""He raised a gull-like cry in the air. 'There she blows - there she blows!
A hump like a snowhill! It is Moby Dick!'" by Mead Schaeffer (1922)
A hump like a snowhill! It is Moby Dick!'" by Mead Schaeffer (1922)
Frontispiece and dust jacket illustration for Moby-Dick
By the early 17th century, just prior to European contact, the Pequots had approximately 8,000 members and inhabited 250 square miles. However, the Pequot War (1636-1638) -- the first major conflict between colonists and an indigenous New England people -- had a devastating impact on the Tribe.
When the Pequot War formally ended, many tribal members had been killed and others placed in slavery or under the control of other tribes. Those placed under the rule of the Mohegans eventually became known as the Mashantucket (Western) Pequots and were given land at Noank in 1651. In 1666, the land at Noank was taken from the Tribe, and it was given back property at Mashantucket.
In the ensuing decades, the Pequots battled to keep their land, while at the same time losing reservation members to outside forces. By 1774, a Colonial census indicated that there were 151 tribal members in residence at Mashantucket. By the early 1800s, there were between 30 and 40 as members moved away from the reservation seeking work. Others joined the Brotherton Movement, a Christian-Indian movement that attracted Natives from New England to a settlement in upstate New York and later, Wisconsin. As for the remaining land in Connecticut, by 1856 illegal land sales had reduced the 989-acre reservation to 213 acres.
Remember, Tashtego has turned to whaling because he no longer is free to roam and hunt on land: "an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires" (Ch. 27).
Tashtego is the first to harpoon a whale on this voyage, though, ironically, the chapter title--"Stubb Kills a Whale"--gives credit to someone else (Ch. 61).
Tashtego knows the inside of a whale--"the belly of the beast"--better than anyone on board, having been submerged in one in Ch. 78 (Queequeg rescues him).
Tashtego claims that he saw Moby-Dick at almost the same time Ahab did: "'I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out,' said Tashtego." (Ch. 133)
When the flag on the top mast that serves as a weathervane is lost, Ahab orders Tashtego to hammer a new one in its place: "And now marking that the vane or flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast" (Ch. 135).
When Moby-Dick makes his final attack on the Pequod, the narrator paints a dramatic portrait of a defiant Tashtego: "the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water. Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart" (Ch. 135).
Tashtego is the last character whose name Ahab speaks as the ship goes down, and in fact, it is Tashtego, not the captain, who plays the captain's role of "going down with the ship": "Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent. 'I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains?"
The final image in the final lines of the last chapter focuses on Tashtego, who survives and resists, even after Ahab has gone, and casts a blow against Empire and "heavenly" justice that "blesses" the world's dominant powers: "A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
"Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago" (Ch. 135).
Given this prominence and the fact the boat Ahab captains is named after a Native American tribe of New England that has been submerged and wiped out by White conquering force, can Ahab's voyage be productively read as a hopeless but valiant effort to strike back against an inscrutable, violating power?
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