Reconstruction 7.1 (2007)
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American Fantasies of Masculine, Physical Labor and the Dangerous Bodies of Pacific Island Whalemen in Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick / Jennifer Schell
Abstract: Throughout the nineteenth-century, writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper and Joseph C. Hart, fairly consistently appropriated the New England whaling industry for national purposes. They claimed the economic successes of the industry as American successes, and they positioned the whalemen as exemplary American workers. However, not all American whalemen were native-born Americans; some were foreign-born laborers. The presence of Polynesian workers and their racialized laboring bodies - often described as monstrous, grotesque, and repulsive - disrupted nationalistic appropriations of the whaling industry and its workers. What was so dangerous about these men was not just that were reputed to be "savage" cannibals, but that they had the potential to threaten the capitalist hierarchy according to which the whaling industry was organized. Polynesian sailors were believed to be naturally predisposed to disobeying the orders of their superiors, causing racial tension in the forecastle, and engaging in bloody mutinies. To control these workers and the threats they posed, authors of American whaling narratives employed discourses of containment which described the bodies of Polynesian whalemen as either physically or metaphorically constricted. Roger Starbuck's popular dime novel, The Golden Harpoon, depicts, Driko, the Maori mutineer, as a bloodthirsty cannibal who must be imprisoned in the bowels of the ship's hold before proper order can be restored to the ship. In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Ishmael, Bildad, and Peleg attempt to metaphorically transform Queequeg's body into an American one, "a George Washington cannibalistically developed" or reduce him to an American animal, a quahog. Although different, discourses of physical and metaphorical containment accomplish the same goal: controlling the bodies of racially-different, potentially "savage" Polynesians such that they are no longer capable of threatening the safety and well-being of white Americans, the chain of command aboard ship, and the proper functioning of American capitalism's organization of labor.
<1> Commenting on the Nantucket whalemen in the first chapter of his novel Miriam Coffin, or The Whale-Fishermen (1834), Joseph C. Hart claims that:
In the exercise of their hazardous trade they have become a bold and hardy race of men...We know not how we can better sum up their character than by giving them their own expressive title of AMERICAN WHALE-FISHERMEN... (4).
In this passage, Hart describes all of the remarkable personality traits that these enterprising mariners possess - their boldness, their bravery, their hardiness, and their manliness - but what makes Hart's characterization of these men especially noteworthy is the way he emphasizes their American-ness by giving them a capitalized title which specifically names their nationality. Heavily invested in a powerfully compelling national fantasy of masculine physical labor, Hart transforms these working-class men into exemplary Americans - the best of national citizens - simply because of the work that they do. Hart was not alone; similar representations of New England whalemen abound in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, most notably in the Nantucket chapters of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Owen Chase's widely popular personal narrative of the Essex disaster (1821), and the whaling episodes of James Fenimore Cooper's novels, The Pilot (1824) and The Sea Lions (1849).
<2> If the New England whalemen could be described as representative of American exceptionalism, then the industry in which they worked could be described as metaphorically representative of American capitalism. This symbolic figuration can be attributed to the fact that Hart, and others like him, believed that the fledgling United States needed to develop its economic might and increase its standing in the world marketplace. These authors heaped their praises upon the American whaling industry precisely because the Americans decidedly out-performed their closest competitors, the British. In his book, The British Whaling Trade, Gordon Jackson compares the American and European whaling industries' profits for the years 1772-1805 and discovers that, except for the years of the Revolutionary War, American whaleships consistently brought more whale oil to market than all of their European counterparts combined (267). This imbalance continued well up into the nineteenth century until whales became too scarce to hunt, and substitutes were found for whale oil [1]. Whaling was the first truly globally competitive American enterprise, and it attracted the admiration and attention of many writers who were interested in explaining what made the American project and its people so extraordinary.
<3> This appropriation of the whaling industry and its workers for national purposes is complicated by the fact that many native-born American men, the ones who were so admired by these authors, toiled alongside significant numbers of foreign-born sailors, without whom the industry would have floundered [2]. There are the Portuguese whalemen in J. Ross Browne's Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846), the European mariners from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and the many African men Frederick Douglass mentions in his speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" (1888) [3]. In addition, myriads of Pacific Islanders worked on American whaling vessels. According to Briton Cooper Busch's 'Whaling Will Never do for Me,' the number of Hawaiians who were working in the American whaling industry in the year 1846 topped 3,000 (46). While it is important to consider the ways in which authors of nineteenth-century American whaling narratives dealt with these other foreign-born workers, I want to focus specifically on narratives that describe Pacific Islanders [4]. Polynesian sailors, more so than many others, suffered from a reputation for savagery and cannibalism, and many authors of whaling narratives perceived them to pose a specific threat to the capitalism of the industry in which they worked. This threat had everything to do with the somewhat suspect and irrational fear that Polynesians were more likely to mutiny than other sailors, disrupt the ships' chain of command, cannibalize their fellow crewmembers, terrorize all aboard, and prevent the work of whaling from being performed. Realistically speaking, there was no reason why Polynesian sailors should be feared any more than white, African, or Portuguese sailors. All sailors - regardless of race, ethnicity, or nationality - were capable of becoming dissatisfied with their working and living conditions and mutinying. However, to many nineteenth-century Americans, Polynesians represented the ultimate embodiment of unpredictable, uncontrolled, uncivilized, primitive savagery. Thus, Polynesians inspired an especially urgent, intense and palpable fear in the hearts and minds of many authors of American whaling narratives. As a result, these writers tend to describe Polynesians according to rhetorical discourses of physical and metaphorical containment, which serve to manage and control these culturally-biased fears about the potential eruption of savagery aboard ship and the destruction of the ships' capitalist hierarchies of labor.
<4> Driko from Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon (1865) and Queequeg from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick are both Pacific Island whalemen, and this marks them as racially and culturally different from their native-born American counterparts. Both Driko and Queequeg have reputations for cannibalism and are feared by most of the other characters in the novels in which they appear. What's more, their presence aboard ship is perceived to be threatening to the hierarchical system of labor according to which all of the mariners work. Because the whaling industry was itself a metaphorical stand-in for American capitalism, threats to the former constituted direct threats to the latter. Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon advances the argument that Driko becomes one of the ringleaders of the mutiny aboard the Montpelier because he is a vicious "savage" who will stop at nothing to gain control of the ship and completely reverse its hierarchy of command. In the first few chapters of Moby-Dick, Ishmael fully convinces himself that Queequeg is going physically harm him - kill him, cut off his head, or cannibalize him. Meanwhile, Bildad and Peleg are reluctant to hire Queequeg because they seem to believe, especially after his impressive display with his harpoon, that he is a dangerous person and that he might be difficult to manage. Even though Driko and Queequeg are both skilled workers, valuable assets to have aboard ship, the treatment of these characters in The Golden Harpoon and Moby-Dick demonstrates just how much other Americans feared their foreign, exotic, laboring bodies. Ultimately, Driko and Queequeg pose a grave danger to the commercial interests of the voyage because if the hierarchy of labor aboard ship is disrupted by mutiny, murder, or cannibalism, then the whalemen cannot efficiently kill whales, boil down the oil, stow it in the hold, or bring it to market. At first glance, the fear that one man might be single-handedly capable of usurping command of the ship and wantonly terrorizing everyone aboard might seem rather irrational. However, the fear is not really about any one individual sailor; it is about the disruptive potential of racialized bodies. In turn, this fear generates others about the fragility of the capitalist hierarchy aboard ship, the fragility of national fantasies of masculine physical labor, and the fragility of American capitalism as a whole.
<5> Why did the whaling industry employ Pacific Islanders if they were so potentially disruptive to the capitalist hierarchy according to which it operated? One possible answer to this question is that Pacific Islanders often replaced crew members who died or deserted mid-voyage [5]. Ready and willing laborers were hard for desperate ship captains to find in the realm of the Pacific, and they certainly hired Pacific Islanders for the simple reason that they had no other options. Practicality aside, Pacific Islanders played another important role aboard ship, for, ironically enough, their presence could sometimes help to reinforce the ship's hierarchy of labor. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the whaling industry's system of labor organization actually required the presence of the very same men who had the capacity to destroy it. The more racially and ethnically diverse the group of common foremast hands tended to be, the more divisively they tended to segregate themselves literally and emotionally along racial lines. As Frank Bullen observes in The Cruise of the Cachalot (1898), "I saw at once that the black men and white had separated themselves, the blacks taking the port side and the whites the starboard" (4). Notice how the whites take the starboard or "right" side. Social activist, common foremast hand, and white man, J. Ross Browne, in Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, is absolutely appalled that, because of his low rank, he has to endure "the insolence of a negro" and live with Portuguese sailors, whom he claims are swine-like, "uncultivated brutes" (108 and 141). Keeping the forecastle racially and ethnically diverse by hiring a variety of whites, Irish, African Americans, Africans, Native Americans, Portuguese, and Pacific Islanders was one way for a captain to divide and conquer his men. In this way, a whaleman's racial prejudices could potentially keep him from joining with his fellow sailors and revolting and mutinying as a single unified group.
<6> Racial differences did more than just keep whalemen from becoming mutinous allies, though. As David Roediger claims in The Wages of Whiteness, the "status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships" (13). While Roediger's primary interest is slavery and the development of "working-class whiteness" in antebellum American, his insight that working-class, white men could compensate themselves for their structural inferiority by claiming racial superiority over their co-workers is quite valuable (9). White sailors, who were subordinates in the hierarchy of the ship, could earn what Roediger, quoting W.E.B. Dubois, calls, "'a...public and psychological wage" (qtd. in Roediger 12). In this way, white whalemen could satisfy themselves that even though they were toiling away with little hope of ever being promoted up the proverbial "ladder of success," they were not standing on its lowest rung. Both this voluntary segregation and this "psychological wage" helped to protect the capitalist hierarchy of the ship - and, metaphorically speaking, American capitalism - from the ever-present threat of mutiny and revolt. Thus, the American whaling industry needed to have these foreign-born racialized laboring bodies working on its ships. Part of the problem, though, was that the threat of mutiny was never completely eliminated. As Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra and Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic claim, mariners, including whalemen, could and did form strong friendships and affiliations with one another, despite national, racial, and ethnic barriers. And so, there was always a potent fear that trans-national groups of sailors could coalesce and ignite widespread labor protests which could destroy the capitalist system according to which the whaling industry operated. This fear was diffused by carefully containing, controlling, and managing the workforce, especially foreign-born workers, such as Driko and Queequeg.
<7> Both The Golden Harpoon and Moby-Dick initially represent Driko and Queequeg as fearsome, potentially disruptive individuals, but they somehow succeed, to varying degrees, in controlling their "savage" identities. Interestingly enough, both texts adopt the discursive strategy of physically or metaphorically containing the bodies of these men, in order to keep them from either harming or bonding with the other mariners with whom they live and work. Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon suggests that Driko's body, in particular his marked, scarred, pierced, and tattooed skin, is emblematic of the "savage" character contained within. Then, Starbuck proceeds to explain how this "savagery" erupts when Driko upsets the hierarchy of the ship and the commercial interests of the voyage by leading a murderous, mutinous plot to assume control of the vessel. Driko's attempt to subvert the ship's hierarchy ultimately fails as the white heroes regain control and order is restored. He is thrust back into submission, physically contained in the hold of the ship where he lies, sentenced to death. What is perhaps even more interesting is what happens to Queequeg in Moby-Dick, namely, other characters try to metaphorically contain his identity by re-imagining it such that his threatening savage, pagan, and cannibalistic identity is neutralized. In Ishmael, Bildad, and Peleg's hands, he seems to become a metaphorical American - a "George Washington cannibalistically developed," a "Hedge-hog," and a "Quohog" (18 and 88). In the end, this rhetorical strategy of physical and metaphorical containment effectively launches a high-stakes battle over Driko and Queequeg's identities in which both sides vie for control over these laboring bodies and what they represent.
<8> In order to fully understand The Golden Harpoon and Moby-Dick's discourses of physical and metaphorical containment, it is necessary to understand something about the national fantasy of masculine physical labor, which these foreign, exotic, racialized bodies threatened. This culturally-dominant ideological fantasy of American national identity transformed white whalemen into representative Americans, hard-working, brave, moral, virtuous, and manly men. Hart, Crèvecoeur, Cooper, and Chase describe whalemen in this way because these mariners possessed well-developed, muscular laboring bodies and a great deal of physical prowess. Whaling is an incredibly physically demanding task, and it requires a set of specific skills, such as coordinated rowing, harpooning, and flensing (the process of stripping a whale's carcass of its blubber), which could only be acquired over the course of several voyages [6]. As such, the men working in this industry possessed a strong sense of personal pride in their laboring bodies and physical capabilities. Those writing about whalemen tended to share this pride, and they also had a certain vicarious aesthetic/emotional investment in these men and their labors. They saw a kind of beauty in the synchronized efforts of these men - these tanned, physically impressive laboring bodies - all working together, struggling to confront the largest natural creatures on the planet with what amounted to slim spears. The identification of whalemen as proud laborers was one key component of a conglomerate identity, which had everything to do with the whalemen's sense of themselves as Americans, workers (meaning both laborers and employees), and men. These characteristics taken together merge into what I have called an ideological fantasy of masculine physical labor which was available to be appropriated for national purposes. In this fantasy, these workers became, to use a bodily metaphor, the backbone of America. These men were the ones, who, via their physical labors, provided the whale oil that lit the streets of an entire nation and poured wealth into the United States' coffers.
<9> This ideological fantasy was available to be appropriated for national purposes because being an American is not just a matter of being a national citizen, but of possessing an imaginative, emotional relationship of belonging to America. Both Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities and Lauren Berlant in The Anatomy of National Fantasy emphasize the roles that imagination and fantasy play in configurations of national identity. Neither Anderson nor Berlant argue against the idea that national identity is materially constituted; rather, they focus on the idea that national identity is simultaneously capable of generating emotive responses in the imaginations of its citizens. As Berlant quite simply claims, "Nations provoke fantasy" (1). These fantasies often make their way into social forums where they are legible and recognizable, available for both appropriation and critique. National identity registers both cognitively and emotionally with national citizens. This double significance of national identity is what gives it its ability to say something about both the internal experience and external labeling of national citizens. Hence, national identity is a fantasy, an internalized relationship to a category that is externally produced and, therefore, socially legible. In other words, the bodies of national citizens are both lived bodies and cultural constructions of a particular kind, and for that matter, so are the bodies of foreign-born individuals such as Driko and Queequeg.
<10> National fantasies, such as the one I describe above, are ultimately ideological in nature because they mediate a host of power relations. Interestingly enough, the national fantasy of the manly American whaleman, because it is ideological, tends to reinforce predominant power relations, and in the process it makes these power relations seem natural. But, it is important to remember that this ideological component does not completely eliminate potential subversions, which threaten to dismantle this national fantasy. Tempted by the possibility of locating, naming, and critiquing a coherent American identity and its ideological components, Myra Jehlen in American Incarnation and Sacvan Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad both set out to grapple with the ideological nature of dominant conceptions of "American-ness" - its artifice and non-empirical nature - and explain how it is that these versions of American national identity continue to circulate across time. While both Bercovitch and Jehlen are highly critical of the ideological nature of these narratives of national identity, as am I, they are also interested in examining their strength and enduring qualities, for, as they observe, ideologies can be immensely powerful in their social and psychological effects even if they can easily be empirically disproved or discredited. As Myra Jehlen argues in reference to "the idea of America," "Denunciations of the reality of life in America as a travesty of the idea, or even the idea itself as a travesty, need not impair the idea's capacity to organize the world for those who continue to believe. Indeed, the idea can even continue, as the converse of belief, to organize the thinking of those who abjure it" (43). Thus, even deeply flawed or unrealistic ideologies, like that of the "white", masculine, American, physical laborer, can tap into very real emotions - for example, the aesthetic/emotional investment in laboring bodies I mentioned above. Culturally dominant ideologies pertaining to nationality can manage and mask social contradictions, including those aboard nineteenth-century American whaleships, but they continue to maintain their strength and currency because, I would argue, they create such palpable and compelling feelings in the lives of those they touch.
<11> Ultimately, the presence of foreign workers, such as Driko and Queequeg, pointed out several obvious contradictions in this ideological national fantasy of physical labor. If a whaleman could be a proud, manly, white, American laborer, he could also be a manly, non-white, non-American, disgruntled employee. My pairing of roughly oppositional identities indicates that a whaleman's identity consisted of a number of antinomies having to do with national identity, working identity, racial identity, and gender identity. These antinomies were not clearly-defined positions held by actual whalemen. Rather, the antinomies provide retrospective frameworks we can use to analyze these troubling and conflicting identities. In narratives written by and about New England whalemen, the identities which make up these antinomies vie for importance. Of each of the opposing terms, one almost always emerged as dominant, and it was these dominant terms, taken together, that created the conglomerate identity of proud, white, American, masculine, individual laborer - the ideological national fantasy.
<12> This conglomerate identity and its variations were all socially produced, not subjectively invented by individual whalemen, and they were hence publicly circulating, socially legible identities. Some understandings of identity assume that an identity - or the kind of self-knowledge that one would use to make an identity - is formed prior to its emergence in a historical, social, or cultural context, that individuals already possess some sense of their identity before they make some imagined choice of roles. This assumption forecloses the possibility, outlined by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, that individuals are always-already enmeshed in cultural contexts and that the development of their identity is impacted, from the very beginning, by the different kinds of meaningful socially legible identities offered to them as possibilities. Butler's "reconceptualization of identity as an effect" suggests that "...it [identity] is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary" (187). This opens up a middle ground - where identity is neither externally imposed nor freely chosen - and helps, I think, to more accurately characterize the kinds of socially significant identities manifested in the whaling narratives. Thus, the whalemen's laboring bodies, and their attendant identities, must be understood as both lived bodies and cultural constructions. Because they were subjectively experienced, these identities, practically speaking, could be lived or worn by individuals or made part of the personal fabric of fictional characters. However, the composite identity of the whalemen was also a culturally-constructed, dominant ideological fantasy with powerfully compelling emotive components. Importantly, this conglomerate identity was subject to potentially subversive eruptions of the other identities in the antinomies. For example, there was always the possibility that a disgruntled employee might become a proto-Marxist mutineer. Feminine identifications might erupt into homosociality and homoeroticism, precisely what Ishmael enjoys in the spermaceti scene in Moby-Dick.
<13> Here, I am most interested in precisely these potentially subversive identities, and how they are managed and subdued, not eclipsed or erased, by the more dominant identities in the antinomies. In other words, I want to explore how dominant identities managed to stay dominant - what rhetorics and discourses kept them dominant - even though their prominence was fairly consistently threatened by the subordinate identities. Because this ideological national fantasy of masculine physical labor, though powerful, really only included white men, working-class sailors of other races were excluded. While these men may have worked in the whaling industry, their presence - and the way it was written about - was carefully controlled and subordinated to that of the whites. Some racial and ethnic groups, such as the Portuguese, over time eventually came to count as "white" by a process which is somewhat similar to that which Noel Ignatiev describes in How the Irish Became White in reference to Irish immigrants in America. But other racial and ethnic groups, such as the Pacific Islanders, never did, and, in fact, they were fairly consistently condemned as "savages" throughout much of the nineteenth century. Of those American whaling narratives which describe Polynesian whalemen, most attempt to contain them and keep their racial and cultural differences from disrupting the work of whaling. Despite their textual and formal differences, both The Golden Harpoon and Moby-Dick are quite heavily invested in exploring discourses of containment, which serve to protect the hierarchy of the ship - and by metaphorical extension, American capitalism - by controlling the behaviors, the bodies, and identities of the Pacific Island sailors. While The Golden Harpoon endorses Driko's physical containment as a strategy for preventing and punishing his disruptive behavior, Moby-Dick indicates that it is ultimately impossible for other characters to metaphorically re-imagine and control Queequeg's identity.
II - Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon and Discourses of Physical Containment
<14> Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon first appeared in 1865 as a part of Beadle's popular series of dime novels. Initially, this particular text might not seem to have much in common with other novels from the series, such as those Michael Denning discusses in his insightful study of the genre, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America. After all, this one is set in the Arctic Circle aboard the whaleship Montpelier, not in the frontier West or the factories of the industrial Northeast. Furthermore, given that the actual work of whaling is completely effaced from its plot, class consciousness and labor concerns seem outside of the scope of this novel. However, as Denning suggests, "the dime novels that seem furthest from working-class life...are often told in accents of mechanics and laborers" (79-80). In fact, a closer examination of The Golden Harpoon makes it possible to see that it is really all about work, for this novel is actually a pointed commentary on the highly disruptive potential of the presence of racialized laboring bodies in the American workplace.
<15> As one of the ringleaders of the mutiny which occurs aboard the Montpelier, the Maori whalemen, Driko is especially threatening because everyone fears that he is a physically deformed, tattooed, pierced, violent, cannibal - or, to quote the novel, a "blue-skinned devil" (15). However formidable Driko may be, he is destined to lose control of the ship and Alice, the young, white heroine, to Harry Marline, the novel's courageous white hero. The novel positions Driko and Marline as direct opposites, generating a binaristic racial discourse which pits the "evil" dark-skinned antagonist against the "good" white-skinned protagonist. In her book, Embodying the Monster, Margrit Shildrick calls this a conflict between the "monstrous" and the "normal." For Shildrick, the monster is "any being who traverses the liminal spaces that evade classification [and] takes on the potential to confound normative identity" (5). Indeed, Driko baffles everyone in the novel, including the narrator, for no one can tell whether he is human or inhuman, man or monster, "savage" or shark. While Shildrick is most interested in dismantling these kinds of binaries, she maintains that, historically speaking, in much of Western culture, "the monster has often functioned as a scapegoat, carrying the taint of all that must be excluded in order to secure the ideal of an untroubled social order" (3). My point here is that what makes Driko so threatening, and so monstrous, is his body, his outward physical appearance, and the fact that that he is perfectly poised to completely destroy the social order of the novel. He endangers the hierarchy of the ship, the capitalism of the whaling industry, American capitalism, and the marriage of Alice and Marline. In order to resolve the conflict between the monstrous and the normal, the novel struggles to physically and violently contain Driko's body and its embodied identity.
<16> Before moving on to further discuss Driko, I want to linger on the subject of mutiny for a moment because understanding the dangers mutinies posed is crucial to interpreting the labor issues in The Golden Harpoon. For all ships at sea, including whaleships, nothing was more feared than mutiny, because mutinies threatened to tip the balance of power toward the subordinates in the hierarchical system of labor aboard ship [7]. According to Marcus Rediker in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, almost all mutineers either threatened the ships' officers with violence or resorted to it as a means of seizing control of the ship (228). Violent and peaceful mutinies, alike, created chaos and threatened the financial success of whaling voyages because the capitalist hierarchy of the ship required obedience, not insubordination. No one could work efficiently or effectively if they did not know whose orders to obey. To make matters worse, mutinies could occur rapidly and with very little warning. Since whalemen both lived and worked together, all of the laborers were thrust together in extremely close quarters, and those who were disgruntled enough to plan a mutiny had ample opportunity to enlist support for their cause. As Rediker points out, mutineers only needed about twenty to thirty percent of the crew on their side as long as the rest remained neutral (229).
<17> Perhaps the most important aspect of mutinies is that, even before the development of labor unions in America's factories, they represented a kind of labor movement that threatened to destroy the very foundations of the organizational structure of the workplace. Not coincidentally, the incendiary potential of both mutinies and labor unions were reacted to with both extreme intolerance and severe violence. According to nineteenth-century maritime law, the punishment for mutinous talk, inciting a mutiny, and actual mutiny was death [8]. If they had not been already executed at sea, mutineers faced the death penalty in American courts once they arrived ashore; the courts typically sided with the captains and owners. As Margaret Creighton observes in her study of the American whaling industry, Rites & Passages, many mutinies may have been justified, because sometimes captains maintained incredibly unfair working conditions. Nonetheless, the law dealt incredibly harshly with mutineers, and mutinying was a desperate gamble at best.
<18> From the very beginning of The Golden Harpoon, the introduction of Driko and his fellow Pacific Islanders makes it clear that they are extremely dangerous individuals, who are far more likely to mutiny than the other sailors. Although they are human beings, Jack Stump, the ship's resident crusty "old tar", describes them as non-human monsters: "'But there are some beings that has the shape of men, and yet they ain't men for all that; - amphibious animals like, that has more of the shark than human natur' in their corporosities...'" (15). In this passage, Stump claims that barely-contained savagery lurks deep in the bodies, the "corporosities", of these men. The heavily tattooed, blue skins of these men apparently represent an outward manifestation of the malicious and dangerous personalities they possess. Capitalizing on the bluish color of their tattoos, Stump suggests that these monstrous bodies possess a disposition more akin to vicious, cold-blooded fish than they do to warm-blooded, compassionate human beings. Furthermore, he seems to suspect that this latent savagery might erupt at a moment's notice and wreak havoc on the otherwise orderly and safe ship, for Stump surmises that there is something portentously ominous about their whispered conversation.
<19> Driko's characterization is similar to that of his companions, for he, too, suffers from these stereotypical, racially-prejudiced opinions about New Zealanders. As the narrator explains, "There was a ring in each ear, another hanging pendant from his nostrils, and his countenance was disfigured in many places by 'tattoo' marks of yellow and blue" (17). After this particularly damning description of Driko's piercings and body markings, the narrator goes on to claim that Driko is especially dangerous because he does not resemble the other Pacific Islanders whom Alice has previously met in her travels. Driko has "thin lips" and wears a particularly "sinister expression" (17). Again, it is his exotic, outward physical appearance - marred, scarred and decorated according to Maori custom - that demonstrates to others his "savage" character. This practice of reading the body as an outward manifestation of the inner identity is not unique to this novel. As Jennifer Biddle claims in her essay, "Inscribing identity: Skin as country in the Central Desert", this kind of interpretive technique is typically Western, and it assumes that the skin is "a material, external cover for a stable, self-identified and self-identical subjectivity" (178). As such, Driko's skin, and the marks upon it, serve as shorthand indicators of the "savage" identity contained within. At this point, the novel undermines itself and its own interpretive methods, though. Solely identifying Driko as a shark-like "savage" is problematic, for he is one of the most compassionate mutineers. What's more, he does not actually engage in the brutally violent acts that some of the other mutineers commit. Instead, as a means of controlling the mutiny, he exploits the stereotype that New Zealanders are vicious cannibals to inspire fear in the hearts of the novel's heroes.
<20> The threat of cannibalism is one of the most terrifying threats made in the novel, and, significantly, it is Driko who says, "'Me like plenty Stump to eat'" (18). As evidence from both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nautical travel narratives and contemporary scholarship suggests, the Maori both enjoyed and suffered from a reputation for cannibalism. Because there was something horrific about consuming the body of a fellow human being that terrified Westerners and struck fear in their hearts, they were obsessed with cannibalism and discovering whether or not it existed on the islands of the South Pacific [9]. Rumors abounded surrounding the death of Captain Cook, and other travelers to the region claimed to have witnessed acts of cannibalism. Despite the fact that they were indeed fearful of falling prey to cannibals, Westerners voyaging to the South Pacific often doubted these reports because, as Geoffrey Sanborn points out in The Sign of the Cannibal, they suspected that "cannibalism was an act with an audience in mind, intended to induce terror" (61). Possessing a reputation as cannibals did benefit Pacific Islanders in terms of intimidating potential colonists and travelers, but it also worked to their detriment in terms of contributing to prejudicial racial stereotypes about their cultures. In this particular novel, Driko expresses intent to cannibalize Stump, but he certainly never puts that intent into action. Instead, Driko counts on the fact that the mere suggestion that he might like to eat Stump is enough to throw Stump into a completely paralyzed and irrational state of mind. Musing aloud, Stump's fear for his own life extends itself into unsubstantiated fear for Alice's life: "'The flesh of that gal is tender, and them fellows are cannibals and like good grub'" (37). Stump's fears never materialize, and Alice never seems to be in any particular danger from Driko in this regard, but the mere suggestion of cannibalism is enough to plant the seed of fear in Stump's mind and keep him from being much of a threat to the mutineers.
<21> Mutinies depended upon oscillations in power, and their success hinged upon physically and emotionally controlling the captain, his mates, and any other dissenters aboard ship. What happens in The Golden Harpoon is that the ship's hold becomes a veritable prison, and the heroes and the mutineers alternate physically containing each other in the bowels of the ship. In order to maintain command of the ship, physical containment is not enough, and those in charge must also terrorize and intimidate those they wish to command. Without actually doing anyone any real physical harm, Driko uses his cannibal reputation to control the emotions of the other characters in the novel, and in fact, when given the opportunity to kill Alice's lover, Marline, he does not, because he is disposed to be merciful to the young girl. This compassionate act is certainly not one in which a cold-blooded, shark-like, non-human would engage. Thus, Driko emerges as a complex individual, who uses his reputation to rhetorically control the other characters, but also engages in strangely beneficent acts of mercy.
<22> Driko is finally imprisoned in the hold of the ship and hung for his role in the mutiny. In this way, the barely-contained "savagery" perceived to be simmering just below the surface of Driko's skin is finally thwarted and defeated. The severity of this punishment intimates that Driko is indeed a monstrous and dangerous body, perhaps because his character is inscrutable, unpredictable and uncontrollable. He needs to be physically contained to preserve what the novel represents as the natural order of things - the hierarchy aboard ship and the heterosexual union of Marline and Alice. The chaos of the mutiny not only jeopardizes the safety of the white workers and their female companion, but also prevents any actual whaling from being performed and undermines the original purpose of the voyage. Because of Driko's untimely interference, the captain cannot fill the ship's hold with oil, and Marline cannot prove himself on the whaling grounds, earn promotions, and climb American capitalism's hierarchal ladder of success. Only after Driko is hung is it safe for the captain to resume the business of whaling and for Harry to assume his new position as harpooner. Thus, it is primarily for his role in effectively destroying the capitalist hierarchy of labor aboard ship - metaphorically representative of American capitalism - that Driko suffers the punishment of death, his "savage" character, forever contained in his lifeless body.
III - Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Discourses of Metaphorical Containment
<23> Along with several other characters in Moby-Dick, Ishmael, when confronted with Queequeg's often confusing and frightening exoticism, attempts to metaphorically transform him into an American in order to diffuse his fear and make him a more acceptable companion and crewmember. As a foreign-born laborer, Queequeg threatens the idea that New England whalemen are representative of American exceptionalism because he is a hard-working, skilled, manly, non-American whaleman. In Moby-Dick, containing threatening foreign bodies is more metaphorical than physical, as it was in The Golden Harpoon, but it serves the same function: protecting the capitalism of the whaling industry, American capitalism, and ideological fantasies of masculine American physical labor. Interestingly enough, Melville seems to be critiquing this kind of discourse and the fantasy which it reinforces, for Queequeg's body, and its embodied identity, refuses to be completely contained in this manner. Queequeg works in an American industry, fraternizing with Americans and carrying his harpoon with him as a constant reminder to others that he is an American worker, but he never really becomes an American, metaphorically or otherwise - partially because he deliberately resists this to a certain degree, himself, but also because his exotic foreign identity is impossible to completely describe as American [10]. Queequeg's resistance to being Americanized manifests itself in his attempts to use his "savage" identity for his own personal, financial gain by marketing his own exoticism in order to sell shrunken heads on the New Bedford market. Ultimately, Queequeg's desire to control his own identity launches a desperate power struggle with those who try to appropriate it for their own purposes.
<24> Ishmael initially presents Queequeg as a man who is forced to tolerate a large degree of racial prejudice from the citizens of New Bedford, but who, in turn, exploits Americans and their fascination with the exotic by selling shrunken heads to them [11]. Ishmael, as the narrator, never reveals much about Queequeg or his thoughts, so there is a great deal about Queequeg that is left mysteriously unclear. However, it is clear that, in the opening sections of the novel, Queequeg makes some attempt to control his own identity. Queequeg himself says nothing about his capitalist endeavors, but the Spouter Inn's landlord, Peter Coffin informs Ishmael that "'generally he's [Queequeg's] an airley bird - airley to bed and airley to rise - yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. - But tonight he went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so late, unless may be, he can't sell his head'" (18). Naturally, Ishmael is baffled by this explanation for Queequeg's odd behavior, and the landlord further explains, "'That's precisely it...and I told him he couldn't sell it here, the market's overstocked...With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?'" (18). Ishmael remains confused until he actually meets Queequeg, but this passage is important in that it indicates that Queequeg has entered the capitalist marketplace of his own free will. Queequeg astutely observes that these shrunken heads, however valuable they might be to him as cultural artifacts, also have commodity value because Americans like to purchase them as collector's items. Knowing that Americans are more interested in these curiosities if they perceive them to be authentic, Queequeg banks on the fact that his foreign and exotic identity will help him to sell his heads.
<25> What is particularly striking about the landlord's description of Queequeg's shrunken head sales is his use of Benjamin Franklin's aphorisms from Poor Richard's Almanac: "Early to Bed and early to rise makes a Man healthy, wealthy, and wise" and "the early bird catches the worm" (217). This is the same Franklin who Max Weber claims epitomizes "the spirit of capitalism" because of the ways in which he casts capitalist shrewdness as a virtue in itself, and the same Franklin who promotes this himself in his somewhat tongue-in-cheek autobiography (11). However, this passage is not an endorsement of Franklin; it is an ironic and pointed critique of Franklin and his advice to his fellow Americans. As Melville's other writings suggest, he regarded Franklin as more of a hypocrite than as a viable role model for success. Even though Franklin is never actually mentioned in the short story, "The Lightening Rod Man", his connection to the confidence man who travels the world trying to sell his lightening rods to gullible individuals is obvious. Also, Franklin, himself, makes an appearance as a buffoonish character in Israel Potter where he gives Israel a great deal of "sound" moral advice to help him become successful, none of which ever works. Similar to Israel Potter, Queequeg apparently follows Franklin's advice, believing that these proverbs will guide him to success in his capitalist venture, but he is frustrated because he does not understand one of the simple laws of capitalism - that of supply and demand. Of course, Peter Coffin's remark about the overstocked market for heads is a joke at Ishmael's expense, but it also works on a more serious level. Queequeg specializes in selling exotic objects, for which there is a market in the United States; however, he does not realize that in a shipping town, the market is flooded with such curiosities. Even if he is able to find buyers for his wares, he may have to settle for lower prices than those which he might earn were he to be selling them elsewhere. Clearly, Franklin's advice does not work for absolutely everyone, and it proves to be too simple - just getting up early does not ensure that one will "catch the worm", because the system of capitalism is a complicated one, and in order to be successful, individuals need more than just a copy of Poor Richard's Almanac in their pockets.
<26> Interestingly enough, Queequeg is not the first, nor the last, of Melville's characters to trade on this fear of "the other" as a means to a more desirable end. In order to be left alone on the island, the Typee establish a reputation for themselves as cannibals, counting on the fact that Westerners will be so terrified of being eaten that they will restrict their colonial enterprises to the fringes of the island. To a certain degree, this tactic works until Tommo discovers that he has nothing more to fear from the Typee than the Happar - the tribe on the island friendly to Westerners. The leader of the slave revolt in "Benito Cereno," Babo, uses his race to exploit both the stereotype that Africans are less intelligent and more subservient than whites and the stereotype that Africans are savage cannibals capable of any sort of violence. Because Captain Delano believes the former stereotype, he is completely deceived about what is really going on aboard the San Dominick, and because Cereno firmly believes in the latter, he is rendered helpless by Babo's constant threats. What all of these situations have in common and what is particularly important for Queequeg - and Driko, too, for that matter - is that these foreign, exotic individuals are only partially in control of what is said and believed about them. They can, to a certain degree, exploit the way in which they are perceived by Westerners and turn these stereotypically-based attitudes to their own advantage, but they do not always win the struggle for self-definition and this can have drastic consequences. Obviously, Driko's death is an example of the price these individuals might have to pay for losing the battle. Having been found out by Tommo, the Typee will most likely be subject to the same fate as the Happar, and Babo comes to an especially violent end, along with his slave revolt.
<27> Queequeg does not necessarily lose the battle over self-representation, as Driko and Babo do, but he does not necessarily win it either. Even Ishmael, Queequeg's best friend and most ardent admirer, constantly attempts to metaphorically contain Queequeg's identity in order to find common ground with him, allay his fears about him, and comprehend the man. To Ishmael, Queequeg is an entirely inscrutable individual - his unfathomable and labyrinthine tattoos, marks on his body, which no one in the novel can interpret or "read", symbolize the complexities of his identity. As such, Ishmael fears him because he fears the unknown, and he assumes, as Stump and the narrator of The Golden Harpoon do, that Polynesians are inherently "savage". Beneath Driko and Queequeg's monstrously exotic exteriors, lie the hearts of cannibals, or at the very least, of collectors of shrunken heads. Unlike Stump, Ishmael finds a way to render Queequeg's dangerous identity safe. His solution is to make him into an American:
...certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed (50).
Queequeg's facial tattoos, which Ishmael describes as making him "hideously marred about the face", render his character inscrutable and indelibly mark him as a cannibal from the South Sea Islands of the Pacific - this is what Tommo, in Typee, feared would happen to him if he were to have his face tattooed (49). In order to overcome his fear, Ishmael toys with Queequeg's identity and re-makes it. After all, George Washington is a highly revered individual, the first president of the United States, and a famous general in the Revolutionary War. Playing with the pseudoscientific fad of phrenology, Ishmael appropriates and recreates Queequeg's identity, "rescuing" him from his status as a cannibal and making him into someone to be respected. Another interesting aspect of Ishmael's characterization of Queequeg is that this character sketch is full of phrases that could be drawn from the advice given to potential businessmen in Poor Richard's Almanac. Queequeg appears to possess a "simple honest heart"; he "looked like a man who had never cringed and never had a creditor" (50). All of these are qualities that Franklin certainly would admire and would suggest cultivating. Possessing the characteristics Franklin endorses recommends him to Ishmael and helps the two become fast friends.
<28> Ishmael is not the only one who attempts to re-make Queequeg in the image of America. The men responsible for recruiting sailors for the Pequod's upcoming voyage, Peleg and Bildad, ultimately transform Queequeg into a Native American when they somewhat reluctantly hire Queequeg as a harpooner. Initially, Peleg is upset to discover that Queequeg is a Pacific Islander and a non-Christian because he maintains that the owners of the Pequod do not hire pagans. They never actually say why they do not hire non-Christians, but I would argue that they fear the disruptive potential of having a "savage" aboard ship. He might mutiny as Driko did; he might be resistant to taking orders and subordinating himself to the hierarchy of the ship; and other white sailors might resent having to share living, working, and sleeping quarters with him, as Ishmael once did. However, as the ensuing events show, when given a choice between hiring a highly skilled and incredibly talented non-Christian laborer or an unskilled green Christian worker in his stead, Peleg and Bildad choose the former. In fact, the hypocrisy of this rule is clearly demonstrated by the fact that all three of the Pequod's harpooners, Queequeg, Dagoo, and Tashtego, are all non-Christians. Ishmael spends a great deal of time arguing with Peleg about how all religions are essentially the same; however, what really matters to the recruiters is the financial success of the voyage, not the religious character of the crew (88). Ishmael may not recognize this, but Queequeg knows what he does not, and once Queequeg demonstrates his skill with a harpoon, he is immediately signed on to the voyage (88-89).
<29> Like Ishmael, Peleg fears Queequeg's foreign, racialized body, and he admires his impressive physical prowess. Because he wants Queequeg to sail on the Pequod, he must overcome his fear. In order to accomplish this, Peleg gives Queequeg two different appellations: Hedge-hog and Quahog (89). Obviously, this is a humorous section of the novel in which Peleg has some difficulty pronouncing Queequeg's "exotic" name, but it is also one which is quite serious because it shows how little Peleg actually cares about Queequeg or his name in the first place - he does not bother to make any effort whatsoever to pronounce the name correctly. The names, too, are quite significant, because the fact that he gives him animal names, not human names, says a great deal about how Peleg views Queequeg. The fact that hedgehogs have spiny quills, which, according to erroneous legends dating back to the 1600's, they throw at attackers, makes them somewhat formidable; however, hedgehogs are also nocturnal, slow-moving, clumsy, near-sighted, herbivores ("Porcupine", def. 1a) [12]. Finally, Peleg settles on Quahog as a name for Queequeg, the Native American name for a small edible clam, a New England culinary delicacy ("Quahog", def. 1a). Since he perceives him to be a pagan, the fact that Peleg takes both of Queequeg's new names from nature is not all that surprising; however, it is significant that the latter one, the one Peleg signs on the ship's papers, turns the tables on cannibalism. In an ironic twist, Peleg, a man who has presumably eaten a quahog or two, is transformed into a cultural cannibal who "devours" Queequeg's Polynesian identity and re-makes it in the image of the absent population of local Native Americans. Soon after the arrival of New Englanders from the mainland, the members of this tribe either surrendered their lands on the island and relocated, or stayed on Nantucket and died as a result of epidemic diseases brought by these settlers. It is interesting to note that while Queequeg is an important presence in the novel up until this point, he largely disappears from the rest of the text - disappears like the doomed Native Americans after whom he has been named [13]. Once Queequeg's savagery is somewhat contained, and made American, his individuality appears to vanish, and he seems to blend in with the rest of the crew, only appearing in a few of the novel's many remaining chapters.
<30> The act of re-naming is here not a complimentary one like Ishmael's, but an invidious one, based on ideologies of racial prejudice. Melville's point here is that this is what happens to the exotic peoples Westerners encounter. Instead of attempting to understand exotic cultures on their own terms, they insist on explaining "the other" in terms they can understand no matter how ill-fitting they may be. While Queequeg's presence is largely erased from the rest of the novel, he is, in this particular scene, resistant to all of this re-making of his identity, and the final representation of Queequeg that appears on the ships' papers is a copy of one of the incomprehensible tattoos on his arm - ironically rendered as a cross in the text. In The Golden Harpoon, Driko's tattoos function as a shorthand way of signifying that underneath his skin, Driko is a monstrous "savage". Roger Starbuck remains quite heavily invested in the idea that the outward appearance of an individual's skin is an outward indicator of his identity, that what Driko inscribes on his skin - his tattoos - says something about his inner person and the life he has led. In other words, to understand the tattoos is to understand the person. However, Melville appears to be gesturing toward a different way of understanding these marks on the skin, for Queequeg's tattoos refuse interpretation and say absolutely nothing about his identity or his life. Melville seems to recognize something that Jay Prosser discusses in his essay, "Skin memories," namely that there is no reliable one-to-one correspondence between marks on the skin and what lies beneath, that "if skin constitutes a visual biographical record, by no means is this record historically accurate" (52). Although he offers no alternative method of understanding Queequeg's identity or his tattoos, Melville points out some of the inherent problems in the way in which Westerners, such as Ishmael, Bildad, and Peleg, interpret the cultural practices of non-Westerners, such as Queequeg. Because they are entrenched in their own worldview, the Americans are unable to see beyond it, and they are only able to accept Queequeg after he has been transformed into George Washington, a hedgehog, or a quahog.
<31> The figure of Queequeg is just one of a host of exotic Pacific Islanders who make appearances in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American whaling narratives. As I have argued, Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon, attempts to cope with the presence of these foreign-born workers in an American industry by demonstrating their disruptive potential and physically containing their bodies. In Moby-Dick, this containment is much more metaphorical, not physical, and it is not as violent. In the end, the physical labor that Queequeg performs has thrown him into contact with Americans, but it does not make him American, no matter how much the other characters wish to see him in these terms. The desire to make Queequeg into a prototypical working American seems to exist solely in the minds of the American characters, and this re-casting of Queequeg's national identity stretches the limits of the imagination. To call a man a hedgehog, a quahog or a "George Washington cannibalistically developed" is to create humorously disjunctive images that diminish Queequeg's dignity as a human being. This descriptive technique says more about the other characters and their prejudicial need to re-make him into an American, than it does about Queequeg's identity, for it is Ishmael, Bildad, and Peleg who appear ridiculous, not Queequeg. Their fears amount to nothing, for Queequeg never intends to harm anyone, and their excessive and needless attempts to contain Queequeg's identity show just how irrational these fears really are. After all, even though Ishmael and Queequeg overcome their racial, ethnic, and national differences and become close companions, they never put their friendship to use in terms of inciting a mutiny aboard the Pequod. In fact, neither one ever expresses a desire to overthrow Ahab; rather, they both pledge themselves to their captain's mad quest for the white whale and follow it through to the end.
<32> Melville's Moby-Dick can be read as being quite critical of ideological fantasies of manly American physical labor and the discourses which reinforced them, but the very fact that these ideologies surface as a subject of debate in the novel would suggest that Crèvecoeur, Chase, Hart, and Cooper's earlier nationalistic appropriations of the whaling industry still carried some social currency. In this context, Melville's assessment of his characters' attempts to metaphorically transform Queequeg into an American can be recognized as his disapproval of the strategy employed by other authors of whaling narratives who claimed that the industry was quintessentially American despite the fact that so much of its labor was performed by non-Americans. Both The Golden Harpoon and Moby-Dick display the racial and ethnic diversity of the whaling industry's labor force; however, Starbuck prefers to rescue American capitalism from what he perceived to be a threat to it and reinforce the stability of national fantasies of masculine physical labor. Melville prefers to condemn the racial prejudices many Americans possess regarding foreign-born labor. He offers up Ishmael, Bildad, Peleg, and Peter Coffin as figures of ridicule for the way in which they try to metaphorically contain Queequeg's identity in order to neutralize their own irrational fears. Thus, Melville advances a pointed critique of the discourses which protect dominant, culturally-constructed narratives of American national identity and deny and ignore the humanity of foreign-born workers, who contribute much to the success of American industry.
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Notes
[1] For those interested in learning more about the various reasons why the New England whaling industry steadily declined in the twentieth century, see Richard Ellis' Men and Whales and Alexander Starbuck's History of Nantucket. [^]
[2] In his chapter on race relations and the American whaling industry in 'Whaling Will Never Do For Me': The American Whaleman in the Nineteenth-Century, Briton Cooper Busch provides an excellent account of the numbers and experiences of foreign-born whalemen. Here, I want to stress the difference between foreign-born workers - those who were not born in the United States, but worked in its industries nonetheless - and immigrant workers - those who expressed a desire to come to the United States from other countries in order to live and work permanently within its borders. While immigrants were also born in other nations, most of them expressed an intent to become American citizens (if they could), while many of what I am calling foreign-born workers never expressed much of a desire to do so. [^]
[3] While some of the men of whom Douglass speaks were African American, meaning that they were slaves born in the United States, some were also Africans, born and raised in a variety of African countries. The whaling industry employed significant numbers of both groups. Elizabeth Schultz's chapter entitled, "African-American Literature," in Haskell Springer's America and the Sea: A Literary History mentions that "Escaped slaves as well as free blacks also found that the sea provided various means of employment. By 1859, of the twenty-five thousand native-born American seamen working out of New Bedford, more than half were blacks, with twenty-nine hundred serving in the whale fishery, the others in the navy or merchant service" (237). Also noteworthy is the fact that Frederick Douglass spent several years working off and on in the shipping industries in New Bedford. See Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself for more on the time he spent there. [^]
[4] Although I do not focus on this particular rhetorical strategy in this essay, it is important to note that many authors of whaling narratives completely ignored the presence of these foreign-born workers and attempted to "whitewash" the whaling industry. One of the most noteworthy instances of this "whitewashing" occurred in the exhibits in what is now known as the New Bedford Whaling Museum when it first opened its doors in 1916. None of the ethnic and racial diversity of the American whaling industry's workforce was displayed, for the exhibits only included white men. James M. Lindgren's article, "'Let Us Idealize Old Types of Manhood': The New Bedford Whaling Museum 1903-1941," is a valuable resource for more information on this. [^]
[5] Margaret Creighton's Rites & Passages: The Experience of American Whaling 1830-1870 provides much information on desertion and the practice of recruiting Pacific Islanders to replace men they had lost. [^]
[6] Whalemen worked with a set of specific tools, such as harpoons and lances, which were unfamiliar to those individuals working in other sectors of the American economy. As such, most whaling narratives, J. Ross Browne's Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846) and Francis Allyn Olmsted's Incidents of a Whaling Voyage among them, contain specific descriptions or illustrations of these implements and the skills required to use them efficiently. These texts also provide etchings and lithographs of the men at work. [^]
[7] Perhaps the most famous mutiny in all of nautical history was that which occurred on the British vessel the Bounty during its voyage from 1788-1789. The story of the Bounty is referred to in many whaling narratives, and in Mutiny on the Bounty, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall recount how Fletcher Christian managed to overthrow Captain Bligh, take command of the ship, and live for a time on the island of Tahiti. This was not the only famous mutiny, however, for in 1824, a whaleman named Samuel Comstock, seized control of the Globe in a bloody mutiny. When the mutineers landed on an atoll in the Marshall Islands, they violently revolted against Comstock, killing him, and they spent some time living amongst the natives of these islands until they were eventually rescued. There were two popular nineteenth-century narratives of these sensational events: Lay and Hussey's A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824. And the Journal of a Residence of Two Years on the Mulgrave Islands; With Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants and William Comstock's The Life of Samuel Comstock, the Terrible Whaleman. Incidentally, extracts from both of these narratives are included in Melville's Moby-Dick. There was another unpublished version of the Globe mutiny, written by George Comstock entitled, "Narrative of the Mutiny capture and transactions on board of the Ship Globe of Nantucket after Sailing from Edgartown." For a historical analysis of the events of the Globe mutiny and a comparison of these narratives see Thomas Farel Heffernan's Mutiny on the Globe: The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock. [^]
[8] Margaret Creighton's Rites & Passages contains a sections which explains how work stoppages and mutinies played integral roles in the labor protests of whalemen at sea. She also describes the maritime laws regarding mutinies, and what happened to mutineers in several specific historical cases. [^]
[9] Captain Cook's journals, Owen Chase's narrative of the Essex disaster, and David Porter's Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean both make clear how profound fears of cannibalism in the South Pacific were. For contemporary scholarly perspectives on this, see Geoffrey Sanborn's The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader and T. Walter Herbert, Jr.'s Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization. [^]
[10] Much scholarly criticism has been written about the figure of Queequeg and the role of Pacific Islanders in Melville's writing. Geoffrey Sanborn's The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader provides an excellent analysis of the Melville's treatment of cannibals and cannibalism in Typee, Moby-Dick, and "Benito Cereno." And T. Walter Herbert, Jr.'s Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization casts Melville's novels against the nineteenth-century travel narratives of various other missionaries and colonists, as well as the ethnographies of twentieth-century anthropologists. [^]
[11] Queequeg's marketing of his own exoticism and his cultural artifacts makes him a precursor to contemporary Native Americans in New Mexico and Arizona who sell turquoise jewelry and kachina dolls at tourist attractions, Papua New Guineans who play on their reputation as cannibals in order to charge tourists for photographs on "cannibal tours," and Africans who export their traditional carvings to art collectors around the world. [^]
[12] According to the OED, the names, hedgehog and porcupine, were rather interchangeable, although the animals, themselves, were somewhat different. Throughout the nineteenth century, hedgehogs were also called "Old World porcupines" ("Porcupine," def. 1d). [^]
[13] In Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism, Wai-chee Dimock uses the image of the Pequod - and the fact that it was named after a tribe of extinct Native Americans - to characterize the "narrative of doom" in Moby-Dick (115). For an early account of the history of Native Americans on Nantucket, see Obed Macy's History of Nantucket (1880). [^]
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