Annotations and Commentary on Moby Dick

by Evelyn C. Leeper

Copyright 2018

Last Updated 24 Feb 2018

 

CHAPTER 54: The Town-Ho's Story

Melville claims that "Town-Ho" is an ancient whaling cry. One site says it is probably a Nantucket cry, "Townor!", meaning "I have seen the whale twice." Melville also says it was used in hunting the "Gallipagos terrapin." That would be the Galápagos tortoise, which was hunted so often and so well by whalers (and other seamen, but primarily whalers) that it almost went extinct. (To be fair, the introduction of rats, goats, and pigs were also a major factor, since these animals ate most of the tortoise eggs.) From 250,000 in the 16th century, the population has plummeted to about 3000 in the 1970s. A breeding program has swelled the ranks to about 19,000, but one of the eleven subspecies went extinct in 2012 when the last specimen, Lonesome George, died. But Galápagos tortoises are not terrapins: tortoises are land-dwellers, while a terrapin lives both on land and in water, and always near water, especially in swampy areas.

How an ordinary seaman like Ishmael ends up in such fancy company is not clear, but perhaps his adventures on the Pequod has served as his ticket into society.

"Romish injunctions of secrecy" alludes to the seal of the confessional. Though Tashtego accidentally reveals the story talking in his sleep, "it never transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast," that is to the rear of the main-mast, where Ahab's cabin would be.

Ishmael says he recounted this story in Lima. The Lima was the ship on which Henry Chase was serving in 1841 when it had a gam with the Acushnet, on which Melville was serving. During this gam, Chase was the son of Owen Chase, one of the few survivors of the whaler Essex after it was destroyed by a whale, and Henry gave Melville a copy of Owen's account of his experience.

"Don" is a title of courtesy used with a man's first name. (The female equivalent is "Doña".) In traditional Spanish and Latin American society, it would be used only for those in the upper class. "Pedro" is the Spanish equivalent of Peter; Saint Peter was a fisherman. Saint Sebastian was martyred by arrows, looking something like a harpooned whale. That Ishmael says that he narrated the story "one saint's eve" is a clue that the names chosen are not accidental, but refer to the saints.

"[The] Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the Line." It is not clear how the Town-Ho could be eastward of Lima, which is on South America's west coast. And Lima is about 500 miles south of the Line (the equator).

(Although both the British Penguin edition and the Project Gutenberg edition have "eastward", the edition read on "The Big Read" has "southwestward", which is much more likely. This still leaves the problem of her being northward of the Line, which might conceivably mean the Tropic of Capricorn.)

Callao is Peru's largest port, founded in 1537; "Manilla" is Manila in the Philippines.

The "two great contrasting nations" shoring the Great Lakes are the United States and Canada. The two shoring the Atlantic are presumably the United States and Great Britain, though that seems an odd way of looking at things.

"[The] goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw" would be the guns at Fort Mackinac on Mackinac Island, Mackinac being pronounced "Mackinaw".

Peltry is (are?) raw, undressed skins. Wigwams are also called wikiups, and differ from tipis (teepees).

Gothic genealogies would apply specifically to the Goths, an eastern Germanic tribe. "Afric" is an obsolete word for African, implying exotic wild beasts. The Tartars (or Tatars) were the western part of Genghis Khan's empire, known as the Golden Horde.

Buffalo is on the eastern end of Lake Erie; Cleveland is on its southern shore. The Winnebago villages would have been in southern Wisconsin, along the shore of Lake Michigan. Most of the Winnebago were relocated to Nebraska, though some still live in Wisconsin.

The Great Lakes, Ishmael says, "are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts." Boreas was the Greek god of the North Wind. When he says that these winds have "drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew" I am reminded that this was not just an 18th and 19th century thing. I remember in 1975 learning from the radio that the Edmund Fitzgerald had sunk in a Lake Superior storm with near-hurricane-force winds and 35-foot waves, with the loss of all 29 crew members.

A Bowie-knife is a sheath knife with a cross-guard and a clip point. It is named after Jim Bowie, who famously used it in a duel known as the Sandbar Fight. By the way, Bowie is pronounced "boo-ee", not "boh-wee".

A subaltern is a subordinate, or in the British military, a junior officer. A viceroy is a royal officer who runs a geographic area in the name of the monarch.

Saying that Steelkilt had "a soul in him ... which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne's father." Charlemagne was the founder of the Carolingian Empire, and considered a great ruler. Yet one can also interpret Ishmael's statement as observing that any son of Charlemagne's father that he chose to name Charlemagne would in fact be Charlemagne.

Apparently "merry as a cricket" is a well-known simile, but I cannot find out why people think crickets are merry.

It may have been the censorship of the times, but there is certainly more elegance in referring to "some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large" than the way it would be written now.

A cooper is someone who makes casks, barrels, tubs, and other vessels from wooden staves. A club hammer (a.k.a. lump hammer) is a one-handed heavy hammer with a double-faced head used in demolition work.

A poinard is a long thrusting knife with a tapered, pointed blade.

Chicha is beer made from corn (maize), served in Latin America.

The Erie Canal was first used in 1821, was completed in 1825, and is still in use today.

The Mohawk counties are probably the counties in what is today called the Mohawk Valley of New York: Schenectady, Montgomery, Fulton, Herkimer, Oneida, and Schoharie.

Venice was known as being very corrupt, so "Venetianly corrupt" is more than just ordinarily corrupt. The Ashantee (a.k.a. Ashanti) people had a large empire in west Africa. It was not conquered by European invaders until 1900.

"Dame Isabella's Inquisition" was established by Isabella I in 1480. It was abolished in Spain under Isabella II in 1834, but the Inquisition in Lima had been abolished in 1820. Ishmael is presumably telling the story after the events of MOBY-DICK, so the Inquisition was not merely waning, but finished.

St. Mark is the patron saint of Venice. St. Dominic supposedly was one of the first Inquisitors, though actual historical evidence of this seems to be thin on the ground.

"Sydney men" would be, not surprisingly, men from Sydney (Australia). From 1788 until 1868, large parts of Australia, including Sydney, was a penal colony and it was not until the gold rushes which occurred after the publication of Moby Dick that there was even a substantial non-convict population there.

Steelkilt and his comrades "hastily [slew] about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass, [and then] these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade." There were barricades in Parisian streets as early as the rebellion of 1588, but this is almost definitely a reference to the barricades of 1832 (now better known to Americans because of the musical Les Misérables).

A rope-yarn would be a single strand of a rope, so apparently flogging on the Town-Ho was done with rope rather than leather, or at least was going to be done with rope in this instance.

Melville implies that some sailors sign papers saying that they have "shipped for the cruise," which allow them to leave as soon as anchor is dropped, even if that is at an unplanned stop during the voyage. Some have assumed this is Melville's justification of his jumping ship from the Acushnet in the Marquesas.

"Prick the buffalo" is probably a phrase Melville made up; there do not seem to be any other references to it.

Mincing knives were two-handled knives used to cut the blubber into small squares when it was still attached to the skin. A handspike is similar to a crowbar.

The mizzen-rigging would be the rigging on the mizzen-mast, or the mast aft of the main-mast.

The vernacular is the native language or dialect of a population. In the case, however, when Ishmael says that the captain "administered [a reprimand] in the vernacular," he is implying that the language was coarse and vulgar.

A lanyard is a rope or cord attached to an object and worn around the wrist or neck.

Teneriffe is Tenerife, the Spanish island in the Atlantic Ocean, and not Teneriffe, a fairly recent suburb of Brisbane.

The story of Steelkilt is very similar to Melville's own story of jumping ship, then signing on to a series of other ship to eventually return to the United States.

A "copy of the Holy Evangelists" would be the local equivalent of the Bible as something to swear on.

Auto-da-fés technically were the public confessions and penances of condemned heretics and apostates. However, since the punishments were far more memorable than the confessions, the term has come to mean the punishments (usually burnings).

Mention of the archiepiscopacy presages mention of a bishopric later.