Then, in February of 1974, I discovered Herman Melville.

The voice of Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, caught me completely by surprise. I had expected to be bored to death, but Ishmael sounded like the best friend I had always hoped to find. In the first paragraph he admits to a state of almost clinical depression—“a damp, drizzly November in my soul”—to which any adolescent can relate. But not to worry, Ishmael reassures us, he has found a solution to this condition. Instead of doing damage to himself or to others, he seeks solace in the sea. What’s more, he insists, he is not alone: “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.” As proof, he describes the city of New York on a Sunday afternoon, its cooped-up inhabitants lingering on the waterfront, looking out longingly toward the sea in search of “the ungraspable phantom of life.”

Needless to say, this was a scene that spoke to me with a direct, almost overwhelming power. “I am tormented,” Ishmael confesses, “with an everlasting itch for things remote.” I found myself nodding in agreement. Then, six hundred pages later, came the final pay off when the white whale smashes into the Pequod. Here was the event that had been a part of my consciousness for as long as I could remember. And as Melville makes clear early on in Moby-Dick, a whale did, in fact, ram into a whaleship from Nantucket back in 1820. So this was the story my father had told us in our bedroom all those years ago. As Ishmael says in the very first chapter, “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.” It was more than I could comfortably comprehend. But as I’ve since discovered, that is a common reaction to Moby-Dick.

 

Twelve years later, in 1986, I moved with my wife and our two young children to Nantucket Island. Melissa had always dreamed of practicing law in a small town like the one she had grown up in on Cape Cod, and when she saw an ad for a position on Nantucket, she immediately sent in her resume. At the time, I was a freelance sailing journalist and could live just about anywhere. And besides, even though we didn’t know a soul on the island, I figured I was already pretty familiar with the place. I’d read about it in Chapter 14 of Moby-Dick.

It was, and remains to this day, my favorite chapter of the novel: a five-paragraph tour de force that creates a mesmerizing sense of bustling enchantment. At this early stage in the book, what will become a dark and disturbing portrayal of Captain Ahab’s mono-maniacal quest for the white whale is more like the literary equivalent of a buddy movie as Ishmael and Queequeg make their uncertain, sometimes hilarious way to the island that was once the whaling capital of the world.

Nantucket is, in Ishmael’s words, an “elbow of sand; all beach without a background.” The island’s greatness has nothing to do with its beauty or its natural resources; it is a mere setting-off point—a place wholly dedicated to an activity that occurs on the other side of the world. In fact, the island is, to Ishmael’s way of thinking, a kind of joke, and the second paragraph of the chapter becomes a running gag about the island’s lack of vegetation. Ishmael claims that weeds have to be planted on the island since they don’t grow there naturally; that wood is so rare that tiny splinters are coveted like pieces of the “true cross in Rome” that Nantucketers are reduced to planting toadstools in an attempt to create some shade; and that the sand is so deep that the islanders clamber around in their own sand-adapted version of snow-shoes.

Once he’s gotten the jokes out of his system, Ishmael plunges into an account of the Native American origins of the island. He tells of the myth of the giant bird that swooped down over a native village on Cape Cod and carried an Indian boy out across the water. The child’s parents set off in frantic pursuit in a canoe. Many miles later they discover an island that would become known as Nantucket, and beneath a tree they find their son’s whitened skeleton. Ishmael then recounts the amazing achievements of an island nation whose dominion is nothing less than all the oceans of the world: “Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.”

If I had stopped to think about, instead of becoming totally captivated by Ishmael’s miraculous prose, I would have realized that he is not describing a real-life place as much as he is evoking a phenomenon, what he calls elsewhere “a fine, boisterous something.” The Nantucket of Moby-Dick is an idea, not a town, and yet I had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I thought that nothing could be better than to live on this wondrous “ant-hill in the sea.”

Not long after relocating to Nantucket I discovered that Melville had never set foot on the place prior to writing Moby-Dick. I had been hoodwinked, seduced by an author’s enticing but purely imaginary construct. But the more I learned about the island’s history, the more I realized that this was not really the case. Even if Melville had never visited the island prior to writing his masterpiece, he was exceedingly familiar with its inhabitants, having spent several years of his youth as a whaleman in the South Pacific. At the core of the dazzling rhetorical display of Moby-Dick’s Nantucket is an imperishable historical truth.