A Whale ain’t Nothing
but a Fish
In the Heart of the Sea by
Nathaniel Philbrick. Harper Collins, £16.99
On November the 20th 1820 the
Nantucket whaleship Essex, sailing in
the Pacific somewhere between the Galapagos and Marquesas Islands — about as
far from land as she could be — was rammed by a sperm whale and quickly went
down. The entire crew of twenty escaped the wreck, but only eight made it back
to Nantucket. One of these was the First Mate, whose account was published soon
after his rescue. Only twenty or thirty years ago the cabin-boy’s account was
found, and it differs in more than just writing style. Using these and various
secondary sources Nathaniel Philbrick (No doubt it’s bad form to say so, but
the name is perfect) tries to reconstruct the full story.
So far, so good — well, appalling of course, I mean good
for the reader — but we are also told loudly, not just by the publishers in
their hyperbolic press release, but also on the title page, that this is ‘The
Epic True Story that Inspired Moby-Dick’
Now just a minute. ‘Inspired’? I was about thirteen and
interested chiefly in wireless, not at all in arty matters, when I sat goggling
in awe through the Hollywood film with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. My
vocabulary contained useful words like ‘Pentode’ and ‘Superhet’, not
‘Symbolism’ or ‘Allegory’. Nevertheless when I came out of the cinema I had the
new knowledge that it is possible to say something about one thing by talking
about another: Ishmael had been telling us about something much bigger than a
whale. Such considerations seem not to trouble this book’s author or publisher
any more than they did the producers and directors of the film. To inspire is
to provide with a plot, Ahab was seriously weird, Ishmael that fashionable
thing a survivor, whale-oil was what the Pequod
was after, and Moby Dick was just a big fish. (Yes, a fish — Melville
himself insists on this.) Ultimately this doesn’t matter: ordeals and quests,
especially sea-quests, have always caught the imagination, and it would take
more than Hollywood crassness to conceal their wider implications and deeper
significances. Much of Moby Dick is
written in a flippant pseudo-scientific style, and it may be only hindsight
wisdom that credits — if it is a credit — Melville with deliberately setting
out to write something meant to enter the canon of big-L Literature.
The opening chapter of In the Heart of the Sea tells how the white settlers of Nantucket
took to whaling and how Quakers — pacifist toward humans, but not toward whales
— came to dominate a close-knit, rigid, typically small-island society. It
seems women had unusual power in Nantucket — the men were away for three years
and home for three months — but (perhaps for the same reason) many were
addicted to opium. The obsession with whaling is well-illustrated by the odd
pieces of knowledge Philbrick has picked up: young men would wear small items
of harpooning gear in their lapels so that the girls, pledged to marry only
successful whale-hunters, could be sure in their choice. A mother is pleased
when her little boy uses a dinner-fork tied to a ball of wool to harpoon the
cat. We are also introduced to Thomas Nickerson, joining the Essex as cabin-boy. While there is much
here that is clearly backed by research, as a sprinkling of quotation-marks
shows, there is also a lot of the speculation common in popular historical
reconstruction. Philbrick spares us ‘Little did he know on that fateful day…’
but there is plenty of ‘Must have’ ‘Probably’ and ‘Doubtless’ and at least one
‘Fate had in store’.
Most of the book is taken up with an account of the Essex’s
voyage, its sudden end and the harrowing events that followed. A
straightforward ripping yarn. Only a few days out, with an inexperienced
captain, the ship is taken broadside and tipped on her beam-ends by a squall.
Two whale-boats are lost; a dispiriting start. Later there is a near-mutiny
when rations run short in fo’c’sle and steerage, but the central event is of
course the sinking, and this is described vividly and without too many explanatory
asides or speculations on the crew’s feelings. Rammed twice, the ship sank to
top-deck level within ten minutes. Astonishingly, those aboard got off in the
spare boat, and a black steward even
managed to salvage compasses, quadrants and nautical almanacs. The two
other boats had been out catching whales. Twenty men in three open boats in the
middle of the pacific…
What became of them is told well, and sometimes with more
detail than may suit many readers’ stomachs. Nantucket Quakers die hard; when
lots are drawn to see who shall be eaten some men object: gambling is wrong.
At the time much was made of the whale’s unsporting
conduct, and it seems still to puzzle present-day writers. Given what
whaleships set out to do, and the now-proven intelligence of their prey, naïve
readers such as myself might wonder why it didn’t happen all the time. Perhaps
the poor benighted beasts are better pacifists than their hunters.
For the thorough-going and scholarly there are fifty
pages of notes, with no distracting indices in the main text, and a ‘select’ (a
mere 150-odd books and articles) bibliography. For the rest of us there are two
generous wodges of photographs: vast whale jaw-bones, survivors in later life,
contemporary illustrations and documents, even a fantastic seventeenth-century
engraving of a cannibal orgy. There are also maps: one of the Essex’s voyage from Nantucket to the
point where she sank, and another showing the routes of the ship’s boats.
Necessarily, the first shows half the world, and the second the South Pacific
from Polynesia to Chile, the equator to Cape Horn. The imagination boggles at
the distances sailed.
There is much else to strain belief. How was it possible
that Owen Chase, dying of thirst and hunger, often too weak to pull himself up
to the gunwales of his tiny boat, kept a log? It was this log, written up later
by his literary friend William Coffin, that Melville read before writing Moby Dick. Even more surprisingly the
cabin boy Thomas Nickerson also made notes and some fine sketches of the
disaster, some of which are reproduced here. His work was only discovered just
before Philbrick started writing.
Harper Collins paid a quarter of a million pounds for the
right to publish this book, and seem to have invested as much or more in
publicity for it. They have decided to make it a best-seller, and it probably
deserves to be, though not for its literary qualities. It’s none the worse for
being nothing to do with Literature with a capital ‘L’, only for pretending to
be: it tells us no more about Moby Dick than a history of the Danish court does about Hamlet.
Simon Darragh
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