubber with raisins of whale flesh embedded in it, “hard to keep yourself from eating it” [416–17]), right-whale tongue, sperm-whale brains, pickled fin tips, and soused fluke ends (298–300). These edible portions of the whale are the only antiscorbutic substance consumed on board and the only possible reason why a ship more than a year out at sea without touching land has not been immobilized by scurvy, beriberi, and pellagra. The only repugnance a sailor might feel for such a feast is the vastness of the carcass that will provide it (“a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long” [298]) and the opulence of its essential substance, spermaceti being “far too rich to supply a substitute for butter” (299). In the Odyssey, a poem that tours most of the symptoms of scurvy as well as the best methods of avoiding it, the hero offers a nostrum for those, like Ahab, who let their brains starve for want of meat:
Through greatest griefe the belly must have ease
Worse than an envious belly nothing is
. . . When most with cause I grieve,
It bids me still, “Eate, man, drinke, and live”;
And this makes all forgot. What ever ill
I ever beare, it ever bids me fill.13
Ishmael wants to know where cannibalism fits into these alternative economies of self-sufficiency and exotic supplements, whether the Pequod is like the hibernating bear, consuming itself, or an orca in disguise, intent on eating its own kind.14 For all their cannibal additions of whalebone, neither the ship nor its captain feed on their quarry. The jokes about cannibalism, mostly having thrived in the vicinity of Queequeg, become more oblique when Ishmael mentions the taboo against eating “a newly murdered thing of the sea,” only to exclaim, “Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal?” (300). He seems to allude both to the dreadful resource of castaway sailors, adopted by Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex, and his companions after their ship was sunk by a whale, and to the Maori taste for human flesh, to which the crew of the Adventure’s cutter fell victim during Cook’s second voyage.15 Unless the oil spilled on the decks near the try-pots counts as a meal for the Pequod, those who don’t eat whale meat are autophages, a category invented by Henry Fielding while on a voyage to Lisbon. It is the disease of “men that eat themselves,” by which he means not just the self-denial of misers, although that is what he begins by describing, but more important a short-circuit in the system of physio-psychological exchange that ought smoothly to flow from hunger to satiety and then from digestion to serenity. The systole of an ill, as Odysseus explains, is counteracted by the diastole of a fill. But when this reciprocal equilibrium is broken, “the passions of men,” Fielding says, “are capable of swallowing food as well as their appetites. . . . The former, in feeding resemble the state of those animals who chew the cud; and therefore, such men, in some sense, may be said to prey on themselves.”16
By what stretch of imagination can an enthusiasm for whale flesh be taboo? At first Ishmael appears to mean that it is a deficiency in the punctilio of the hunt, a lack of respect for the body of the creature on which one dines. Stubb is guilty of this sort of solecism. Just for fun he lanced the ulcer beneath the flipper of a crippled old whale, agonizing it, and now he eats his steak by the light of a whale-oil taper. It is a dismal joke, for it anticipates those scenes at trying out when whales are forced into posthumous autophagy by having their blubber feed the fire that boils their oil. It is the cetacean equivalent of the so-called Roman candles composed of the bodies of Christian martyrs wrapped in tar vests, mentioned by Juvenal in his third satire, whose melting fat fed the flames that were burning them up. So there is something of totemism in Ishmael’s idea of cannibalism, when one’s prey is also one’s god, and eating it constitutes a sacrament. Hobbes calls Leviathan the “Mortall God”; Ishmael on the other hand claims the whale is immortal in its species (462).17
What about the fullness of the whale? It isn’t possible to see sperm whales eating because they take their prey at a depth where light cannot reach, but their diet is known to consist mostly of squid, cephalopods ranging in weight from one hundred grams to four hundred kilograms, interspersed with a fair amount of fish, the odd seagoing mammal, and an occasional human.18 But nearer the surface they exhibit most splendidly the responsiveness of their organs, skin, and shape to the two elements they live in. The large spermaceti bulge of the nose, especially protuberant in males, is variously supposed, at the present state of knowledge, to act as a ram, a variable buoyancy device, and a source of powerfully focused sonar for locating squid at depth—a nose for seeing in the dark (Whitehead, 317–20; Hoare, 173). John Hunter believed the oil inside whales sustains the necessary equilibrium between inside and outside, the tension of the animal’s frame and the density of the water it moves through, while the shape itself is more uniform and regular than a terrestrial animal of the same size because “water is always the same” (Hunter, 4: 339, 337). This fluid correspondence between the inner and outer aspects of the whale is characteristic of every movement it makes. Its oil impregnates the surrounding sea; the water mingles with the air inside its lungs and then emerges as the vaporous spout. In goes the flesh of giant squid, digested into the wonderful crystalline structure of sperm oil, and out comes the odoriferous substance called ambergris with a scent powerful enough to overcome even the most nauseating stench. All of these metamorphoses demonstrate the flux and reflux of action, repletion, respiration, sensation, evacuation, and intelligence, exemplary of the system of effluvial exchange that Robert Boyle, a leading exponent of empirical science, found so riveting in living bodies.19 Whales no less than humans “ought not to be look’d upon merely as an aggregate of Bones, Flesh, and other consistents, but as a most curious and living Engin, some of whose parts, though nicely fram’d as to be very easily affected by external Agents, are yet capable of having great Operations upon other parts of the Body, they help compose.”20 Nobody is more apt for this job of observation than Ishmael.
Though whales dine in the dark, they sport in the light, saluting the sun with quivering flukes before they dive and in the moment of death turning their heliotropic heads to the sun. As Christopher Smart glorifies the movements of his cat Jeoffrey (“For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion, For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business . . . For he can spraggle upon waggle at word of command”), so Ishmael salutes the five great motions of the whale’s tail: “First, when used as a fin for progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes” (376).21 He is astonished that the sense of touch, responsive to the minutest external stimulus, is confided to the edge of this mighty limb, in the “crescentic borders” of the flukes that exhibit lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the features of any other creature (375). He is amazed that the thick skin of the animal is enclosed by another layer of cuticle so soft that Ishmael compares it with satin, and so fine that Hunter compares it with gold leaf (Hunter, 4: 351n1). When dried it is like isinglass, brittle and transparent, and preserved by Ishmael as his bookmark: “It is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles” (306). No gesture, and no explanation of it, could be more remote from Ahab’s anger with his quadrant than this, or from Stubb’s method of illuminating his meal. Not that these whale-skin spectacles, formed of the finest layer of the very surface Ahab desires so roughly to pierce, offer any access to the kinds of occult truth he is after. They belong to motions and gestures that Ishmael for his part finds utterly fascinating while remaining scarcely expressible and “wholly inexplicable” (378).
What is it that entitles Ishmael to this Mosaic glimpse of the back parts of a totemic god? It stems from the savage simplicity of life at sea into which Queequeg is as naturally and invisibly drawn as his tattoos are into the patterned quilt on the bed at the Spouter-Inn. The crew of a Nantucket whale ship receives “nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin and comforting bosom” (73). Each is “wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with a mighty birth” (181). “Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals” (270). This makes them prone to superstition, but the transactions between the senses and the imagination are as unfettered as Queequeg’s relations with Yojo, his god. The whalebone used to prop up Ahab, and to steady him for the fatal blow he will deliver to the embodiment of all that has thwarted him, is used by these savages to make little icons and idols, “anything you please, in the way of a mariner’s fancy” (270). In the cycle that runs from the fresh impression of an object upon the senses, and thence to the storehouse of the fancy or imagination, then back again to Hobbes’s visible creature of the fiction of the mind, there is no hindrance to its pace and rhythm. The motion and its outcome are expressive of the smooth running of what Boyle calls the “hydraulo-pneumatical engine” of the embodied mind (Free Enquiry, 127).
In cases of scurvy this rhythm is compromised by the deficit of the biochemical that supplies the cells of the body with collagen and clears its nervous system of oxidized material that otherwise would inhibit the action of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. The effects of scurvy on the body were well known to be consumptive. James Lind said that the disease produced corrosives so fierce that “like a menstruum, they work upon and dissolve the cellular structure of the body.”22 Its impact on the nerves was less well understood. Thomas Willis and Walter Charleton, however, produced a prophetic hypothesis of a substance similar to latex or albumen that entered the body on the vehicle of fresh food. Without it the fluid of the nerves and the brain would turn cloudy and feculent, impeding the animal spirits and leading to spasms of nervous hyperactivity followed by extreme lassitude. Characterizing these explosive outbursts in the early stages of the disease were images of what was most desired: food, water, green leaves. Later these images would become strange and disturbing, “idols” Willis called them, precipitating in the patient “a falling down of the whole soul.”23
There were three distinct loci of scorbutic fantasy: the table, home, and the mirage of a blue ocean transformed to green pasture. The first corresponded to the disorder of bulimia (the name assigned to unappeasable hunger in Scottish physician William Cullen’s nosology), the second to nostalgia (named by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss physician, and applied to scurvy by Trotter after he saw the union of the two diseases on the slave ship Brookes), and the third to calenture, the common name for the febrile illusion of the sea as land. All three are conveniently illustrated in the Odyssey and Moby-Dick. Odysseus watches his crew cramming themselves with lotus while he is coping with a fit of nostalgia, so he urges the frenzied men to remember that home is their destination, “nothing so sweete is as our countries earthe.” But oblivious to such abstract charms, they have to be manhandled back to their ship while they
striv’d, and wept, and would not leave their meate
For heaven it selfe. (Homer, 154 [lines 150–64])
Odysseus experiences the delights of calenture as, tied fast to the mast, he listens in rapture to the sirens’ song and struggles to throw himself into their arbor underneath the waves, fenced by the bones of sailors who have fallen victim to the same beguiling sounds. In Moby-Dick bulimia is implied in the joke about the ninety-foot-long meat pie and spermaceti too rich for the human stomach, modified by the culinary finesse of Ishmael and (to a certain extent) Stubb. Nostalgia has to wait until the very end of the story, when Ahab and Starbuck see home and family reflected in each other’s tear-filled eyes; unless, that is, we count Ahab’s nightmare voyage from the South Seas back to Nantucket, his brain caked with madness, as a case of nostalgia in reverse, the victim being forcibly removed from the only place he wanted to be—what Baudelaire called “la grande maladie de l’horreur du domicile,” colossal and horrifying sickness precipitated by homecoming.24 Ishmael gives two accounts of calenture. The first is a fatal hallucination suffered by the sailor at the masthead who falls into a reverie, “takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature,” loses his footing, and plunges into the mirage, never to rise again (159). The second is a much softer vision of the sea-turned-prairie experienced at the oar of a whale boat. “The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time. . . . This mixes with your most mystic mood, so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate” (492). Ahab pretends to a hallucination of the same kind in the dialogue with his first mate about the allure of home: “The air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay” (545).
These three different images or fancies can each be intensified, either by the arrival, even the bare promise, of what is desired—food, home, the green surface of the earth—or by the continued absence of it. Melville gives a fine description of the voluptuous delight attending the materialization of dream food in his picture of the Julia’s crew gorging on fruit in the orange grove. These moments of pure sapid recognition, where an image is fully answered by a sensation, Charleton calls “corroboration.”25 Samuel Coleridge’s parched Ancient Mariner wakes from a dream of drinking to find his thirst quenched by the rain falling on his bare skin:
Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.
Ishmael calls it interpenetration.
But there is a great deal of mental as well as physical torment endured when the promise is not fulfilled, as so often it wasn’t when sights and smells from the shore were not reachable. In this situation, the British naval officer John Byron reported, “Reason cannot preserve mankind from the power which fancy is perpetually exerting to aggravate the calamities of life.”26 This is when maritime heroes weep without restraint. If privation goes on long enough, with the fancy or imagination vainly working overtime to prompt the will to obtain what the body needs to survive, the result is the fixation Willis understands as the falling down of the soul; Charleton, as the vehement embrace of the favorite image; and Hofer, as a lesion of the mind.27 It is important to note that at this stage, patients, while eager to attract the sympathy of others, are exclusively absorbed in their own imaginings and feelings, “not only forget[ting] all . . . old attachments, but shew[ing] utmost signs of dislike to those who had been most dear.”28 The same egoism has consumed Ahab: when he declares he “only feels, feels, feels” (563), it is not for others he feels. The sympathy he extends to Starbuck can only be pretense. Even while the tear is in his eye, he knows he will not be turning the boat for home. He triumphs in the shape of a solitary blasted apple tree whose useless fruit has fallen to earth; Starbuck’s face meanwhile acquires the “dark, atrabiliary look” of terminal scorbutic nostalgia.29
Several times Ishmael traces the growth of Ahab’s fixation and arrives at a conclusion similar to those of students of nostalgia and scurvy alike—namely, that the brain is enslaved by an image or idol—what Ishmael calls “the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea” (186). Ahab’s reason has been made the vassal of an unappeased imagination, “his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it” (185). It is a sort of madness John Locke identifies in those whose idol is faithfully served by the captured reason: the man turned to glass is very careful to avoid being shattered; the lunatic who fancies himself a monarch expects homage as his due.30 Ahab conceives his quest as a Cartesian assault on doubt. The malign force of the malus spiritus that would not let him stand straight, spun him round, and whipped his hair until he fell into the vertigo of unreason he now understands to be inseparable from all the deluding “low, enjoying powers” of a material world denied his gift of “high perception” (167). Along with Descartes, who invented the minor deity of empirical knowledge whose wiles were only too manifest to someone who was someone because he thought, Ahab could say, “It may be that what I see is not really a whale, it may also be that I do not possess eyes with which to see anything; but it cannot be that when I see, or (for I no longer take account of the distinction) when I think I see, that I myself who think am nought” (Descartes, 69; adjusted). Expecting to destroy the whale, Ahab also expects to dispatch his own fabrication of the demon of empirical doubt because then he will be thinking and knowing that he beholds an absolute distinction between being and nothingness. When Ian Hacking considers the pedigree of such energetic certainty, he raises a question that Ishmael never stops posing: does reason derive its confidence from frenzy?31
We have seen that with Ahab the polarities of nostalgia are reversed and the sequences of scorbutic decline are oddly disarranged. Home is where he cannot be at home: madness begins for him with his delirious rage against the course shaped for Nantucket after he is wounded. So when he and Starbuck peer into one another’s eyes to find two reflecting mirrors of home and family, there can be little doubt that this is a performance of nostalgia on Ahab’s part, a mockery of feeling. He supplies a tear or two for the sake of verisimilitude. The Andean calenture that immediately follows is another example of scorbutic-nostalgic sensation made to operate in the wrong place and in the wrong key, since we can contrast its factitious ornaments with Ishmael’s genuine article experienced in the whaleboat. Ishmael is sensitive to this piracy of scorbutic symptoms, evident not just in Ahab’s performances but also in the behavior of anyone whose imagination has become disorderly. The crowds of people in New York, standing as close as they can get to the sea, all staring at it mesmerized, causes Ishmael to exclaim, “Are the green fields gone? What do they here?” (4). Along the same lines, Bildad, piloting the Pequod from Nantucket into the main channel, sings his calenture psalm: “Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, / Stand dressed in living green” (104), as though they were in front of the ship instead of behind it.
Along with the more Gothic, Promethean, and Faustian gestures available to it, reason that is the vassal of an unreason is no longer afraid of the protean manifestations of empirical evidence, such as Descartes’s sporting with the various colors, textures, degrees of limpidity, and scents of wax at the end of his second Meditation, all of which he commandeers by virtue of thinking he sees, feels, and smells them—that is, certifying each perception with the corroboration of the identical thinking thing (67–70). Ahab knows that his body is affected by scorbutic nostalgia, and he is sufficiently familiar with its symptoms to perform three of them—nostalgia, tears, and calenture—as proof of his mastery, regardless of where they fit into the pattern of the disease. In this respect he is very like the heroes of Andersonville as Melville imagined them, heroes who, in the fatal stages of scurvy and starvation, were still able to resist the sort of total breakdown that would have made them contemptible to their captors and themselves. Both in their case and in Ahab’s, however, such constancy was owing not to the legislation of reason, but to its wreck.
This essay originated in discussions between Jonathan Schroeder and the author concerning the resemblances between maritime scurvy and nostalgia.
1. See Thomas Trotter, Observations on the Scurvy (London: T. Longman, 1792), 45, 145, and William Falconer, A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions on the Disorders of the Body (London: C. Dilly and J. Phillips, 1788), 85.
2. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 69; adjusted. Further citations in the text.
3. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 159. Hereafter cited parenthetically in text.
4. Ian Hacking, “Dreams in Place,” in Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 254.
5. Herman Melville, Battle Pieces: The Civil War Poems of Herman Melville (Edison, N.J.: Castle Books, 2000), 178–79. The event was held at Vanderbilt University in April 2018 and was attended by scholars contributing to a Bloomsbury volume titled A Cultural History of the Sea, vol. 4, Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800), ed. Jonathan Lamb (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17–18.
7. Thomas Melville, “Journal of a Voyage in the Speedy, Whaler,” MLMS Q 36 [FM4/2223], Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia; Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships 1787–1868 (Glasgow: Brown, Son and Ferguson, 1959); Jonathan Lamb, Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 160–75.
8. See Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus; or, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905, 1906), 2: 392–98 and 17: 72–78.
9. Herman Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (London: Constable, 1922), 16. Further citations in the text.
10. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1968), 3.
11. Melville, Typee, 254; Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, personal communication; Richard Henry Dana, Two Years before the Mast (New York: P. F. Collier, 1969), 343; Walter Dickson, “Scurvy in the Mercantile Marine,” Transactions of the Epidemiological Society, June 1866: 12; Thomas Trotter, Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen, 3 vols., 2 ed. (London: Longman, 1804), 2: 165.
12. Jonathan Betts, Harrison (London: National Maritime Museum, 2007), 130.
13. Homer, The Odyssey, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, trans. George Chapman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 125 (7, lines 306–7, 311–14). Further citations in the text.
14. Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 211.
15. A. W. Brian Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 95–145; Owen Chase, Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Corinth, 1963), 86–93; Marshall Sahlins, “Hierarchy and Humanity in Polynesia,” in Transformations of Polynesian Culture, ed. Tony Hooper and Judith Huntsman (Auckland: Polynesian Society, 1985), 195, 215; James Cook, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, 1772–75, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (London: Hakluyt Society, 1961), 745.
16. Henry Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (London: Dent, 1964), 234.
17. Hobbes, Leviathan, 120.
18. Philip Hoare, Leviathan; or, The Whale (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), 154; further citations in the text; John Hunter, “Observations on the Structure and Oeconomy of Whales,” in The Works of John Hunter FRS, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Rees et al., 1837), 4: 362; further citations in the text; Hal Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 44–45; further citations in the text.
19. Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notions of Nature, ed. Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 127. Further citations in the text.
20. Robert Boyle, “Of the Great Efficacy of Effluviums,” in The Works of Robert Boyle, 14 vols., ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2000), 7: 267.
21. Christopher Smart, Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam, ed. William Force Stead (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 154–55.
22. James Lind, A Treatise on the Scurvy (Edinburgh: J. Millar, 1753), 333.
23. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes, trans. S. Pordage (London: Thomas Dring, 1683), 50; Willis, A Tract of the Scurvy, in Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physick, trans. S. Pordage (London: Thomas Dring, 1684), 178.
24. Charles Baudelaire, Journaux intimes, FB editions (CreateSpace Independent Publisher Platform, 2015).
25. Walter Charleton, Natural History of the Passions (London: James Magnes, 1670), 107.
26. John Byron, “Commodore Byron’s Voyage,” in John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages and Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, 3 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773), 1: 93.
27. Willis, Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes, 50; Charleton, Natural History of the Passions, 107; Johannes Hofer, Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia, trans. Carolyn Kiser Anspach, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, no. 2 (1934): 381.
28. Trotter, Medicina Nautica, 3: 362–64.
29. Brian Lavery, ed., Shipboard Life and Organisation 1713–1815, vol. 138, Navy Records Society Publications (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 493.
30. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 161; II, xi, 13.
31. Hacking, “Dreams in Place,” 254; John R. Cole, The Olympian Dreams and Youthful Rebellion of René Descartes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 133–70.