Philip Hoare - Leviathan

By the time Melville arrived, New Bedford was experiencing an unparalleled boom. In the 1840s, three hundred whale-ships–more than half of the American fleet–sailed from the port, often returning with two or three thousand barrels of oil and profits running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many New England boys, fired up by the heroism and glory it offered, volunteered for the chase. While their peers went to California in search of gold or the Dakota plains for buffalo, they found another wilderness: whaling was the Wild West of the sea.

Like a cowboy or a jockey, the experienced whaler was physically tailored for the job–or perhaps his job moulded him. ‘He is a rather slender, middle-sized man, with a very sallow cheek, and hands tanned of a deep and enduring saffron color,’ wrote Charles Nordhoff, who sailed from New Bedford soon after Melville, ‘…very round-shouldered, the effect possibly of much pulling at his oar.’ A vagabond cast in ‘this shabby part of a whaling voyage’–as Ishmael puts it–the well-travelled whaler bore

a singular air of shabbiness…His shoes are rough and foxy, and the strings trail upon the ground, as he walks. His trowsers fail to connect, by several inches, showing a margin of coarse, grey woollen sock, intervening between their bottoms, and his shoes. A portion of his red flannel drawers is visible, above the waistband of his pantaloons; while a rusty black handkerchief at the throat, fastened by a large ring, made of the tooth of a sperm whale, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, keeps together a shirt bosom…innocent of a single button.

The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner–an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth. Whale oil and whalebone were commodities for the Machine Age, and owners and captains adopted the same punitive practices employed in mills and factories, reducing pay and provisions to pursue a better profit.

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