Fear

Captain Kip Files

I wanted to get to know the workers on board the Morgan because, as a biographer, I need to gain some sense of Melville’s work environment. But this “sense” I hope to achieve is a far cry from the reality Melville experienced, and my own 21st-century experiences on the Morgan can only be a faint simulation of what he experienced in 1841.  So I must keep in mind that for one day only I am only imagining what another man’s life only might have been.  That’s a lot of “only,” and perhaps all I can do in writing a biography is measure the distance between my present and Melville’s past.  Still, one boundary these two spheres share is our common humanity; if only I might isolate, for one day, one or two of these shared humanities.

I had witnessed the work on board the Morgan: the running to stations, the pulling and heaving, the call and repeat, the unity of body and action.  Now I wanted to know the workers, from the youngest on board to captain, as individuals: what they thought and felt.  Maybe here would be the connection.  I had little time for extensive interviewing, and no illusion that in less than a day I could really “get to know” anyone, much less a group of workers busy at work.  Often my interviewees stopped their responses in mid-sentence with a polite “I gotta go” when first mate Sam or second mate Sean yelled out a command. So I developed a concise two-question approach that I hoped would allow me sufficient entrè into the varied lives of the crew:  How did you get into this profession? What is your biggest fear?

Of course, the two questions were a mirror of myself: who am I and why do I fear death? But I also had Melville in mind and, in particular, his brilliant (lesser known) novel Redburn, an autobiographical fiction based on his adolescence that is therefore an important though problematic source for any biographer.  In Ch. 16, Redburn is made to climb aloft to the highest yard in the dark of night to release the gaskets that tie up the highest smallest sky-sail. Standing on the skysail yard, Redburn reflects:

For a few moments I stood awe-stricken and mute. I could not see far out upon the ocean, owing to the darkness of the night; and from my lofty perch, the sea looked like a great, black gulf, hemmed in, all round, by beetling black cliffs. I seemed all alone; treading the midnight clouds; and every second, expected to find myself falling—falling—falling, as I have felt when the nightmare has been on me.

I have always related to this passage: the darkness, muteness, and falling.  I have a healthy respect for heights.  I like to hold tight to railings.  When I’m on a balcony, I imagine myself pitching over and have to shake off this “imp of the perverse” death-wish (as Poe might call it).  Three years ago, I witnessed a person throw herself off a five-story parking structure in San Diego: I saw her fall; I heard the slap-crack as her body hit the pavement like lumber, and I must shake off this image, night or day, whenever it invades my mind.

On board the Morgan, I had no time to explore the crew’s fears in such detail, and I knew that even in asking the question, I risked unconsciously coaxing them in their response toward my agenda of exploring Melville’s self-doubting expressions of fear rather letting them express their own authentic being.  But, I reasoned, if the present crew is a sphere completely separate from the sphere of Melville’s past, one common link between then and now is this form of our shared humanity.  Fear is trans-historical, and my job was to ask and listen to these sailors not listen to myself.

One respondent, the youngest of the professional crew with three years experience under sail on tall ships, was utterly unresponsive even to my first question: how did you get started working at sea?  He gave only laconic, single word utterances, and I never got to my second question: it seemed fruitless to attempt it. I left him to his solitude, which I deeply respect.

Others were more open in relating their life histories: they had been on a boat of some sort since the age of four, ten, twelve, clocking from ten to twenty years working summers or full time on ships powered by engines or wind.  I did not ask them if they loved the sea, if it had some pull on them, or metaphysical depth.  Their eyes were on the deck and the rigging and not on the horizon.  One had been at it long enough, he said, and he was set to quit in a year or so and return to college, get a degree, and make some money. For many, this sea life is a transition to something else.  Melville, for instance, left the sea and became a writer, which as far as we can tell, is when he began to reflect back on the pull of the sea and its metaphysical depth.

My second question was hard to ask because fear is something people do not readily admit to.  Men are often reticent with regard to this subject, so I fully recognize how the question What is your biggest fear? can be taken as an assault on a man’s manhood. The Fear Question is the opening of an issue that the culture tells men not to address. This mute stoicism is a venerable precept of courage, although, paradoxically perhaps, another precept is that writing about your fears is itself an act of courage, and one Melville manages quite well.  A common enough initial response to the FQ was “spiders.” The humor is that a big guy cringes at a little crawling thing, and we chuckled at this opener, though, any sensible man will tell you spiders are scary.

A second, understandable evasion was to ask whether I meant fear in general or fear at sea.  And I would let that ride: whichever, I would say; start where you want.

I was undeterred in asking this number two question, expecting that when I got people finally to relent they would respond mostly along the lines of Redburn’s fear of falling falling falling.  He relates this to “the nightmare,” which is the common enough anxiety dream of falling that many have experienced.  And why should a young man dream of falling? What anxieties could possibly afflicted a young man? For starters there is failing to succeed, to love and be loved, to be a man, to find a mate.  Falling is a form of failing.  The two seem closer than just one letter apart.  But no one mentioned this.

Although, one worker after some thought beyond the spider stage of response said, he mostly feared “freezing up” in the rigging.  I thought he meant that his forearms, wrist, and hand might, from all the gripping and holding, cramp and go numb, but no, the fear is being up in the rigging and not knowing whether to climb up or down, slide right or left.  Which line will secure you, which one is loose.  Freezing up is when you cannot tell.  The issue is not falling, but not knowing where to go.

In Redburn, Melville writes that it is not enough for a young sailor “to learn the ropes.”  In fact, that expression, which we take to indicate expertise, really is only the beginning of what a sailor in the rigging must learn, not just the names of the lines but their relation to each other, and one’s relation to the line.  To pass from a boy to a sailor man, Redburn tells us, means becoming “an artist in the rigging.”  This modern sailor knew this truth all too well.  He was as much an artist in the rigging as any of his crew mates, but he also knew that no artist can get lost in his revisions, that even the best artist in the rigging can “freeze up.”  Others listening knew what he meant.

Another long-time sailor spoke of fire in the hold.  A ship is a bit of tinder floating in the sea; it’s all wood and hemp; it is designed to keep water out; fire travels fast below deck.  And this person’s insight birthed another, a fear of being cast on a lifeboat at sea.  I think he was on a roll and might have listed more fears of the sea, but a command went out, and he ran off, repeating the command.

An unexpected fear came up in an unrelated conversation with one of the crew’s more experienced members: the snapping of the canvas sails as they billow out.  We assume this sound, like the revving of an engine, signals the beginning of some romantic sea adventure, or at least wind in the sails and forward movement.  But, she cautioned, the force of a flapping sail can break the line that holds it, which means the loose end of the sail with its ropes, block, and tackle can slap you in the face or push you off a spar.  If you hear a snap, you better duck or hold on tight.

Eventually, I worked up nerve to ask my questions to the captain, Kip Files.  It occurs to me now how presumptuous I was in asking the captain what he fears.  Maybe it is not good deck etiquette to ask the person in charge of the very piece of wood that is keeping you afloat in the Atlantic anything that approaches self-doubt, or interior searching.  Frankly, I want my captain courageous.  Unconsciously, I seem to have been re-enacting an embarrassing moment in Redburn when the young man approaches his captain, as if they were gentlemen of equal rank, and he is summarily rebuked for thinking he might pay the captain a social call.  What had I been thinking?  But Captain Files honored my question with respect, though perhaps a quizzical look, as if to say do you really want me to tell you I fear sinking, drowning, falling?  But his diplomatic response was a telling mix of confidence and anxiety: he feared failure, in particular, failing to get the Morgan into Boston on time.  And while I thought at the time that this was a spider-like evasion, I see now a truth embedded in his authentic response: his fear of failing is a version of my fear of failing.

Our “38th Voyager” crew coordinator, Paul O’Pecko grabbed me.  I was on the list to climb the rigging, and I was next. Weather permitting, we were allowed aloft but only up to just under the platform where the shrouds meet the foremast or mainmast.  More experienced sailors climb over this platform or through the “lubber hole” in the platform.  More experienced sailors continue up higher on rope ladders, or out on foot ropes sagging beneath spars, or slide down stays that keep masts secured.  I was not an experienced sailor, but knew I had to do this.

Fellow voyager Jason had just descended and gave me the harness we are required to wear, as do all sailors.  The straps fit tight around your shoulders and up your crotch.  Does that feel comfortable? Dana coyly asked.  Tolerably, I said.  Then the harness is not tight enough, she said.  So I cinched it up to uncomfortable, climbed onto the bulwarks with nothing but the sea moving past me below, and climbed the shrouds with nothing but deck below, following Dana’s instructions always to maintain three points of contact: two hands and one foot; two feet and one hand.  Our harness came with a loose strap ending with a clasp, which we are to use at the top to clip on to a secure line as we look around.

As I climb the ever-narrowing wooden rungs of the shroud, I wonder what use this clasp is while I am climbing.  I could fall to the deck, like lumber, as I climbed, the strap and clasp flailing in the descent.  Nor did I pause to look at the horizon; or up to the platform; or down to the deck; only at the whiteness of my knuckles as I muttered, “three points of contact; three points.”

Sitting aloft was Chris, who kept me company as I clipped onto to a line he had a liking for.  I had no questions for Chris about his career or his biggest fear.  I could see the bow of the ship as it cut the water and the deck spreading beneath me, and I turned as well to wave to friends below, who looked mighty small.  I am still a respecter of heights.

I asked Chris how often the wooden rungs of the shrouds break, and as I descended, I could not help repeat to myself his answer:  “Almost never.”

 

Work

At 5:15 AM, on July 15, we are all up and on deck.  True to maritime procedure, we were divided into watches, larboard and starboard, which meant that if we were actually working on the ship, and for more than just a day, we would keep to our assigned groups, and take on work commands related to our side of the ship. We would be true sea men and women.  And, to be sure, the “38th Voyagers” were invited to work with the more experienced crew members—both Mystic’s rotating demonstration crew and the professional crew hired on for the entire voyage—as the occasion arose.  That said, each of us had our projects to keep us busy, and I found that I worked less at the ropes than I had anticipated.  My chief excitement was that I was assigned the larboard watch, which is the watch that Melville says his alter ego Redburn was assigned to.  I would be a “larbolin,” as opposed to a “starbolin,” as workers in a watch were called.

Redburn is a greenhorn, as was Melville, and he is the last of the “larbolins” to be chosen.  The “38th Voyage” had a more humane way to divide up the watch.  We had numbers on our name tags, and mine was an even number,  which designated me as a larbolin, so I did not have to go through the peculiar humiliation of waiting in line to be the last one chosen.  I had had enough of that in high school.  But suddenly workers at the starboard bow bulwarks were assembling to weigh anchor, and I crossed over to help, not thinking it was work for the starbolins, not me.  The sun was barely up, and I had already violated maritime law.  And yet Sara, one of the demonstration crew, paid no mind and showed me how to pull the line, one hand over the other hand.

There were eight of us or more pulling, but only when told “heave.”  We stopped at the word “Avast.” I could feel the heavy weight of the anchor even on my short section of the line.  And when we stopped pulling and held tight, we could tell there was a ton of anchor at the other end.  Only when second mate Sean Bercaw had lashed the anchor to the side of the ship were we instructed to “drop the line.”

The anchor we lifted

I had wondered before what the sharpness of a ship’s rope  would feel like on my  palms.  But the line is supple, and though it is not soft, I felt no burn, but there was certainly something sticky there, which I was happy to show others: Jack Tar, I was. Another crew member showed me his pants, spattered with brownish tar, like a Jackson Pollack painting: Yeah, he said, we know tar.

I had come on board thinking I would record the feel of the sea, the stars and darkness at night, the heat of the hold.  In fact, it was an overcast night, cool day, calm sea, and foggy morning, and I found nothing unusual to feel or see.  But what I learned the moment I climbed out of my bunk and onto the deck is that a ship is a place of work.  I had known this intellectually, had read about it a good deal, and had written about it from the perspective of those books and my imagination, but now I could see it happening: and the young man who showed me his tarred hands and Pollock pants was above all a worker.

But the work begins with language.  Every line, mast, spar, and sail has an individual name.  And the workers need to know them all.  Indeed, a ship is nothing if not a glossary.  And you would think it would be enough, to begin with, simply to know your glossary.  But demo-crew-member Mary K. Bercaw Edwards (also an acclaimed Melville scholar and Mystic Seaport Museum researcher) told me that the words for each line mast spar and sail differ from language to language, and that once the professional crew had been hired—many coming from different ships hailing from different continents and maritime traditions—the first order of business was comparing their glossaries and deciding on which words to use for line mast spar and sail.  It’s a sea of words.  Something an English prof might appreciate.

The deeper implication I sensed was how the sea is a multicultural nation unto itself.  We think of the sea as an immense separator of nations, but it is in fact its own place.  I suppose that is obvious, and something, again, I had had some intellectual awareness of in reading about sea literature and culture.  But watching workers speak their lingo, and learning that they had agreed to speak it together, gave me an experiential perspective; their work was making their language work, and you could see it happen on deck.

The sea is a place that draws together customs and cultures from all over, puts them into one cosmopolitan “vessel,” makes them come together.  Put Palestinians and Israelis in a ship, I say, mix them equally in both watches as larbolins and starbolins, give them food and bunks, jobs, a space to share, a reason to work together. Ah, that would fix the world.  But I see I am just channeling Melville too much.  Or maybe not enough.  True, Melville saw ships as multiculural vessels: the Neversink, the Pequod, the Fidele, the Bellipotent. A place on the sea where humanity mixes.  But he also saw obsession, corruption, tyranny, racism, deception, infamy, mutiny, and war on those ships.  I need to snap out of this cosmopolitan romancing of work and the sea.

Much of our morning was shrouded in fog, and we could barely make out the tug up ahead that was towing us into open waters.  A high pitched mechanical foghorn, up on the mizzenmast, began to sound in the usual woeful measure.  Because of the low visibility, professional crewman Aaron at the wheel in the stern could not make out the tug maybe three hundred feet in front of the Morgan‘s bow, which was itself 106 feet away from Aaron.  So demo crew member Randy stood at the prow, and with his back to Aaron and facing the tug, he signaled Aaron whenever the ship began to veer a point or two off the line attached to the tug.  From my place at the bow I could see the tug ahead and watched Randy’s gestures.  Then I headed back to the stern to watch Aaron steer the ship, not by compass or his own eyes, but by Randy’s signal.

The Morgan‘s immense rudder is moved right or left by a beam-like tiller upon which is attached a wheel that winds a line coiled on a stem behind it.  The line is threaded through a set of pulleys and is attached to the sides of the ship.  When the wheel turns, it pulls the line and moves both wheel and tiller back and forth on the narrow stern deck.  Standing starboard of the wheel, Aaron would stare ahead into the fog, and at Randy’s signal, he would change course, not through precise and leisurely adjustment of the wheel with hand and wrist as you might on some pleasure craft, but with his whole body: arm, shoulder, chest, and knees.

        

Here the entire ship comes down to two men working together, in tandem, as if one person: no language between them, just action.

Other times, the ship seems alive with the “call and repeat” yelling of mate and crew.  This litany is by no means the call and response of church.  Instead, the mate yells out a command to a watch or anyone or the whole crew, and instantly the right crew members know who is being addressed and repeat back the command.  So the mate calls “Stand by the main braces” and the crew members run to the ropes called braces that maneuver the sails into the wind and repeat back while running “Stand by the main braces.”  Or when a sail is set to begin with, the mate will call “Sheet home,” and the crew will call back “Sheet home” as they pull on the lines called sheets, secured to the lower corners of the sails.  The idea is that if the workers vocalize the work that they must do, they will know what they are doing, and their mate will know they know.  And still other times, workers strain together on the lines in unison, without getting ahead of one another or falling behind with a simple “heave.”  There is no thought, only word and action. And in all cases, at all stations, everywhere there is rope: lines in the air, and on the deck.

Work, it is said, is noble, but I don’t know what noble means.  Labor is hard, focused, intense, perilous, immediate, and on board this ship, many work as one to pull a line in a kind of mutual self-adjusting simultaneity that hints at hope.

The Day Before: Provincetown

The Morgan‘s “38th Voyage” has been divided into a dozen or so “legs”: each consisting of a night in port and a day at sea.  I and nine other voyagers had been assigned one of the last legs, from Provincetown to Boston.  So getting to Provincetown, the very stinger end of Cape Cod’s scorpion tail peninsula, required some strategic thinking.  Rather than driving there via the Cape’s often overly trafficked roadway, my spouse Ginny and college-age daughter Liana made our way to Boston, spent a night as a guest of fellow Melville scholar and 38th Voyager Wyn Kelley, who lives outside Cambridge, and took the ferry from Boston to Provincetown on the following day, July 14.

Although the plan for my personal “38th Voyage” is to experience something of what Melville might have sensed when he first climbed aboard a whaling vessel, I had no thought of trying to re-enact moments from his whaling fiction.  But inevitably I thought of how Ishmael arrives first in New Bedford (where he meets and beds down with Queequeg) and then sails to Nantucket.  One beginning, two ports.  And I was doing something similar.  And I feel I must resist thinking this similarity is relevant to my biography if only for the simple reason that Melville’s fiction is not his life.  In fact, he first sailed out of Fairhaven (next to New Bedford) and did not visit Nantucket until after he published Moby-Dick.  While Ishmael and I might share the two-port opening to our narratives, they have nothing to do with Melville’s one-port departure.  I must be vigilant in not letting fiction stain biography. But who is without stain?

Morgan moored in Provincetown, alongside Mystic Whaler

As the high-speed ferry churned out of Boston harbor, several of us “38th Voyagers”—Daniel, Paul, Julia, Jason—found each other on the windy open deck and learned more about ourselves and our projects.  And as we plowed a long arc into Provincetown harbor, we caught our first glimpse of  the Charles W. Morgan, moored in the bay with the Mystic Whaler tethered beside it, like a lesser conjoined twin.

When the ferry brought us to the Provincetown dock, Ginny and I discovered that the town was no longer the sleepy village we had first visited in 1979, when our first daughter Emma was barely two and our second daughter Eliza a projection.  The main street paralleling the shore is now a bustling parade of tourists exploring the usual touristic shops and cafes.  It was also “Bear Week.”

Since the 1980s, Provincetown has become a vacation haven for citizens who are gay, and on this particular week, the community was celebrating “Bears,” who are gay men of a generally large build and hirsute nature.  These are men who do not fit the standard stereotype of the slender and perhaps effeminate male, and as a point of pride these big and hairy guys have found a label that provides some degree of comfort in a world that has, until recently, denied their existence and right to self-esteem.  Bearded, head-shaven, hand-in-hand, they walked past shops and beside out-of-towner families, making their humanity seem far more real than the label “Bear.” I could not help but think of Ishmael and Queequeg.

Or, for that matter, of Melville’s explorations of masculinity throughout all of his fiction.  Readers have always sensed in his writing an attraction to male beauty, male anger, male bonding, male iniquity, male detachment, male despair: a fact no doubt resulting from Melville’s inward gaze at his own masculinity.  Thus, the inevitable question: was Melville gay?  While I am not convinced that he was, I think the better question is how did Melville manage so well to write about the range of masculinities without recourse to the kinds of labeling we, in our time, inflict upon our thinking—fairy and bear, or even gay and straight—as if these single words could ever come close to expressing the complexity of sexual feeling.  In describing Ishmael and Queequeg in their matrimonial bed or standing head to head as a “cosy, loving pair,” Melville unexpectedly applies a hetero-domesticity to the two men that simply makes labeling impossible, as if to say we have more important, deeper work to do regarding humanity than affixing labels on people, like pounding revenue stamps on a bill of lading.  Finding the “life” in Melville’s deeper work is what I, as biographer, hope to do.  I may not be able to see life as Melville saw it, but I must train myself to look at life as it is, for myself, as best I can.  A biographer is one who looks, and hopefully sees.

Soon enough, I found myself and other Voyagers on board a small launch that would take us to the Morgan moored out in the bay.  Since our arrival, the tide had gone out, so the launch at the pier now floated far below us as we stood on the dock.  We descended the steep steps to the landing below, and  I turned to wave at Ginny and Liana as they watched us sailors-for-a-night-and-a-day head to sea.  The swift and bumpy ride to the Morgan made photography difficult, but I wanted a shot of the ship from below as we approached.  Within minutes we were climbing on board the Morgan.  When I got on deck, my first instinct was to look up at the foremast towering above us, its massive trunk, the ladder-like shrouds, the spars, and rigging.  Everywhere were  lines.

We were immediately greeted by third mate Rocky Hadler, who showed us no ropes but laid down a few rules—feel free to interact with the crew; don’t get in their way—and introduced us to our bunks in the forecastle below.

The matter of the bunked berths was something we had all awaited with some degree of anxiety.  What if I snore, or worse, what if they snore?  Will it be “stifling” down there? Will I fit in the space? Will the ship’s gentle rocking  put me to sleep or make me puke?

We descended below decks via the “stairs,” which is really more like a ladder, and given the small opening, it was best to go down as you would on a ladder, facing the rungs.  I learned this trick quickly enough after attempting to descend facing forward and immediately whacking my forehead on the deck as I descended.  This was the first of three or so lumps on the head, acquired through contact with beams below decks, and one barked shin.  Once you have sustained these injuries, you quickly learn to respect the close quarters of a ship, especially below deck.

In the forecastle, we selected our bunks.  Mine was situated at the very bow.  An added amenity for this bunk only is a massive beam adding strength to the bow.  I did not know whether to cling to this beam or shun it.  In approaching a bed, your instinct is to climb settle in the usual way: sit on the side, lean toward your pillow, then pull your legs in.  But if you try this in the twenty-inch space between bunks, you find yourself stuck in a half sitting posture with a bang on the back of your head, which compensates for the bang on your forehead coming down the ladder.  Regaining consciousness, I observed one of the veteran crew tuck herself in.  She simply dove head first into her berth, rolled over, pulled in her legs, and closed her curtain.  In a few minutes she was in the arms of Morpheus.

As for me, I read on my Kindle and listened for what was outside the bow and next to my ear: an occasional muffled shushing of water and bump of the landing deck.  Next thing I knew it was 5:15 am, and a very polite crew  member called for all hands on deck.

Sea Writing and Melville Biography

In this post, I want to begin an experiment by printing here selections from my Melville biography—still a work in progress—related to Herman’s first moments at sea, written before I embark on the Morgan.  Once I am done with my experience on a whaling ship, I want to see how I might re-write these passages.  The new versions created by such revision would be what I call a “fluid text,” mentioned in my previous post.

Some background: Melville embarked on his first oceanic voyage as a nineteen-year-old “boy” (greenhorn) on the packet St. Lawrence to Liverpool and back in 1839.  He would not go whaling, on the Morgan‘s sister ship Acushnet until January, 1841.  My first day sailing on a whaling ship will happen, weather permitting, on July 14, 2014, between Provincetown and Boston.  So my adventure will do double duty in simulating, via my own experience, Melville’s first voyage and his first day on a whaling ship. The three selected passages below attempt to capture some sense of life on a ship: its motions, its effect on time and sleep, and the stars at night.

[Leaving New York Harbor] from Ch. 39. Along the Marge

Sailing through the Narrows—New York Harbor’s gateway to the Atlantic—is exhilarating whichever way you are headed, into port or out to sea. Boatloads of immigrants, as early as the 1830s, have made their entrance to America through this strait, with Brooklyn to the right and Staten Island to the left. And the St. Lawrence might have passed one such immigrant ship as it sailed into the Atlantic. For Melville the exhilaration was in escaping America and family. The musty acrid stench of the city, the clatter of iron rims on cobblestones, the sweat and babble of workmen and whores, the chuffing of the steamboat Hercules that had tugged his ship through the Narrows, and the carpings of mother, uncle, siblings, and cousins simply dissolved. With wind filling the sails, Herman left it all behind and moved into waters he had never before witnessed. . . .

[Watches and Sleeping] From Ch. 40.  His First Crew

In Redburn, Melville makes spirited fun of this watch-induced, bell-driven system of sleep deprivation. With sophomoric good humor, he has Redburn weigh the pleasures of unconsciousness against the fact that when asleep, you cannot be conscious of being unconscious or therefore cannot enjoy the pleasures of unconsciousness. Thus, instead of seeking uninterrupted sleep while off duty during the middle watch, he asks a starbolin on duty to come below decks and quietly rouse him every hour as if he were announcing the next watch so that in waking up prematurely and repeatedly he can enjoy what would seem to be “several complete watches in my bunk to the other sailor’s one” and thereby maximize his awareness of the good sleep he is getting (NN Redburn ch. 26). Some will see the humor in this philosophy; insomniacs perhaps not.

The rigid dispensation of maritime time ignores human biorhythms. It reminds the sailor that every moment of his life is ticking away, every movement accounted for. At all times, he is being “watched.” The relentless system forbids normal sleep, countermands human will for the sake of survival, infects the mind with the presumption that an artificial order—“forms, measured forms” as Melville would have Captain Vere put it in Billy Budd—might somehow countermand the natural chaos of the waves. It even infects language.

Consider the economy of this nautical term watch. It is three kinds of noun and a verb. Seamen use a timepiece (watch) set to Greenwich time to navigate, while men in a team (watch) look at (watch) the rigging and sea during their shift on deck (watch): they watch the ship’s watch in watches during a watch. Now, after that sentence, look again at this word watch and see how odd it looks with all the duties it performs. At sea, one word for Time accounts for one’s group, identity, duties, and wakefulness; it brings the beating hearts of disparate men—their eating, sleeping, work, and bonding—in conformity to one artificial rhythm.

[Star Gazing] From Ch. 40. His First Crew

Although the city lights of Albany, Manhattan, even little Lansingburgh were dim compared to the glaring incandescent street lamps of today, their brightness limited stargazing for city dwellers, and on land Melville would have had to wander out at night and lie down in a field on his uncle’s farm in Pittsfield to watch the stars, or in Manhattan, he could walk along the Battery. But at sea, with the dim lights of the ship to his back, he could stand as far forward from the foremast as possible, press his belly to the port bulwarks at the bow, tilt back, and look straight up to the red star Arcturus over head in June. He could easily make out the familiar Big Dipper, and then follow the line of its pointer stars to Polaris on the tail end of the Little Dipper, that dim but ever-fixed star appearing only a couple hands up from the horizon, the polestar hub around which all other constellations seem to revolve. Lingering on deck into the middle watch that first night, he could see Draco perhaps for the first time, the long sinuous constellation that threads a path between the two Dippers almost encircling Polaris. And later at sea, with an hour or two to spare during other, quiet, steady-sailing middle watches, he could, if he took the time, observe the brighter stars of the Little Dipper seem slowly to move like the hand of a clock around the hub of Polaris, or so they would appear to move as Herman on the revolving earth revolved beneath the stars.

In one of his infamous but compelling “cetological” chapters in Moby-Dick, Ishmael alludes to this phenomenon—observable with the naked eye over time—when he reports seeing representations of whales everywhere, in paint, teeth, wood, sheet-iron, stone, mountain ridges, and finally stars. “Thus,” Melville concludes, “at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me.” Often related in mythology to the dragon, the Leviathan that earthbound Ishmael says he “chased round and round” is Draco, who with the Little Dipper also appears to revolve around the “Pole” of polestar Polaris.

Herman’s first day at sea was a long one. Though initiated into a world of work and regulated time, he had a well of adolescent adrenalin that normally kept him up late at night on land anyway, and ironically the nautical system of watches, which despite its rigidities seems suited to adolescent sleep patterns, actually required him to spend those late nights wide awake, every other day, without a carping mother sending him to bed. Like Ahab, he relished “the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches” and alone with his thoughts at sea, he was encouraged “to think untraditionally and independently.”

Fluid Texts: The Morgan, Moby-Dick, and Theseus’ Ship

Original and new timber of the Morgan keel.

How “real” is the Morgan as a ship, is an important question to ask.  As important as asking, what do you mean by “real”?  The ship dates back to 1841, but like any ship it had to be repaired, refitted, rebuilt during its active life, and it has been restored in recent decades.  So how much of the original timber is left, and does that make a difference in our understanding of this historical and critical object?

In raising the issue of ship conservation on our “38th Voyager” listserv, crewmember Frank Reed made the following comment, invoking the philosophical conundrum known as “Theseus’s Ship,” which goes something like this:  Theseus sails out on a thirty-year voyage, and every year he replaces some part of his ship—planks, sails, rigging, fittings—with new materials until, at some point, he has replaced all parts of the ship so that nothing original remains.  When he returns home, is he on the same ship?  As you can tell from Frank’s comment, which I am quoting below, the Morgan is indeed something of a Theseus’s Ship.  In responding, I raised a parallel in literary studies to what I call Fluid Texts, and my response follows Frank’s below.  I think the conversation reveals interesting ways to talk about ships, novels, “versions,” and revision.

Frank Reed (email correspondence, 6 July 2014):

When the decision was made in the early 1970s to remove the Morgan from her sand berth, it was a conservation decision with profound consequences. Rather than being a historical artifact, the Morgan necessarily became a living ship. Protected in sand, nearly everything below the waterline was “original fabric” (19th century wood) and a lot above the waterline, too. It was estimated that the vessel was 50-60% original fabric. But after re-floating, it became necessary to restore and replace planks and beams and everything else on a regular basis. Now the Morgan is less than 20% original fabric and by some estimates only 10% original fabric (mostly the massive keel). Is this an old vessel? By the standards of living ships, yes, it is. On wooden vessels, rotten planks get replaced. But by the standards of other artifacts, it surely isn’t a historical “artifact”. If someone sold you a desk manufactured in 1841 and then explained after you bought it, that 90% of the wood had been replaced within the past thirty years, you might be appalled! The Charles W. Morgan has become a literal Ship of Theseus (though it certainly has a stronger claim to being an old vessel than the US Brig Niagara –is that vessel the second oldest in the USA, as Erie Maritime maintains, or is the Charles W. Morgan, as Mystic Seaport claims?). As a completely restored and renewed sailing vessel, some have argued that the Morgan must sail, at least for one last summer and maybe more. And even in 1974, I remember some curmudgeonly locals arguing that it had no other fate except sailing cruises for well-to-do “tourists” once it was removed from the safety of that sand berth. Living ships must sail.

My Response (email correspondence, 6 July 2014):

Dear Frank,

Your delicious explanation is fascinating, and adds more depth to what I anticipate will be one of the deeper experiences of my life: sailing on this vessel.

You raise the parallel to Theseus’ Ship, which is an old paradox that has been used in other fields, in particular one that I am engaged in, when I am not writing this Melville biography, and that is Textual Scholarship and the creative process, in particular a field of study I sort of inaugurated called “the fluid text.” The idea is that a written work exists in multiple versions, and over time a text will “evolve” through various versions that the author has no control over but which reveal fascinating aspects of our culture. Translation is one such “revision” of a text into a thoroughly different “version.” And any form of adaptation—Moby-Dick appears as a children’s book, games, films, plays, operas, music—also generates numerous versions of the work.

The fluid text approach is not to say that the original of MD is any less important, only that the many versions of it are also an important way of mapping how a culture reads MD. Anyway, I have used Theseus’ Ship in talking about fluid texts to ask: how far along, from one version to the next, can we go before we find that the version in hand is no longer a version of the original but another original of its own? And my answer to this is “only when we forget the links that connect the versions.” In short, memory is what keeps Theseus’ Ship still identifiable as Theseus’ ship, even though every plank and line has been replaced.  And only memory, or our making histories of fluid texts, keeps us conscious of the “version” being a version.

So what I draw from this is that the Morgan is like Theseus’ Ship, which is like Moby-Dick. We keep generating versions of them and if we keep remembering our continued and evolving experience of the Morgan, we won’t scoff simply because the planks under our feet are not the very molecules that were first placed there. Culture is memory, and things like the 38th Voyage keep culture alive because it creates new memories about the same object, or version of the original object. So a new plank is a version of the old plank, and the person who placed the new plank is a version of the first ship’s carpenter who placed the old plank; and we voyagers are versions of the original whalers, at least to the extent that we can relate our experience to theirs, critically and with imagination.

But having said this, I want to know how many of us will want to see, touch, and feel some part of that 10-20% of the ship that Frank tells us is “original.” Can we touch the keel, without jumping over board. Melville, or rather Ishmael, has a chapter on the risks of knowing what the whale’s spout is: you risk death finding out; but I won’t get into that.  yrs, John.

[Later in this thread, New Bedford Whaling Museum senior maritime historian Mike Dyer passed along the image that appears above showing where some of the Morgan’s original and new timbers meet.]

 

Packing My Bag

When I tell friends and colleagues about my being one of the eighty “38th Voyagers” to sail on the whaling vessel Charles W. Morgan, for a night and a day, they invariably wonder what it will be like to sleep in a hammock strung between the low rafters of the deck above.  Yo ho.

In fact, the Morgan is equipped with rows of berths, layered along the sides of the ships below decks in the forecastle, pronounced “fōc’suhl,” the traditional living quarters of the sailors who worked the ship.

Because I am on the last leg of the Morgan‘s “38th voyage,” I and my crewmates have had the benefit, over the past month or so, of hearing online reports from earlier fellow voyagers of what their experiences have been and what it is like to sleep in one of these berths, which, ominously, has been likened to a coffin.

Indeed, these six-foot long coffin berths give the average-sized human of 5’8″ plenty of leg room for stretching out.  Happily, I rise to that exact average height.  Taller mates are not so lucky.  But I also hear that the forecastle is “stifling,” and there is always this incentive to get out of the berth and seek fresh air on deck.  That said, we have also been told by those higher up the chain of command that we must not clump around on deck at night, as the deck is the forecastle’s ceiling, and the reverberating noise disturbs the slumbers of the inmate crew.

Of course, as a Melvillean, I immediately recognize a link to Moby-Dick.  In the novel, second mate Stubb is so annoyed by Ahab’s obsessive, midnight, whalebone-leg pacing that he interrupts Ahab and asks him to soften his step: Ahab kicks him back down to his berth.  Simply as a literary-critical gesture for the benefit of my shipmates, I am tempted to take a midnight walk on deck in order to simulate Ahab’s obsessive pacing. Unlike Ahab, I am still equipped with two legs, so I will have to substitute a pair of heavy-soled boots for his noisome and noisy peg-leg.  But this is not part of my project proposal, and besides I’d rather read Moby-Dick than perform it.

But this reminds me that I should tell you of what I shall be packing for my night and day on board the Morgan.  We were given a list of suggested items, including waterproof jacket (check), comfortable shoes (hmm), water bottle, pillowcase, sheet, and flashlight (check times four), toothbrush and paste (yes), deodorant (please), hat, sunscreen, sunglasses (OK), meds (by the fistful), and my favorites: binoculars and writing tools (check and double check).  I will also bring my laptop and camera.

Ishmael put it all in a Carpetbag; I have my old backpack, which should hold what I need. But please understand that I am one of those types who define “camping” as where they don’t have room service.  My understanding is that such service is not supplied aboard the Morgan.

Reader be kind: we all have our set ways and our morning routines; we are all getting older, and set in our ways.  Rarely do I sleep in coffins, and at times I need to walk my suburban deck at night looking up at stars.  But I have vowed to sleep snug, to walk soft, and to man up and be the “boy” that my crewmates and captain will admire.

Morgan Sails Again

The whaling ship Charles W. Morgan, launched in 1841 out of Fairhaven (near the whaling town of New Bedford, MA), was built by the same shipmakers, who less than a year before, had crafted the Acushnet, Melville’s first whaling ship.  The Morgan and Acushnet are essentially sister ships; that is, they have the same shape, size, displacement, and provenance.

In January, 1841, Melville sailed on the Acushnet, and after eighteen months, he had had enough of whaling, or whaling under his despotic captain Valentine Pease.  He jumped ship on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, lived on that Pacific island for a month among the islanders, and wrote up his adventures “among cannibals” in his first book, and only best seller, Typee (1846).  Soon after Melville’s initial, meteoric success as a published author, the Acushnet sank.  But sister Morgan has survived and is one of the few among all the many nineteenth-century whaling craft to be preserved.  After having sailed 37 voyages, into the 20th century, it was out of commission for decades but remained seaworthy and has been a docked exhibit at Mystic Seaport Museum since the 1970s.  Like thousands of visitors to Mystic, I and my family have climbed aboard the docked Morgan, wandered above and below deck, and imagined Melville’s life at sea, on a whaling craft like this one.

Recently, enterprising curators, interpreters, and administrators at Mystic Seaport Museum received plentiful and enthusiastic funding to refit the Morgan for the sailing of its “38th Voyage.”  They have assembled a professional crew and developed an itinerary of visits between Mystic and Boston.  At each port during the three-month period of sailing, the Morgan has also been the showcase for various public exhibits and activities related to nineteenth-century whaling.  In addition, eighty “38th Voyagers” were chosen to sail the Morgan, in groups of ten or so, on twenty-four-hour “legs” of the journey: a night in port and a day under sail.  A call went out for applicants to send proposals for projects they would perform if given this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend a day working a whaling craft.  Hundreds of educators, scholars, scientists, historians, journalists, artists, poets, musicians, navigators, seamen and seawomen—experienced and not (i.e. me)—responded with ideas.  I proposed to write this blog, about a landlubber biographer seeking physical contact, for a night and a day, with an environment similar to what Melville experienced on his whaling ship for eighteen months.

Morgan‘s sister-ship Acushnet was not Melville’s first ship.  Up until his nineteenth year, he, like me, and perhaps most of us, had had a merely transportational not professional relation to ships and sailing.  He had ferried, by steam, up and down and across the Hudson and over to Rhode Island.  He had rowed or canoed, I suspect, the occasional sibling, cousin, playmate, and/or girl friend on the occasional pond.  But he had not voyaged into the Atlantic, under sail, until the economic depression of the late 1830s put him aboard the St. Lawrence, a wind-driven “packet” carrying mail, passengers, and cotton to Liverpool and back in the summer of 1839. Heading out, Herman was labelled a greenhorn, or “boy,” as all greenhorns were called, regardless of age. (Melville made this episode in his adolescence the basis for his fourth novel Redburn, a great read.)

So Melville had had significant sailing experience by the age of 21 when he signed aboard the Acushnet and experienced adventures and thoughts that would culminate in a life of writing, in particular Moby-Dick. Of course, nothing he had experienced on the St. Lawrence could prepare him for the peculiar hunt of the whale, its dismemberment and boiling down blubber, and the barreling up of oil.

For myself, nothing but my reading and writing has prepared me for sailing on the Morgan.  I am 64, and as they say, a boy.

 

Loomings

Let’s just say I am a 64-year-old Melville scholar and leave it at that.

I’ve read Melville, and taught Melville for forty years, and written about his writing, and, truth told, I am writing a full and I hope readable biography of Melville.  But none of these years of reading and writing has prepared me, exactly, for my next “Melvillean” project.  On July 14, I will be joining a dozen or so fellow humans, known to me only as names and email correspondents, and almost as many crew members to sail on board the Charles W. Morgan, a whaling ship built in 1841, normally docked at Mystic Seaport museum but now recently fitted for its 38th Voyage at sea.  For the first time in my life I will be under sail, on the Atlantic, out of sight of land.

I am a bit frightened.

True, I grew up on the Pacific coast, in San Diego, perched on a sunny cliff at the end of a street called (oddly enough it now seems) Narragansett, and listened to the muted roar of waves as I fell asleep each night: a boy of eight or so.  And true I have sailed on New York’s Lake George, with a neighbor, once or twice; and true, I have canoed on numerous ponds and up numerous streams in the Adirondacks.  And true, too, I once “sailed” from France to Ireland, over night on a massive hotel-like ferry and woke in the middle of the night to see a full moon rising, white disk, straight line horizon, silver streak, framed by a circular porthole. So I can claim some relation to the sea. But true, as well, I have never been under real canvas sails, with masts and spars and “ropes,” on a big sailing craft, out at sea.

But I am about to rectify that on July 14.

I don’t think I have to do this.  And part of me—that part we landlubbers call Reason—tells me that just because I am writing a biography of Melville and just because Melville went whaling does not mean I too must go to sea, for even a night and a day.  “Melville” is a text.  He is a particular set of written words.  That text is what I study, and the life in the text is all the life I need to focus on in writing my biography.

But nobody believes that. I  must get to sea to feel underfoot what Melville first felt when he, too, first went to sea.

I believe that is true, and maybe you believe me, too, when I say it.  But it is not the real reason.  By no means.  I also need to get to sea because its immensity frightens me, and, like you, I have few years left.