Vengeance on a Dumb Brute, Ahab?

An Environmentalist Reading of "Moby-Dick"

Author(s): DEAN FLOWER
Source: The Hudson Review , SPRING 2013, Vol. 66, No. 1, LITERATURE AND THE
ENVIRONMENT (SPRING 2013), pp. 135-152
Published by: The Hudson Review, Inc

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43488684

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 DEAN FLOWER

Vengeance on a Dumb Brute, Ahab?

An Environmentalist Reading of Moby-Dick
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the
Ancient Manner ( 1 798)

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life

pasturing freely where we never wander.
- Henry David Thoreau, Waiden (1854)

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched

to everything else in the universe.
- John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)

As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical

barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric
on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other
miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking
back in unexpected ways.
- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of

quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of
all humanly ascribed qualities. ... To meet God or Medusa
face to face, even if it means risking everything human in
myself.
- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

Moby-Dick. The best book ever written about nature.

- Annie Dillard in The Nature Reader (1996)

Let's can easily be

begin
seenbeaswith
a fable
seenofColeridge's
modern environmentalism,
as a fable of greatand
modern poem environmentalism, of marine disaster. and It
I think Melville took it that way. For no good reason whatsoever
the Ancient Mariner shoots the Albatross, the bird "hailed in
God's name" and fed by the crew, the bird who has rescued the
ship from being crushed among polar icebergs and guided it to
safety, taking up residence in its rigging. But the bird is killed,
and the ship must now endure a voyage of nightmare - hellish
sun, deadly calms, parching heat, baleful moonlight, ghostly

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136 THE HUDSON REVIEW

spirit-spouts and shadowy submarine pursuits, slimy things

ing on slimy seas - "The very deep did rot" - followed by starva
and death, until the guilty narrator alone is left, haunted b
ghosts of his shipmates, all standing on the masts and spar
accusing him. Luckily, but again for no apparent reason, he
down into the ship's shadow on the water and sees the mag
unexpected beauty of the water snakes. A "spring of love" s
up in him, and he "blesses them unaware." The curse is lifte
a long ordeal of penance ensues, involving a final escape
the ship, "Stunned by a loud and dreadful sound" which "s
the sky and ocean, goes "down like lead." The narrator
himself afloat like a man "seven-days drowned" and is rescu
a harbor Pilot's boat:

Upon the whirl, where sank the ship

The boat spun round and round;
And all was still, save that the hill
Was telling of the sound.

When he ventures to speak, the Pilot shrieks and falls down in a

fit, and the Pilot's boy goes mad. So the Mariner must row the
boat himself, knowing he is seen as the Devil, fearing that
perhaps he is the Devil. He has failed to love "both man and bird
and beast," failed to recognize that he has no greater right to life
than the Albatross, failed to see that its survival has anything to
do with his own, failed to recognize any possibility of a spiritual
connection between them.

It is striking to consider how much Melville drew upon

Coleridge's poem in Moby-Dick. The cabin boy who goes crazy, the
whirling vortex of the sinking vessel with its sole survivor, the
haunted and death-laden ship bearing half-acknowledged guilt
and unrepentant hostility, the vacillations of beauty and terror, or
serenity and nightmare, in the natural world, a sea voyage
constantly verging upon allegory and sublime mystery. When the
Pequod meets the Albatross (ch. 52) the strange ship is "bleached"
and "spectral," as if covered in hoar-frost, and its pallid crew is
"forlorn-looking," unable to speak or respond to speech. The
rust-stained whiteness of the Albatross and its incommunicable

story seem drawn directly from Coleridge's poem. Likewise Pi

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 DEAN FLOWER 137

madness: having drowned and "seen God's foot on the tread

the loom" and having "spoke it," he returns to life unab
resume its discourse, unable to communicate his annihil
vision. In Ahab's apostrophe to the whale's head in "The Sph
(ch. 70), he is certain the creature is incapable of speec
Melville too seems to have thought whales were silent, a
Starbuck, who calls it a "dumb brute." "Speak, thou vast
venerable head [says Ahab] . . . speak, mighty head, and tel
the secret thing that is in thee. ... O head! thou hast
enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham
not one syllable is thine!" The moment occurs at noon, w
"silence reigned over the . . . deserted deck," and the atmosp
seems uncanny: "An intense copper calm, like a universal y
lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measur
leaves upon the sea." The inspiration for this is agai
Coleridge, when the ship is becalmed, without breath or mo
on a silent sea:

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand
No bigger than the Moon.

Whatever Melville adopted from Coleridge, he transformed; but

surely its stimulus was vital. Mightn't it be said that the poem's
deepest moral - not just the Mariner's resistance to loving all
creatures great and small, or his purposeless cruelty in killing the
Albatross, but the arrogance that puts man first and subjects
other creatures to his will - is the same moral carried over and
writ large in Moby-Dick ?
Toward the end of Waiden in the "Spring" chapter, Thoreau
said, "We need to witness our own limits transgressed." The whole
passage leading up to this has been of interest to conservationists
from John Muir and John Burroughs at the turn of nineteenth
century up to the present day. It remains a locus classicus for our
National Parks system and its philosophy, for such organizations
as the Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra
Club, for biologists and poets, for virtually everyone concerned
with the preservation of species and habitat - forests, wetlands,

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138 THE HUDSON REVIEW

shoreline, mountains - against the relentless encroachmen

civilization.

We need the tonic of wildness, - to wade sometimes in marshes

where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming
of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder
and more solitary bowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its
belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to
explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious
and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed
and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have
enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible
vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the
wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud,
and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need
to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely
where we never wander.

Note the progression from wading and listening and savoring the
tonic of wildness to watching its Titanic forces at a safe distance
and feeling "refreshed" when it reminds us of our limits. Thoreau
never encountered anything Titanic on the waters of Waiden
Pond, nor does he register any real transgression. Now consider
Moby-Dick , where Ishmael meditates on the "everlasting terra
incognita" of the sea ("Brit," ch. 58):

. . . though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have
immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of
thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a
moment's consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag
of his science and skill, and however much in a flattering future, that
science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack
of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the
stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continued
repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the
full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.

Here indeed is transgression. In face of the full "awe-fulness" of

the sea, baby man will be insulted and murdered, his puny efforts
pulverized. Ishmael goes on to even darker recognitions: the sea
destroys not just man but its own most powerful creatures:

Like a savage tiger that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so
the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves
them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no
power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle
steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.

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 DEAN FLOWER 139

At the same time that Darwin was propounding his frighte

new theories of natural selection and Tennyson was appalled
visions of Nature "red in tooth and claw," indifferent to the
survival of whole species, Melville saw "the universal cannibalism
of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on
eternal war since the world began." Or again in "The Funeral"
(ch. 69) when the rapacious sea-vultures descend on the carcass
of the whale, joining the hungry sharks from below, Ishmael
exclaims, "Oh, horrible vulturism of earth! from which not the
mightiest whale is free." But Melville's purpose in these grim
formulations is not to lament a godless universe. It is rather to
restore a vision of both the grandeur and the ultimate, overmas-
tering power of Nature - Edmund Burke called it "the Sublime"
in his 1756 essay - an "awefull" power that "aboriginally" belongs
to the sea, a power that will transgress our egotism, our pride, our
excessive faith in science and ourselves. "Who's over me?" says
Ahab, to which the novel responds, the very nature of Nature. We
all, says Ishmael, hover over Descarrian vortices, which are utterly
indifferent to our survival. Mother Nature is not "there for us."
"Heed it well, ye Pantheists!"
Yet the ocean in Moby-Dick - Nature itself - is not just a sublime
and masterless antagonist, either for "baby man" or for its Levia-
thans. In a multitude of ways, the novel suggests, we are enmeshed
in it, along with other creatures, and these vital interdependen-
cies commonly go unrecognized. I want to suggest, in other
words, that Moby-Dick anticipates a modern view of ecology, even
when - especially when - that view of interdependence is violated.
John Muir's oft-quoted remark, "When we try to pick out any-
thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,"
could not be more Melvillian in the sense that any prosaic thing
in the novel - a fast fish or a loose fish, the head of a harpoon,
masthead standing, bailing the tun - might lead us to Plato or
Egyptian pyramids or the French Revolution or to any number of
expanding metaphors and abstractions. As Ishmael puts it, "O
Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your
linked analogies!" John Muir was thinking about his own wilder-
ness experience in the Sierras when he declared that everything
was hitched to everything else. He was among the first modern
ecologists, if by that we mean ecology as a human science, not just
a biological one. The term ecology , from the Greek for "home" +
"study of," was coined in 1866 by Ernst Haekel, but the idea goes

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140 THE HUDSON REVIEW

back through Linnaeus in the eighteenth century to the an

Greeks. Darwin certainly understood it in 1859 when he wro
the famous conclusion to The Origin of Species ,

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed

many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes,
various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling throug
damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed f
so different from each other, and dependent on each other in
complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting aroun

Here is a recent definition of ecology from E. O. Wilson

Future of Life (2002) :

Every species is bound to its community in the unique manne

which it variously consumes, is consumed, competes, and coop
with other species. . . . The ecologist sees the whole as a netwo
energy and material continuously flowing into the community
the surrounding physical environment, and back out, and the
round to create the perpetual ecosystem cycles on which our o
existence depends.

Consider now some images in Melville's novel that a m

ecologist would seize upon. The "universal cannibalism o
sea" would be no more than interdependencies in the f
chain; "the vulturism of the earth" would be merely na
economy - who wishes to do without those notorious cl
crews, the crows, ravens, turkey vultures, and condors? Con
too the way humans are included in Melville's ecology. In
Shark Massacre" (ch. 66), the whaling-spades and mincing k
used to slice away the whale's blubber compete with the sh
requiring an "incessant murdering" of the foe - in their app
for whales. Queequeg says that "de god wat made shark mu
one dam Ingin." But which creature conducts the Indian m
cre, sharks or men? Surely that linked analogy tells us some
crucial.

Consider again, in the same light, the "cannibalism of the sea."

Melville makes much of the ferocity of the sperm whale, particu-
larly its teeth. It was thought in his day to be the largest carnivo-
rous whale species, and we now know its deadliest enemy (apart
from man) is the giant squid, which it preys upon. But is not The
Pequod a carnivore too, with its ancient array of long sharp whale
teeth, used for belaying pins, and its huge jawbone tiller? "A

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 DEAN FLOWER 141

cannibal of a craft [says Ishmael], tricking herself forth in

chased bones of her enemies." "Stubb's Supper" (ch. 64) dram
tizes the analogy again, when the second mate insists that a st
cut from the whale he has just killed, be grilled for him:

Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. M
gling their mumblings with his own mastication, thousand
thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead Leviathan, smac
ingly feasted on its fatness.

Notice who in this ecology is at the top of the food chain. W

men kill men in the throes of a sea fight, Ishmael obser
"sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, l
hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved.
In the pseudo-comic interlude that follows, Stubb mercile
teases Fleece, the old black cook; but Fleece gets the last wor
he limps away: "Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him
whale. I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark
hisself." In the next chapter ("The Whale as a Dish"), Melville is
still thinking about human carnivorosity and our reluctance to
admit it:

Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live

bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that
sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a
cannibal? . . . Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and
enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle
made of? - what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are
eating?

The terms here are striking: the ox is a brother, and the meat eater
is a cannibal We consume the flesh of our brothers, our fellow
creatures. Ishmael is not saying we should stop murdering
whales, not here anyway. In Melville's ecology we are fatefully
bound to other creatures, whom we consume, with whom we
compete, some of whom may consume us - in which case we call
them monsters.

Another image of interest to a modern ecologist might be

traced from the pastoral serenity of Right Whales in ch. 58,
grazing on brit "like morning mowers [who] seethingly advance
their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads," to the
horrific apparition of the giant squid (ch. 59) which arises from
the deep, mistaken at first for Moby-Dick. It is of course disturb-

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142 THE HUDSON REVIEW

ingly huge, faceless, formless, and white. But its one distingui
feature tells us it's no placid vegetarian: "innumerable lon
radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a n
anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object
reach." What if Coleridge's Mariner had seen this instead of
pretty little water snakes? No chance of blessing unaware
giant anacondas. Yet Ishmael calls it an "apparition of life,"
death. And he indicates that we are connected with it, even
bound to it, in the next chapter ("The Line") by means of the
imagery. When the whale is about to be harpooned,
the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting
and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are
involved in its perilous contortions, so that to the timid eye of the
landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers with the deadliest snakes
sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman,
for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and
while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any
unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible
contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings. . . .

And the chapter concludes, "All men live enveloped in whale-

lines." Melville's images may seem extreme, but that is only
because he wishes to convey the disturbing complexity of the life-
lines we are entangled in, "twisting and writhing around [us] in
almost every direction," "intricacies" and "horrible contortions"
upon which our lives depend, complexities we may dismiss or
ignore, but which reach out and grasp us like anacondas never-
theless. Everything is connected. Ecologists today may speak with
equanimity about diversity of species, about the harmony and
balance of healthy ecosystems, but they are just as anxious as
Melville was to warn us of how fatefully these intricacies either
sustain or destroy us.
Modern ecology got its biggest boost from Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring in 1962; after its publication, everybody knew the
term. She saw the "chemical barrage [of pesticides] hurled
against the fabric of life" as warfare doomed to failure. "The
question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life
without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called
civilized." Virtually every other contemporary environmentalist
agrees, both with Carson's warfare image and her apocalypticism.
In Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire (1968) it comes in the form of

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 DEAN FLOWER 143

"industrial tourism," destroying the wilderness with roads, c

and crowds. In Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America (1977)
comes in the form of "agribusiness" - huge machines and co
rations laying waste to the small farms and agrarian commun
that used to sustain us so well. In Leslie Marmon Silko's prop
novel Ceremony (1977) and in Terry Tempest Williams'
feminist narrative Refuge (1991), it comes in the form of nu
weapons designed - unless we do something about them
destroy us all. In organizations like Earth First! and Greenpea
comes in the form of warfare - or at least violent resistance -
against those who, pretending not to, wage war on the earth.
But is warfare against the earth the right metaphor for Moby-
Dick? Doesn't Melville celebrate whalers and whaling? In "The
Advocate" (ch. 24) Ishmael argues that whale-hunting is not
mere butchery; it requires greater courage than warfare, and has
far nobler purposes:

For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting
out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. ... If American
and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage
harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and the glory of the whale-
ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
between them and the savages.

Ishmael even claims that whalemen made possible "the liber-

ation of Peru, Chili [sic] , and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain,"
and the "establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts."
Australia was rescued from savagery and "given to the enlight-
ened world by the whalemen." In the islands of Polynesia the
whale-ship "cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant,"
and even in "that double-bolted land Japan," Ishmael claims, the
whale-ship will soon cross that threshold and make the nation
hospitable. In "Knights and Squires" (ch. 27), the figures of
noble stature, the real Knights, are Queequeg, Tashtego, and
Ahasuerus Daggoo, the harpoon^m. Melville honors them with
that archaic spelling of 1621, and Daggoo is identified with the
Biblical king and patriarch. Indeed, the whole crew - now
"federated along one keel" - comes from around the world, "An
Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all
the ends of the earth ..." Clootz was a German who led a motley
group representing different races and nations into the French

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144 THE HUDSON REVIEW

National Assembly in 1790, to symbolize all mankind's sup

for the French Revolution.

As for the actuality of hunting whales, Melville saw not slaugh-

ter, not unequal combat and butchery, but arduous and terrifying
encounters with a prey that could - and very often did - escape,
elude, outwit, injure, crush, and destroy his attackers. Although
Melville "never threw a harpoon in his life," as Barry Lopez once
put it, despite the novelist's claim of more than two years' experi-
ence as a harpooner to his English publisher, he knew intimately
what it was like to row in a whaleboat. See his 1847 review of J.
Ross Browne's Etchings of a Whaling Cruise , in which he recalls in
vivid images his experience of being a terrified oarsman, water
lashed "into suds and vapor" by the whale, lances and ropes flying
about in chaos - "It's all a mist, a crash, - a horrible blending of
sounds and sights ..." We are not asked to feel sorry for the
whale, either here or in the novel. Will he perish? No, says
Ishmael (ch. 105), "the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing
upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed
defiance to the skies."

But hark ye yet again - the little lower layer. When we reach
"The Try-Works" (ch. 96), it becomes impossible to ignore the
warfare against nature that underlies the Pequoď s enterprise.
What seemed before an epic hunting story - violent, bloody,
merciless on both sides, but a source of nobility and value - turns
into a ghastly vision of industrial hell, a fiery holocaust. Reducing
whale blubber to oil produces an unspeakable pollution:

Would that [the whale] consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is
horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you
must live in it for the time. ... It smells like the left wing of the day of
judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

The image is not just about the technology of whale oil produc-
tion but about all such steam-driven, oil-burning, soul-destroying
industries - whose smoke and soot are poisons. Ishmael stands at
the helm, not even mentioning Ahab at first, in this new vision of
infernal enterprise: "The burning ship drove on, as if remorse-
lessly commissioned to some vengeful deed." We think back to
those frugal businessmen, Bildad and Peleg, who commissioned
the voyage, "Quakers with a vengeance." Melville knows how well
the austerities of New England Calvinism gave sanction to the

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 DEAN FLOWER 145

ruthlessness of capitalism: Onward, Christian soldiers, marc

as to war! "The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps," says Ishm
and now he sees them all - noble harpooneers included -
begrimed and crazed by the flames. The vision is apocalyptic:

as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and
dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into
the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the
white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides;
then the rushing Pequod , freighted with savages, and laden with fire,
and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness,
seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's
soul.

Note how the ship has taken the Leviathan's place, scornfully
champing the white bone - the devoured whale, instead of the
little whaleboat - in its mouth, viciously spitting out what it
destroys. From here on we will see Ahab in terms of industrial
and mechanized images: iron rails, manufactured body parts,
carpentry, hammer and forge. The portent of "The Try-Works" is
inescapable. Modern industrial capitalism feeds on its own
ruthless power. It is headed on a course of self-destruction that
will take us all down with it. Much of the most influential environ-
mentalist writing today is apocalyptic too - The End of Nature
(McKibben), The Future of Life (Wilson), "Total Eclipse" (Dillard),
Silent Spring (Carson), Writing for an Endangered World (Buell) -
and for the same reasons.

What of Moby-Dick himself? Can the actual animal be seen

apart from all the allegory and symbolism, the superstition and
demonizing, the meanings that human emotions - like Ahab's
anger - project upon him? The problem is wisely summed up by
Pip's comment, in "The Doubloon" (ch. 99), "I look, you look, he
looks; we look, ye look, they look." Each person sees and projects
his own understanding, and there can be no unprejudiced truth.
Still, what can be known of the animal himself? When Moby-
Dick's history is first introduced, in ch. 41, Ishmael emphasizes
the animal's terrifying intelligence:

Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet
his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural
terror, as that unexampled , intelligent malignity which, according to
specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults.
More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than

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146 THE HUDSON REVIEW

perhaps aught else. For when swimming before his exulting pur
with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times
known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon t
either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in const
tion to their ship. [Italics mine.]

Treachery and malignity come up again when we hear how M

Dick so easily "reaped away" Ahab's leg: "No turbaned Turk
hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more
ing malice." But that qualifier, seeming, is clearly an invitat
rethink the malice. Just change the point of view and it be
clear. Might you not be malignant too if, year after year, malic
little men threw barbed spears into your sides and tried to
you? Might you not, having intelligence, find ways to decei
outwit your pursuers? In short, wouldn't you too use your h
Melville signals this irony by his covert allusion to Shakesp
the "Turbaned Turk" in Othello's suicide speech:

in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state

I took by th' throat the circumcised dog

And smote him - thus.

The malignant enemy here - the barbaric Turk - is not Moby-

Dick but Ahab, the one who smote him first.
Starbuck alone in the novel challenges Ahab on the subject of
his vengeance, rightly of course ("The Quarter-Deck, " ch. 36).
But consider his terms for Moby-Dick:

"Vengeance on a dumb brute! . . . that simply smote thee from

blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

The repetition of dumb - incapable of speech - carries the more

colloquial implication of "stupid" or "slow-witted," from the
German dumm . Clearly, Starbuck condescends to the animal, as a
"brute" and a "thing," capable only of "blindest instinct." But that
is not what the novel tells us. Ishmael has already appreciated the
stories about Moby-Dick's "unexampled" intelligence and
malignity in ch. 41; he returns to the subject more factually in

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 DEAN FLOWER 147

"The Affadavit" (ch. 45), to anticipate the climax of the no

The sperm whale, he declares, is "sufficiently powerful, kno
and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stav
utterly destroy, and sink a large ship. ..." He will often chas
attacking whaleboats back to the ship "and pursue the ship it
Even when harpooned, Ishmael attests, the sperm whale

then acts, not so often with blind rage, as with willful, delibe
designs of destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conve
some eloquent indication of his character, that upon being atta
he will frequently open his mouth, and retain it in that d
expansion for several consecutive minutes.

Modern observers of wild animals may well see this awe

display of ferocity as a calculated strategy - terrify your en
and you may not have to attack and risk injury. Melville add
footnote a passage from Owen Chase's Narrative of the
(1821), not one plank of which survived a sperm whale's atta

[It] was anything but chance which directed [the whale's] o

tions; he made two several attacks . . . , both of which, accordin
their direction, were calculated to do us the most injury . .
aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and
He came directly from the shoal which we had just before ente
and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired
revenge for their sufferings.

Chase seems fully aware of who caused the fury and why i
justified. Not quite so lucky as Ishmael, he survived in an o
boat for weeks, unable to think of anything but "the horrid asp
and revenge of the whale" - another Ancient Mariner.
It would be a mistake to emphasize the battering-ram pow
the whale's head over its cranial capacity. Modern science co
firms what Melville knew empirically: the sperm whale
gigantic brain, the largest of any species on earth. Think h
many chapters of Moby-Dick are devoted to the whale's hea
which comprises almost a third of his body - a "sphynx," an E
tian pyramid, a prairie, a crypt to drown in or a womb
delivered from, a source of treasured ambergris, the very mi
Nature itself. With wrinkled illegible lines on his forehead,
mirror and counterpart of Ahab's furrowed brow, and his ch
he confronts Ahab with mystery. Or rather, he affronts him, w
his awesome intelligence and utter indecipherability.

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148 THE HUDSON REVIEW

But in the final three-days' chase Ishmael is not affron

last (ch. 133) he sees Moby-Dick close up, in the harpo
stealthy first approach, and he is overwhelmed by im
serene beauty and harmony: everything about him is "daz
"fleecy," "milky," musical, playful, and dancing. "A gentle
ness - a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness invest
gliding whale." It is the animal! s joy Ishmael appreciates, n
own. "Not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpa
glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam." For a mom
"hand-clappings" of the waves are "suspended by exce
rapture."
With language like that, Melville surely must be counted
among the greatest of nature poets. Aesthetic response, rapture
- whether in the form of poetry or not - is a vital component of
all modern environmentalism, never to be dismissed as mere
aestheticism. The desire for natural beauty is a survival instinct,
not just poetry. Two quick examples from non-poetic realms:
Aldo Leopold argues that no decision about how we use land will
succeed if we ignore its aesthetic value. E. O. Wilson argues that
the human instinct for beauty is part of our DNA, essential to
knowing what sustains us and where we can best survive. Wilson
coined a term for it, biophilia, but Ishmael and others under-
stood its value long before. Darwin, for example, in his summa-
tion of The Origin of Species :

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having
been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that,
whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and
most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

So much, then, for the sheer beauty of Melville's whale.

Moby-Dick's behavior on the first day's chase is to surge up
from the deep, directly under Ahab's boat, with his huge jaws
wide open. When Ahab eludes this, Moby-Dick, again with
"malicious intelligence," seizes the whaleboat, holds it aloft and
shakes "the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse," then
crushes it in two. Lesson clear? Not quite. Moby-Dick next swims
round and round the wrecked crew, his "vengeful wake" churn-
ing and lashing the water into a whirlpool with "ever contracting
circles" whose center is Ahab's head. When the Pequod intervenes,
Moby-Dick sullenly swims off.

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 DEAN FLOWER 149

On the second day Moby-Dick breaches, spectacularly, "R

with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths," "booming
entire bulk into the air, and "piling up a mountain of dazz
foam." Attacking all three boats even before they attack hi
rushes among them, entangles and twists their lines into
smashes two whaleboats to smithereens and goes down
boiling maelstrom." Then he rises again under Ahab's
unstricken boat," lifts it up perpendicularly with his head
sends it "turning over and over" into the air until it crashes up
down - with all of its occupants again in the drink. Remark
Moby-Dick's fury now abates, and, "as if satisfied that his work
that time was done," he mildly swims away "at a trav
methodic pace." It is impossible to ignore the feeling that h
made not just a rational choice, but a noble one.
On the third day - but we all know what Moby-Dick doe
the third day, breaching again beside the ship and "leaving
circling surface creamed like new milk round [his] ma
trunk." He seems "strangely oblivious" when Ahab dart
fierce iron and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale." H
thought it over, Moby-Dick makes a rational decision. He at
the ship itself, head on, smashing open a gaping hole in its
and again, after circling around deliberately, he hammers
the starboard bow - with, Ishmael infers, "Retribution, swift
vengeance, eternal malice ... in his whole aspect." Again he is
notably "quiescent." Had enough? But Ahab must fling his last
harpoon and his last curse, and the rope whizzing out violently
forms a noose which yanks him "voicelessly" into the depths. Exit
Moby-Dick. All in all, given the relentless malevolence of his
attackers, I think he behaved rather well.
Can anything now be said in explanation if not defense of
Ahab, from the point of view of modern ecology, or the deeper
understanding of nature? Consider the argument of that rather
cantankerous desert rat, Edward Abbey. His purpose in writing
Desert Solitaire in 1968 was to undertake a radical experiment.

I am here [in the Nevada desert] not only to evade for a while the
clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to
confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of
existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which
sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece
of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all
humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of

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150 THE HUDSON REVIEW

scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even

means risking everything human in myself.

He wanted to understand Nature just as deeply as Melville d

confront it somehow, unsentimentally, unmisted by love or dis
Whether he will encounter God or Medusa - or neither - he
declares his "willingness to risk everything human in myself."
That sounds more than a bit like Ahab to me. But Abbey's sourc
was a passage in the second chapter of Waiden about "fronti
only the essential facts of life." Thoreau wrote,
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live s
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a
broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce i
to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get t
whole and genuine meanness of it and publish its meanness to the
world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able t
give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau did not think that human life, reduced to its lowest
terms, would prove to be mean. But he wanted to be empirical
about it. If the experiment proved that Nature was ultimately
mean, he would not only relish that meanness but "publish it to
the world." If it were sublime, which of course is what he thought
(and learned from Emerson), he would still want to publish a
disinterested account of it. Now consider Ahab. He too wants to
prove what's fundamentally true about the Creation. On the
quarterdeck he tells Starbuck about the pasteboard masks of all
visible objects, but behind them he senses "some unknown but
still reasoning thing." He chafes at the idea of that unknowable
intelligence. But what's worse, he sees in this force - call it God,
Nature, or Moby-Dick - "outrageous strength, with an inscrutable
malice sinewing it." It's the seeming malice at the heart of it that
Ahab cannot abide, and to defy that he will risk everything
human in himself. Ishmael paraphrases Ahab's quest in ch. 41,
showing that he recognizes and perhaps even sympathizes with its
motives:

all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in
them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That
intangible malignity which has been from the beginning. . . . All that
most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all
truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain;

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 DEAN FLOWER 151

all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy A
were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Mob
Dick.

In effect Melville goes Thoreau one better: he will publish both

the meanness and the sublimity of Nature. What if Thoreau had
found truth with malice in it? Aren't there "malicious agencies"
in nature as well as benevolent ones? Malignant species of all
kinds? What if he had endured the sufferings of Job or dwelt on
all the undeserved agonies of human beings, not to mention
those of domestic and wild animals? For Ahab, "Truth has no
confines," and perhaps that can serve as a mild rebuke to simpler
truth seekers like Abbey and Thoreau. By not reassuring us that
Nature will sustain or heal or console, and may seem malicious by
not intending anything, perhaps Moby-Dick became what Annie
Dillard said it was, the best book about nature ever written.
Now for a coda about Native American wisdom, befitting the
novel's Epilogue. What were those tattoos that Queequeg trans-
ferred so assiduously to his coffin, which became Ishmael's life-
buoy? "All manner of grotesque figures and drawings," perhaps
the work of "a departed prophet and seer," Ishmael supposes,
perhaps "a complete theory of the heavens and the earth," appar-
ently a riddle "not even [Queequeg] himself could read."
Modern environmental writing suggests an answer to this ques-
tion, which at some level I think Melville may have understood.
Ever since Thoreau spoke of "a more perfect Indian wisdom" in
1842, American nature writers have turned to alternative lan-
guages and to so-called "primitive" cultures for wisdom - chief
among them in recent decades are Leslie Marmon Silko and
Barry Lopez. Silko has argued, in her essays and fiction, that the
stories of the Laguna Pueblo Indians link them to the land and to
their tribal history - often very specifically, to this mesa or that
particular arroyo - preserving knowledge that sustains them,
generation after generation. In Arctic Dreams , Lopez writes about
the "place-fixing" stories of the Eskimos in the Canadian Arctic:
"they occurred against the backdrop of a mythological landscape
[and were] usually meticulously conserved. (It was always possible
that the storyteller would not himself or herself grasp completely
the wisdom inherent in a story that had endured, which had
proved its value repeatedly.)" Now let's consider a source closer

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152 THE HUDSON REVIEW

to Queequeg's origins in Polynesia: the Moken, nomadic fis

men who have lived for hundreds of years on the Andama
on islands off the coast of Thailand and Burma. On December
26, 2004, when the great tsunami struck, not a single Moken
native died. Those on land knew immediately they should find
higher ground, and did so. Those at sea immediately recognized
the strange swells and paddled out to deeper water and safety.
"We've told the story of the wave since the old times," one of
them explained to CBS television news, matter-of-factly. "The Big
Wave had not eaten anyone for a long time, and it wanted to taste
them again." None of the Moken tribes had ever experienced a
tsunami, but the story told them what to do - a story they pre-
served without knowing why. Surely some such story as this was
carved on Queequeg's coffin, and allowed Ishmael to survive.

In Memoriam: Benjamin P. Flower ( 1 962-2012), marine geologist

and paleoceangrapher

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