Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick

of literature. Ishmael begins by describing how the mincer, the sailor who cuts up the whale blubber into thin pieces known as bible leaves, secures a very special coat made from—get this—the foreskin of a sperm whale’s penis . . . that’s right, the foreskin of a whale. I won’t go into the details (for that you have to read the book), but suffice it to say that once the mincer is dressed in this black tubular outfit, he looks, Ishmael insists, just like a clergyman as he stands at a pulpit-like table slicing the blubber into bible leaves. It’s then that Ishmael delivers the punch line. “[W]hat a candidate for an archbishoprick,” he enthuses, “what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!”

20
    The Left Wing
    W hen I was growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, we would sometimes drive into the city past the steel mills along the Monongahela River. The stench and smoke were so bad that my younger brother and I would hold our breath as we looked in fascination at those scorched towers belching fire. Twenty or so years later, when I moved to Nantucket and became interested in the island’s whaling past, I came to realize that Nantucket in the early nineteenth century, when the town was the center of America’s first global industry, was much more like the Pittsburgh of my childhood than the posh summer resort it had become. Back in the nineteenth century, Nantucket stank of oil, and in 1846, when a fire broke out at a hat store on Main Street, close to half the town was consumed by flames fed by the very element that had sustained the island for more than a hundred years. Nantucket rebuilt, this time in brick, but for all intents and purposes whaling was finished. Within a couple of decades the island’s population had dropped from ten thousand to just three thousand. Nantucket was on its way to becoming a ghost town, just as my old home Pittsburgh has been abandoned by a sizable segment of its population since it, too, lost the industry that once made it famous. It’s what happens to communities, large or small, afloat or ashore, that play with fire.
    To kindle a fire on an oil-soaked wooden ship was risky at best, but it was the only way to boil the blubber into oil. Wood was used to start the fire in the brick tryworks, but once the rendering of the blubber had begun, the flames were fed with the crispy bits that floated to the top of the bubbling try-pots. This meant that the fire that consumed the whale was fed with pieces of the whale’s own body. The smoke that poured forth from this organically fueled flame smelled even worse than the fumes from burned human hair. According to Ishmael, “It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.”
    This horrible smoke wafts across the deck as Ishmael stands at the Pequod ’s helm on a dark and breezy night. “[T]he wild ocean darkness was intense,” he recounts. “But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.... [T]he 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.” Ishmael is taken over by a “stark, bewildered feeling, as of death” as he attempts to steer the Pequod through her self-created fog. Suddenly he discovers that he has somehow managed to turn himself around so that he is now facing the stern instead of the bow. This means that any turn of the helm will be the opposite of what he intends and could very well capsize the ship. Ishmael quickly corrects himself.