Authors: Paul Metcalf
Genoa (12 page)
“here says that he has had the quadrant hung up until he reaches land, to repair it . . .”
October 7, course changed from West to West-South-West, to follow the great flocks of birds overhead.
October 10:
“Here the people could endure no longer. They complained of the length of the voyage. But the Admiral cheered them up in the best way he could, giving them good hopes of the advantages they might gain from it. He added that, however much they might complain, he had to go to the Indies, and that he would go on until he found them . . .”
Ahab: “‘What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings
and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time . . .?’ ”
October 11:
The crew of the
Pinta
picked up “a reed and a stick, and another stick carved, as it seemed, with iron tools and some grass which grows on land and a tablet of wood. They all breathed on seeing these signs and felt great joy.”
October 11:
“. . . the Admiral asked and admonished the men to keep a good look-out on the forecastle, and to watch well for land . . .”
“‘It’s a white whale, I say’ resumed Ahab . . .: ‘a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.”’
“. . . and to him who should first cry out that he saw land, he would give a silk doublet, besides the other rewards promised by the Sovereigns, which were 10,000 maravedis to him who should first see it.”
“‘Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce my boys!”’
October 11, course changed again to West.
(As a traveler to unknown parts, Columbus was of course expected to bring back tales of fish growing on trees men with tails and headless people with eyes in their bellies . . .
And there was the light, seen by Columbus—or so he says—two hours
before midnight on the Eleventh: “. . . like a little wax candle rising and falling.” Be it the pine-knot torch of an Indian . . . sea worms, phosphorescent . . . or the jammed and crowded imaginings of Christopher . . . whatever it be, Columbus, on the strength of it, claimed his own doublet, and the Sovereigns’ 10,000 maravedis . . .
Ahab: “‘. . . the doubloon is mine, Fate reserved the doubloon for me.
I
only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first. There she blows! . . .”’
Like a great albuminous globe, monstrous beyond all proportion, the ovum looms ahead . . .
October 12:
“At two hours after midnight the land was sighted . . .”
A
FTER ALASKA
, Carl came back to Indianapolis, with a duffle bag of old clothes and odd relics . . . bits of bone from walrus, seal, and man, pieces of carved wood, various stones shaped by the ocean, or by Carl himself, or perhaps by long-dead Indians. He stayed (as always) only a short time . . . “just long enough to change my sox.” Then he was off, apparently without funds (this is another story, where his money came from, where he got it, or whose it was—he never seemed to have any except just when he needed it, and then only just enough), heading east . . .
and the next we heard he was in Spain, flying a plane . . . seat of the pants flying, he said, no instruments, no time to learn (he had never flown before) . . . for the Loyalists.
Columbus:
“this night the wind increased, and the waves were terrible, rising against each other and so shaking and straining the vessel that she would make no headway, and was in danger of being stove in.”
The first return voyage:—as on all eastward voyages, the voyages of return, voyages back—opposite and contrary to those westward—he met dirty weather.
“At sunrise the wind blew still harder, and the cross sea was terrific. They continued to show the closely reefed mainsail to enable her to rise from between the waves, or she would otherwise have been swamped.”
For two days, on board the
Niña,
the officer of the watch scanned each on-coming wave, and gave quick orders to the helmsman, in order that the wave might be met at the best angle. All contact with the
Pinta
was lost, and no attempt was made to hold to a course.
“. . . no one expected to escape, holding themselves for lost, owing to the fearful weather . . .”
“Here the Admiral writes of the causes that made him fear he would perish, and of others that gave him hope that God would work his salvation, in order that such news as he was bringing to the Sovereigns might not be lost. It seemed to him the strong desire he felt to bring such great news, and to show that all he had said and offered to discover had turned out true, suggested the fear that he would not be able to do so . . .”
(Melville to Hawthorne: “. . . I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man
ought
always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine.”
“He says further that it gave him great sorrow to think of the two sons he had left at their studies in Cordova, who would be left . . . without father . . ., in a strange land; while the Sovereigns would not know of the services he had performed in this voyage, nor would they receive the prosperous news which would move them to help the orphans.”
And Melville in Pittsfield, winter of 1851, writing
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
his son Malcolm an infant, and Lizzie pregnant again: to Hawthorne: “Dollars damn me . . .”
“. . . that the Sovereigns might still have information, even if he perished in the storm, he took a parchment and wrote on it as good an account as he could of all he had discovered . . . He rolled this parchment up in waxed cloth, fastened it very securely, ordered a large wooden barrel to be brought, and put it inside . . . and so he ordered the barrel to be thrown into the sea.”
Lizzie, reporting Herman: “Wrote White Whale or Moby Dick under unfavorable circumstances—would sit at his desk all day not eating anything till four or five oclock—then ride to the village after dark . . .”
. . . heading for the conclusion, the disaster, the sinking of the
Pequod:
Melville, as Starbuck: “. . . may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh Mary! Mary!—boy! boy! boy! . . . who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this day week may sink . . . !”
And Ahab, to Captain Gardiner of the
Rachel
(who has begged him to join in searching for his lost son): “Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good bye, good bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself . . .”
Ahab to Starbuck: “I see my wife and my child in thine eye.”
And: “About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me . . .”
Pittsfield, 1851—the infant Malcolm; Lizzie, pregnant; and cannibal old Melville, in the chase:
“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.”
From the medical book: “It is even assumed that the ovum itself has a certain radiation designed to attract the spermatozoa.”
(Ahab: “. . . the most vital stuff of vital fathers.”
“As soon as the first spermatozoa have reached the ovum, they surround it and try to penetrate with their heads the outer membrane.”
Starbuck: “Oh! my God! what is this that . . . leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue.”
Again, the wind hesitates, the children below are quiet. The sensation I have had of the attic as a ship, pitching upon the plain, is gone, and I tilt back in the chair, balancing on the back legs; my body is still, and numb,
and glancing upward, I notice the crossbeam, a tremendous piece of oak, hand-hewn, that divides the attic over my desk . . . something associated with it comes to mind, and in a moment I recall
the tornado
We had seen it coming from the front porch, and my father had herded us—Mother, Carl, and myself—into the basement, while he went first to the barn to secure a logging chain, and then returned to the house, and climbed (we could hear his footsteps, the chain clanking on the stairs behind him) to the attic . . . then there was silence, save for the rising wind. I was little then, easily held by the wrist, but Carl, whining and squirming, suddenly broke away, and before he could be reached he had jumped the steps three at a time and was gone . . . Mother screamed after him, but didn’t follow: she tightened her grip on me, and let him go. The house fairly shook, we heard the barn roof lifting and settling in the pasture, some of the other outbuildings collapsing, and we thought for a moment that the roof of the house had been moved . . . After it was over, Father would say little, except to command Carl to what was left of the barn for punishment . . .
but Carl—the excitement of the storm mixed with the tears of his beating—couldn’t wait to tell me what had happened: how Father had lifted planks, had secured one end of the chain to floor beams, the other to the cross-beam overhead; how the roof had started to lift, and the chain had held—but the second time, the chain had broken, and Father had grasped an end in each hand . . .
. . . when the roof lifted a third time, Father had spreadeagled himself, his feet off the floor, the whole superstructure held by his hands, arms, and shoulders . . .
(Melville: “And prove that oak, and iron, and man/Are tough in fibre yet . . .”
The roof twisted slightly, and settled back in its old position . . .
. . . and after, Father had deliberately unfastened the chain, surveyed the broken link, restored the floor planks, and (although he had taken no notice of him, Carl had thought himself undiscovered) called to Carl, dragged him from his hiding place near the eaves, and marched him to the barn for a thrashing . . .
It was the Polar Front—meeting of Polar Continental and Tropical Maritime—that caused Columbus’ dirty weather. The violent air masses, forming a circular motion . . .
(Bondi,
C
OSMOLOGY
:
“The nebulae show great similarity amongst themselves. They are probably all rotating and many of them show a spiral structure.”
. . . create a hurricane, or perhaps tornado or waterspout, a sucking up . . .
But Columbus, first and always a navigator, fought it out . . .
and Melville, too, whose eye was level . . .
(“. . . let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze upon God.”
. . . went—not up—but sounding, into the whirlpool, the vortex . . .
. . . went down.
“. . . resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby-Dick swam swiftly round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him . . . Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale’s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,—though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble . . .”
The vortex: “. . . whose centre had now become the old man’s head.”
Hur obed,
the Phoenician sailors called it:
hole of perdition . . .
Charybdis.
And on the second voyage, Columbus, sailing along the southern coast of Cuba, suddenly “entered a white sea, which was as white as milk, and as thick as the water in which tanners treat their skins.” The colors changed—white, green, crystal-clear, to black—and the men recalled old Arabic tales of the Green Sea of Gloom, and endless shoals that fringed the edge of the world.
