3C. Moby-Dick (1851), Chapter 5-7.

The cenotaph above is in the Seaman's Bethel in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
The chapel was built in 1832.

From Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville

Click here for the full text.

It makes a stranger stare

In chapter six of Moby-Dick, we’re introduced to the streets and people of New Bedford. It is noted that New Bedford’s primary industry is whaling and it’s an industry that recruits many people of differing backgrounds, but it has a particular attraction to younger men due to its promising nature. “There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.” (Ch.6 Melville)

Question: What vision of America as an ideal is depicted in the narrator’s account of New Bedford?

Consider: American as an ideal, cosmopolitanism

“If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford. In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.

“But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town. . ."

The sky had changed

Chapters 5-7 of Moby-Dick begin to build a much more solemn depiction of sailors who are hunting whales. In chapter 5, Ishmael expects the sailors staying at the inn to be loud and almost primitive, but he is shocked to see that they are quiet and demure. He comments, "I was preparing to hear some good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed." Perhaps these sailors are quiet because of what they have seen and done. Then, in chapter 7, Ishmael visits a chapel, but during his visit, the weather turns dreary, "The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist." When he arrives at the chapel, he discovers it to be a memorial for those who have lost their lives whaling. The combination of bad weather and the memorial might foreshadow Ishmael's adventure on the seas to be cold, dark, and dangerous.

    Question: What is Ishmael’s attitude toward death? 

    Consider:  Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.