Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick Page B

is, Ishmael’s vision of the future: a drowned world devoid of land dwellers, a paradise for whales.

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    Queequeg
    I n Typee, the bestseller Melville wrote about his time with the native peoples of the Marquesas, the narrator is at first enraptured with his hosts, in particular the beautiful Fayaway. But then something strange happens. His leg begins to bother him to the point that he can no longer walk. He soon realizes that he must leave this island paradise; otherwise he is going to rot to death like an old banana. “Try to go back to the savages,” the novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote in an essay about Melville, “and you feel as if your very soul was decomposing inside you.” So what happens when the roles are reversed; what happens when the native flees his island paradise for a whaleship?
    Queequeg was born on a Pacific island but decided that he had to leave. Like Melville, he fled his former home for the strangeness of the other. After his years as a whaleman, he is no longer strictly a native, but he is far from being your ordinary Westerner. He is, Ishmael tells us, “a creature in the transition state—neither caterpillar nor butterfly.” And then, after several sweltering days cleaning out the Pequod ’s hold, this tattooed exotic from the South Seas gets sick and, like the narrator in Typee, begins to die.
    As his body wastes away, his eyes become increasingly prominent. “[L]ike circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died.”
    When Queequeg was on Nantucket, he saw, Ishmael relates, “certain little canoes of dark wood . . . ; and upon inquiry, he . . . learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes.” Since his own people laid out their dead in canoes, he decided that he, too, should be buried in a “coffin-canoe,” and the carpenter subsequently builds him one of these formfitting vessels with some old planks taken from a grove of trees on a South Seas island named, cunningly enough, Lackaday.
    Like the Essex crew members, who fitted out their own coffin-canoes with what provisions they salvaged from the wreck, Queequeg prepares his craft for a voyage to eternity, requesting that his harpoon, some biscuits, a flask of water, a bag containing “woody earth scraped up in the hold,” and a piece of folded sailcloth for a pillow be placed in the coffin. Once all is in readiness and Queequeg has climbed into the coffin to make sure it is “a good fit,” he suddenly begins to feel better. “[I]t was Queequeg’s conceit,” Ishmael says, “that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him.” Within a few days, Queequeg is fully recovered and decides to use his coffin-canoe as a sea chest. Later in the novel, after the Pequod ’s life buoy is lost during an unsuccessful attempt to save a sailor who has fallen from the rigging, Queequeg offers his sea chest as a replacement. And so his former coffin-canoe is caulked and sealed and turned into a life buoy, the irony of which is not lost on Ahab. “A life-buoy of a coffin!” he soliloquizes. “Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of that.”
    Queequeg, the instigator of this unsettling transformation, remains an enigma to the end. The tattoos on his body were etched by one of his island’s holy men “who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out . . . a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous