[In the following essay, Hamilton discusses Moby-Dick's sea in terms of its theological significance to Melville.]

For I say there is no other thing that is worse than the sea is
For breaking a man, even though he may be a very strong one.

Homer, Odyssey, VIII, lines 138-39

In Moby Dick the sea appears to mean virtually everything. It is the home of both the nursing whale-mothers and the rapacious shark. It has a serenity that can nearly cure Ahab's monomania; it is also darkness and death. It is in any case the primary symbol in Moby Dick and a clue to Melville's artistic and religious imagination. If, as Melville reminds us, the sea covers two-thirds of the earth, it also seems to cover two-thirds of Moby Dick. It is both earth's center, its ultimate clue; it also brings forth the savagery, destruction, and death lurking in human beings. I believe that Melville, in the course of working on his masterpiece, came quite literally to worship the sea, and I suspect it is his most distinctive theological category. It is not the weak Jesus or the evil God, but the inhuman sea that ultimately is able to solve his crisis of faith.

I propose to lay out the story of the sea in Moby Dick by focusing on the sea stories of the two main characters, Ishmael and Ahab. Neither has a simple or single view of the ocean. Ishmael's story is a developing and coherent one. He begins in flight from land, allured by Bulkington's courageous landlessness. But things happen to him; he stands mast-head watches, and he has a look, from a little distance, at Ahab's sea. He comes to see that he cannot be content with Bulkington's world. That world has more evil and death in it than he wants. Ahab's view of the sea is not developing; it is fixed, but it is dialectical. He knows the human sea, but his character weds him to the inhuman one, all madness and death.

Before turning to Ishmael's story, a word may be in order on the idea of nature in Melville's work. There is a tension here, and it can be illustrated by two texts: Ahab on visible objects, and Melville to Hawthorne in a letter during the writing of Moby Dick.

All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! … Sometimes I think there's naught beyond.¹

Ahab is here a convinced believer in the transcendentalist view of nature: nature as symbol of what lies beyond, in self and in world. Whales are not really whales, but something deeper, “a little lower layer.” This Christian-Platonist-transcendental view of nature is Ahab's, and it is related to his madness and to death. Melville appears both offended and fascinated by this view of nature. It is surely part of his artistic power that ordinary substances can be made to stand for extraordinary realities. In a letter to Hawthorne, during the writing of Moby Dick, Melville refers to a saying of Goethe, “Live in the all.”

This “all” feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.²

He feels the power of this transcendentalist-symbolic view of nature, but he distrusts it. He can, of course, be quite straightforward about nature and the sea. Nature delivers “outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it” (Chap. 36, p. 144). Sea, shark, whale, iceberg—all reveal “that intangible malignity that has been from the beginning” (Chap. 41, p. 160). All deified nature, he can write, “absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within” (Chap. 42, p. 170). Ishmael, whatever his mystical-transcendentalist temptations may have been at the outset of the voyage, will conclude (and this conclusion will be the charter of his physical and spiritual survival) that the relation of human beings to nature can only be a technological one. Let us turn to Ishmael's encounter with that piece of nature that is our special concern, the sea.

I. ISHMAEL

Ishmael is elusive as a character and as narrator. But we do know his sea, what it is and what he thinks of it. Moby Dick is a book about Ishmael's sea, and thus about land and about death. The novel begins with Ishmael's reflection on sea and land. Land—in this case New York City—is boredom, depression, even suicidal temptation. Ishmael goes to sea because he is in some kind of spiritual jeopardy. But, he tells us, the sea can be healing. Why otherwise do Manhattan dwellers inevitably wander down to river or sea on a Sunday afternoon? Meditation and water, everyone knows, are wedded forever. Moby Dick can be read as a justification for this wedding.

The closest Ishmael comes to explaining his feelings about the sea, and perhaps the closest Melville ever comes to giving us the clue to Moby Dick, is in the elusive remark about Narcissus, “who because he would not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned” (Chap. 1, p. 14). That image, the image of ourselves, is seen in all rivers and oceans; it is “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all” (Chap. 1, p. 14). Why the key? Oceans allure not because they clarify anything, but because they remind us that nothing can ever be clear. The sea, like life itself, is ungraspable.

Already, in the first lines of the novel, we are deeper into theology than we had any right to expect. The young Ishmael is caught in a theological crisis. He may toy with his Presbyterian God for a while, who, though unknown himself, is believed because He makes all things clear. But Ishmael is telling us of an ocean that functions as a perfect opposite to that God. That ocean is indeed unknown—it is “wild,” “distant,” “forbidding,” (Chap. 1, p. 16)—but, unlike God, it makes all things unclear.

One of the strangest aspects to Ishmael's sea is its relation to death. He tells us at the start that he went to sea to escape the threat of death in the life of the city. Yet the ocean itself is death-dealing—“there is death in this business of whaling” (Chap. 7, p. 41). He abolishes his fear of the death of the sea by a conventionally pious (and unconvincing, perhaps even to him) affirmation of the soul's immortality. Upstate Presbyterianism, for a time, abolishes his fear of death on the water. Soon he will find that the water itself will abolish his fear of death on the land.

On the way to Nantucket, Ishmael continues his reflections on land and sea. Leaving the mainland, he reflects on “the intolerableness of all earthly effort” (Chap. 13, p. 59); he turns against what he calls the turnpike earth marked by slavish heels, and prepares “to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records” (Chap. 13, p. 60). Land is death and despair; sea is also death, “monotonous and forbidding” (Chap. 16, p. 70) and perhaps something more.

In chapter 16, a new note is added. Not only does sea heal the landsman's depression, not only is it the dangerous symbol of life ungraspable; now it is related to freedom, heroism, the idealized American character. Referring to the character of the Quaker, Ishmael remarks that sometimes a unique individual emerges

who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remote waters … been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary, and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly … to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes one in a whole nation's census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.

(Chap. 16, p. 71)

Ishmael is thinking of Ahab here, but Ishmael-Melville also seems to be talking about the effect of the sea on his own private struggle for a bold and nervous lofty language for the very book he is writing. Something in the sea brings out the human, tragic uniqueness in a man. This is one meaning of the wedding of meditation and water. It almost seems as if Melville is suggesting that it is nature, not history; sea, not land, that most decisively shapes the American character.

Against this background of reflection on the sea, Ishmael makes his apostrophe to his shipmate Bulkington who is at the helm as the Pequod leaves Nantucket. Ishmael will not finally be able to live wholly in the heroic air of Bulkington's radical landlessness (though Melville may have been so able), but here at the start of the voyage he longs to, as he struggles toward his maturity. Bulkington, just back from a long voyage, returns immediately to sea. “The land seemed scorching to his feet.” Port he rejected—port as standing for help, friends, comfort, for “all that's kind to our mortalities.” And Ishmael reflects on Bulkington's view of land and sea.

But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

(Chap. 23, p. 97)

This is a simple but astonishing allegory: ship is the soul, the wind is the world, land and home are peril, the sea's landlessness is freedom. And, Ishmael continues, “all deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore” (Chap. 23, p. 97). For in

landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than being gloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!

(Chap. 23, p. 97)

This is the most deeply felt expression of Ishmael's romantic idealization, almost divinization, of the sea. Sea stands for all the heroic graces of humanity, while land, city, American history itself—all are rejected. Ishmael will always hold to this, but he will add to it. He has yet to encounter another's sea—that of his captain—and deeper waters await him. The intensity of these lines makes it hard to avoid the feeling that Melville put a very central part of his own imagination into this tribute to Bulkington and to landlessness as perhaps the only true divinity.

Ishmael never loses his confidence in the healing sea, and he never rejects Bulkington. But in recounting his experience of standing a mast-head watch, he comes to see that the beautiful sea can be deadlier than the wild one. Up there, a hundred feet above the deck, you are “lost in the infinite series of the sea” (Chap. 35, p. 136), the seductive sea, he calls it (Chap. 35, p. 139), where “everything resolves into languor” (Chap. 35, p. 137). He recounts something like a classical mystical experience, as one is “lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie” (Chap. 35, p. 140) that he “loses his identity, takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature”; lulled by the “inscrutable tides of God.” one is likely to “drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever” (Chap. 35, p. 140). This new dimension of Ishmael's sea, this curious affinity between water, beauty, death and mystic selflessness, is summarized in a striking passage.

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!”

(Chap. 112, p. 402)

Ishmael has discovered not only the literal death that lurks in the craft of whaling, but the deeper mystical death that lurks beneath the whole romantic attitude to nature. Narcissus dies in the water because, in his egotism, he wishes to merge with the image of himself in the water. Ahab-Narcissus dies, and brings others to their deaths, for the same mad reason. Ishmael begins to see this madness of mysticism, and this discernment will give him his freedom from both madness and death in Ahab's sea.³

Sea-mysticism taught Ishmael something, but it didn't convert him. He had gone to sea because of death on the land, and he knew that he would be exploring death at sea. He may still be drawn to Bulkington's landlessness, but he is becoming as grimly realistic about sea as he had been about land. He is presumably prepared to confront the spiritual temptation offered by his captain, and in response to that, a new factor emerges in his reflection on land and sea. He comes to long for the land at sea, much as he had longed for the sea from the land.

Let us look at this emerging realism. The best example can be found in chapter 58, “Brit.” The chapter begins with a comparison of the brit-strewn ocean to an American wheat-field, reminding us of the connection Melville liked to draw between ocean and prairie. But this comparison leads not to the healing sea with which he began, and not to any praise of heroic landlessness. It leads to an expansion of his mast-head pessimism, as Ishmael remarks that

the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters …

(Chap. 58, p. 235)

He had spoken before of the sea's “unshored, harborless immensities” (Chap. 32, p. 116) and he had noted, in the chapter on whiteness, the special terror of white water. But these earlier explorations are made more precise. The destructiveness of the sea is used to attack American pride. However much, Ishmael says, baby man may congratulate himself on his technological prowess, “the sea will insult and murder him” (Chap. 58, p. 235), for American self-righteousness ignores “the full awfulness of the sea” (Chap. 58, p. 235).

Chapter 58 is the decisive summary of Ishmael's engagement with the inhuman sea as an experienced sailor. “The live sea swallows up ships and crews,” it is like “a savage tigress” or “mad battle steed”; the “masterless ocean” (masterless, in that no guiding providence constrains it) in its “devilish brilliance and beauty” destroys all. And finally: “Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea” (Chap. 58, p. 235). This cannibalism is shortly explored visually in the scene of the sharks devouring their own entrails (Chap. 66, p. 257) and in Queequeg's comment on that scene: “de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.” The presence of death, even in the mildest of seas, is beautifully portrayed in the picture of the beheaded carcass of the whale, released from the ship's side.

Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

(Chap. 69, p. 262)

And in “The Try-Works” chapter, the Pequod becomes a flaming hell, sailing into “the blackness of the sea” (Chap. 96, p. 353), that sea thus transformed into “the dark side of this earth” (Chap. 96, p. 355).

The mature Ishmael's perception of the sea's evil leads him to modify the passionate landlessness he had earlier admired in Bulkington. Since the sea is a cannibal, perhaps the contrasting land is not quite so “turnpike,” so contemptible. In a statement more like Tommo, at the beginning of Typee, than his own early romantic optimism, he can say:

For as this 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 [the inner isle, of course, but also those other isles Ishmael has pushed off from: Manhattan, Nantucket], thou canst never return!

(Chap. 58, p. 236)

This identification of the soul's inner security with land is something new for Ishmael. It is not that he has become a landsman, and he is not utterly rejecting romantic landlessness, but the simple distinction between the evil land and the healing sea is certainly blurred.

Ishmael has one more dimension of the sea to discover. He has yet to encounter the Pacific. Earlier he had told us that the Atlantic is settled and civilized, while the Pacific is “solitary and savage” (Chap. 54, p. 210). At the close of the novel, as the Pequod finally enters the Pacific waters, Ishmael utters a final credo (in chapter 111, which F. O. Matthiessen has called Melville's greatest):

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath … And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shapes and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

(Chap. 111, p. 399)

Here the sea is the anima mundi, the very principle of life itself, restless as life is, gentle and deadly. And again, in yet another sense, the Pacific has become a god.

To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the mid-most waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built California towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.

(Chap. 111, pp. 399-400)

Ishmael's sea ends as it begins, with divinity. At the beginning of Moby Dick the sea is a minor god, Narcissus. Here, at the close, the mighty Pacific has become a symbol of the entire universe, heaven and earth together. Pan instead of Narcissus, before whom all must bow. Melville finally could not laud the Christian God because he came to believe him to be evil. The sea is his new god who does not lose his divinity because of his evil. (In a late poem, “Pebbles,” Melville would write, just three years before his death: “Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea—.”) Ahab's sea, to which we must now turn, will prove to be an intense confirmation of that ultimate sea that Ishmael came to worship.

II. AHAB

In chapter 114, “The Glider,” the Pequod is at the Japanese fishing grounds, in the Pacific, and the weather is mild. Ishmael reverts briefly to his mast-head romanticism, and speaks of the stillness created by “the tranquil beauty and brilliance of the ocean's skin” that almost tempts him to forget the tiger heart, the velvet paw concealing the deadly fang (Chap. 114, p. 405). It is interesting to note that he describes his experience of the ocean's beauty as a “land-like feeling” (Chap. 114, p. 405), reflecting his recent rediscovery of the land.

This serene Pacific even affects Ahab, as he draws closer to his engagement with the white whale. Earlier, in a meditation, he had felt the healing of the sea: “the warm waves blush like wine,” he had admitted (Chap. 37, p. 147), but they could not heal him then. He is too demoniac, madness maddened. Here, at the journey's end, Ahab expresses the same longing. “Would to God these blessed calms would last,” he says to himself (Chap. 114, p. 406). But they cannot; storms follow calms, death is life's only secret.

In chapter 70, Ahab speaks to the decapitated head of a whale, lying against the ship's side. He asks the head for its secret.

Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!

(Chap. 70, p. 264)⁴

The whale knows the earth's foundations, Ahab says. Once again we have the idea of the sea as anima mundi, the world's secret. Ahab, the perfect transcendentalist, knows that nature is not itself, but only a mask covering what lies in the human soul. Nature and soul are one; whale-head and Ahab are one. So in addressing the head, he is really addressing himself, and it is fitting that the address to the head should conclude with his most heartfelt tribute to the symbolic nature of language.

O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.

(Chap. 70, p. 264)

Later, in a similar meditative scene, Ahab watches a dying whale turn toward the sun, and his language to the whale and to the sea becomes virtually a prayer. (It is interesting that both Ishmael and Ahab have a divine sea at the heart of their stories.)

Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. … In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.

Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!

(Chap. 116, pp. 409-110)

Ahab, like Ishmael, turns to paganism to find the right words of praise; not to Pan, but to the even older chthonic goddess of the waters. Ahab has become one with that divinity, far more radically than ever Ishmael had done with his divinities on the mast-head.

Once more, before the chase, Ahab confronts his goddess in the forms of the gentle Pacific. Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” begins with a striking comparison of the sea and sky. Both are blue, yet

the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells. …

(Chap. 132, p. 442)

Birds become the thoughts of the feminine air, while whales, sword-fish and sharks are the thoughts—the realities—of the masculine sea. The sexual imagery in this union of sea and sky becomes even more explicit.

A loft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as a bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen here at the equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away (Chap. 132, p. 442).

Ahab is affected by this brilliant blue morning, with its union of sea and sky. He thinks of his children, and the enchanted, feminine air “did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous things in his soul” (Chap. 132, p. 443). He looks into the water and sees his own reflection, but not his madness and anger. He weeps and seems, for a moment, wholly sane. He admits to Starbuck that he has forsaken the peaceful land “to make war on the horrors of the deep” (Chap. 132, p. 443). But the feminine air loses her struggle with the man who once declared that he knew not a mother, and the murdering masculine sea wins this decisive last battle. Ahab admits to Starbuck that he cannot relinquish the search, for he does not think his own thoughts, but God's. As Ishmael once and briefly lost his soul to the water, we see here an Ahab who has utterly lost his. He has given it to God and the water, and that is why he is mad: in schizophrenia the distinction between self and world is abolished. Ahab has become the ocean he sails upon. He has taken upon himself its murderous inhumanity, rejecting the claims of land and sky. In this single act he has become suicide, murderer, madman. Romantic transcendentalism received no more decisive rejection in the nineteenth century than in this story of Ahab and his sea.

Pip's madness underlines the nature of Ahab's sea. In describing Pip's experience of both the surface and the depths, Melville speaks of the inhuman and beautiful divinity of the sea. On and under the water, Pip had seen God and lived. It made him mad.

Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.

(Chap. 93, p. 347)

What Pip saw was the fortuitous, meaningless character of life, with God in control of the meaninglessness. This is one of Melville's darkest theological visions: God is not abolished by life's meaninglessness, he is turned into an immoral monster, not unlike Ahab. Ishmael escaped because he had found another God, the sea, in whom meaninglessness and divinity are not at war.

Moby Dick is found, all hands save Ishmael are lost, and the Pequod, rammed by the whale, is drawn into the vortex. And, as the final words declare, “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago” (Chap. 135, p. 469) at the time of Noah's flood. In the end as the beginning: Ishmael and the sea.

Shortly after Moby Dick was finished, Melville wrote to Sophia Hawthorne. The letter contains a conventional, yet moving trope.

Life is a long Dardanelles, My Dear Madam, the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck, but the bank is too high; & so we float on & on, hoping to come to a landing-place at last—but swoop! we launch into the great sea! Yet the geographers say, even then we must not despair, because across the great sea, however desolate & vacant it may look, lie all Persia & the delicious lands roundabout Damascus.⁵

Notes

1. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, New York, W. W. Norton, Inc., chap. 36, p. 144. Hereafter in this essay I propose to include my references to the novel in the text, citing first the chapter and then the page in the critical edition published by W. W. Norton, Inc.

2. Letter of June 1 (?), 1851, in The Viking Portable Melville, p. 434.

3. “Oblivion to cruel reality through idealism does not end in the transcendentalists' sweet vagueness, but in suffocation and death—as Melville was soon to show at length in the annihilation of the young idealist Pierre.” F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 126.

4. Melville always admired the deep divers, so something in him must be sympathetic to Ahab here. In a letter to Duyckinck, March 3, 1849, he had written: “I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more. …” The Viking Portable Melville, pp. 378-79.

5. Letter of January 8, 1852, The Viking Portable Melville, pp. 456-57.