What I didn’t realize then was how long it was going to take to discover just what that truth meant to me.

 

I would write two books of Nantucket history before I turned my undivided attention to the story I had first heard as a child. By that point I’d begun to appreciate the ballast of reality hidden in the Pequod’s hold. For us, distanced by more than a century from the time when whale oil was the petroleum of its day, it is difficult to believe that a process as ghastly and strange as whaling was an integral part of the American economy and culture. Having grown up in Pittsburgh at a time when the city was dominated by smog-belching steel mills, I had been unexpectedly prepared to appreciate the dirty, often brutal conditions aboard a whaleship: floating factories dedicated to ripping blubber from the whale’s corpse, chopping the blubber up, then boiling it into oil amid a stinking pall of sooty smoke. Moby-Dick may be, on occasion, mythic and metaphysical, but it is also an extraordinarily detailed and accurate account of American whaling in the nineteenth century. As Ishmael insists, again and again, he is not making this up.

But the novel is much more than a historical document. As I’ve already indicated, it can be quite funny; in its flights of language Moby-Dick can be more than a little intimidating, as if Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible teamed up to write a very weird book about whaling. Once the tale of Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick clicks into high gear, the novel becomes an adventure story. Then there are the fascinating sidebars that begin to take up more and more of the novel as Ishmael openly discusses his attempts to write a book as ungovernable as the white whale itself.

But it wasn’t until the writing of In the Heart of the Sea that I came to understand that Melville had gotten much more than a dramatic conclusion from the story of the Essex. He had gotten a point of view. If nothing else, Moby-Dick is the tale of a survivor. And just as I’d analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the men who’d survived the Essex, I found myself trying to figure out who was this Ishmael and why fate, or at least Melville, had chosen him alone to tell the Pequod’s story.

 

At the beginning of the novel, Ishmael informs us that all this happened “[s]ome years ago—never mind how long precisely.” We subsequently learn that he has been living with the story for a very long time, shipping out on a string of whaling voyages in the years since the sinking of the Pequod. All this time he has been preparing the book we are now holding in our hands. Taking a writer’s fact-gathering to an unheard-of extreme, he has even had the dimensions of a gigantic sperm whale skeleton tattooed to his arm.

But if Ishmael has thrown his lot with the sea, he has done so with more than a little regret. As he knows better than anyone, the sea is a most unforgiving task-master. “No mercy, no power but its own, controls it,” he says in the chapter titled “Brit,” then launches into a simile that ends as an anguished warning: “For as the appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle; thou canst never return!”

To my mind, the novel’s masterpiece is the chapter “The Grand Armada,” in which Ishmael discovers the vision of domestic bliss that he has denied himself but which is nonetheless crucial to our humanity. After being dragged through the chaotic fringes of a vast school of whales, he and his whaleboat crew come upon a lake-like still center, where whales gently copulate and mother whales suckle their young. Even if this “enchanted calm” is all too quickly destroyed by a whale entangled in the line of a cutting spade, it remains an enduring example of everything the demonic Ahab is not:

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the center freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely reveled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

The imagery of this passage anticipates the novel’s final scene, in which the whale-rammed Pequod and all the chaotic plentitude of the book are sucked down into the swirling vortex of the void. The sole exception is Ishmael. Clinging to a life-buoy fashioned from Queequeg’s unused coffin, he seems to have drifted into the welcoming stillness at the maelstrom’s center, where he remains miraculously immune to the sea’s hazards. “The unharming sharks,” he recounts, “they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.” Two days later Ishmael is rescued, and as is the blessing and curse of all survivors, he must begin to live the rest of his life.

 

The publication of Moby-Dick marked the beginning of a difficult time for its author. What is generally considered the greatest American novel ever written proved to be a critical and popular disappointment in the fall of 1851. Even Melville’s friend and literary confidante Evert Duyckinck panned it in what must have been a humiliating review for Melville. The novel’s poor sales put him under increasing pressure to support his large and growing family. Then, the following summer, Melville visited Nantucket for the first time.

Like the author of Moby-Dick, the island had fallen on hard times. In just a few years, Nantucket had lost more than a quarter of its voting population to the gold fields in California. Where he had once imagined Ishmael walking the streets with his cannibal cohort Queequeg, Melville found a ghost town.

He made a point of meeting George Pollard, the captain of the ill-fated Essex. Pollard had given up the sea and become the town’s nightwatchman.