Moby Dick online reading group, Chapters 49-54

 

"A glass of chicha de jora, a type of corn beer." Via Wikipedia, public domain photo. 

This week: Chapters 49-54, "The Hyena" through "The Town-Ho's Story."

This section of the book was dominated, at least for me, by "The Town-Ho's Story," a narrative that includes another fateful encounter with Moby Dick.

I was intrigued by the passage which loops back to the main story: 

“It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There she rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.

“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’

“‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—but that would be too long a story.’

“‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.

“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air, Sirs.’

That self-referential passage seemed rather modern to me.

I was also startled that in the same chapter, Melville suddenly writes about the part of the country where I live (I live in a suburb of Cleveland, which is in northern Ohio, on the Lake Erie shore): 

For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. 

The Great Lakes state of Ohio was fully settled by 1850-51, when Melville wrote Moby Dick, but it was very much a frontier about 40 years before, when the War of 1812 was fought, as this passage suggests. The "fleet thunderings of naval victories" is surely a reference to the Battle of Lake Erie, a naval battle in Lake Erie near  Put-in-Bay, west of Cleveland and east of Toledo. It was arguably the most important battle of the War of 1812 and was a decisive American victory. Melville's readers would have been familiar with the famous message of Oliver Hazard Perry, the victorious American commander: "We have met the enemy and they are ours."

A couple of  other bits in the text:

As Ishmael is telling his story to his friends in Lima, they guzzle chicha. I  didn't know what that is, so I looked it up. Wikipedia helpfully explains that chicha is a drink native to Latin America, sometimes alcoholic and sometimes not, sometimes made with corn. I'm guessing Ishmael is fueled by the alcoholic version as he spins his yarn. 

In the "The Gam" chapter, Ishmael remarks that when whale boats meet in the ocean, they sometimes pass along letters. I wonder how often letters to seamen in whale ships were actually delivered? "At any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date a  year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files." I took it that this passage referred to newspapers; imagine getting a newspaper, months out of date, and knowing it was the latest news available. This reads very strangely to the modern reader. 

Bonus blog post!

For his contribution to Maybe Night, Oz Fritz has posted a new essay at his "Oz Mix" blog, "Moby Dick and Finnegans Wake," which argues that there's a passage in Finnegans Wake which refers to Moby Dick. I think Oz makes a pretty case, although as he admits it's not ironclad. "Let's call this circumstantial evidence," Oz write. There are also some comparisons between the two classics. 

Next week: Please read Chapters 55-59, "Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales" through "The Squid.”

That's going to be covered by Oz, and apparently he's been waiting for weeks to write about the "Squid" chapter, so I'm looking forward to it.