Publishing History
First British edition (entitled The Whale), expurgated to avoid offending
delicate political and moral sensibilities, published in three volumes
on October 18, 1851 by Richard Bentley, London. First American edition
published November 14, 1851 by Harper & Brothers, New York.
As letters to Richard Henry Dana and Richard Bentley attest, Melville was
far along on a new book by May 1850. This latest work was apparently another
relatively simple adventure narrative in the manner of Typee or Redburn, "a
romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends of the Southern Sperm
Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience,
of two years & more, as a harpooneer...." That August Evert Duyckinck
wrote that the story was "mostly done -- a romantic, fanciful & literal & most
enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery -- something quite new."
Melville had promised Bentley that the book would be ready that autumn, in expectation of which he was sent an advance of 150 pounds. His financial situation was poor and he was desperately in need of a publishing success. Nevertheless, he abandoned the nearly-finished romance to spend an entire year rewriting under a spell of intense intellectual ferment further heightened by the study of Shakespeare and a developing friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. The resulting work was finally shipped to Bentley on September 10, 1851: although it received many positive reviews, it sold poorly and accelerated the decline of Melville's literary reputation.
The Epilogue, explaining how Ishmael survived the destruction of the Pequod, was inadvertently omitted from Bentley's edition, leading many British critics to condemn Melville for leaving no one alive to tell the first-person narrative (see excerpt from London Spectator below).
Excerpts
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having
little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on
shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of
the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating
the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever
it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily
pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral
I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me,
that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately
stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off --
then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my
substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws
himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising
in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time
or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with
me. --opening paragraph
"
Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them,
ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league.... Drink, ye harpooneers!
drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow -- Death to
Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" --Chapter
36 (The Quarter-Deck)
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters,
however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet,
in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of
ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly
regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his
more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats,
and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds
of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that
smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies;
one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the
whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch
blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab.
And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath
him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in
the field.... Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that
almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against
the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last
came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual
and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac
incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating
in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.
That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion
even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient
Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall
down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the
abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that
most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth
with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the
subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon
the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his
whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he
burst his hot heart's shell upon it. --Chapter 41 (Moby Dick)
It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. --Chapter 51 (The Spirit-Spout)
But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. --Chapter 55 (Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales)
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul. --Chapter 96 (The Try-Works)
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potter's Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness. --Chapter 111 (The Pacific)
It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly
separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently
pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved
with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep.
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled
birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro
in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans,
sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings
of the masculine sea.
But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows
without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished
them.
Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air
to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling
line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion -- most seen here at the
equator -- denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which
the poor bride gave her bosom away.
Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and
unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of
ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting
his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven. --Chapter
132 (The Symphony)
Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;
but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still
more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow,
so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly
unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible,
sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving
ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles
of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged
waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead,
a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue
waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake;
and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But these
were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering
the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff
rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of
a recent lance projected from the white whale's back; and at intervals one
of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a
canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long
tail feathers streaming like pennons....
On each soft side -- coincident with the parted swell, that but once laving
him, then flowed so wide away -- on each bright side, the whale shed off
enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly
transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it;
but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm,
enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all who for the first time
eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou may'st have bejuggled
and destroyed before. --Chapter 134 (The Chase -- First Day)
As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant
himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three crews. Ahab's
boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale
head-and-head, -- that is, pull straight up to his forehead, -- a not uncommon
thing; for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming
onset from the whale's sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained,
and while yet all three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to his
eye; the White Whale churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant
as it were, rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered
appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from
every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which
those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling like
trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him; though,
at times, but by a plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's unearthly
slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds. --Chapter 134 (The Chase --
Second Day)
