An education on a whale ship

Ann Fabian*

Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

A talk delivered to the newly elected members of the Rutgers Universitychapter of Phi Beta Kappa, 25 May 2010.

Keywords: Moby-Dick; Herman Melville; teaching; whaling; RutgersUniversity; continuing education

First, let me add another voice of warm congratulations to all of you. Youhave done something great, worth celebrating. I know you will hear thismany times in the next few weeks. But for you here today I want toemphasize one note in these noisy celebrations. I want you to know thatyour professors not only acknowledge your abilities but recognize as wellthe privilege of teaching students gifted with your curiosity, ability, andambition. The best thing about being a professor at this university is thediscovery somewhere in the course of a semester – in exam answers, in a labreport, in a paper – that you actually have students who are as smart as orsmarter than you are.

Usually you get one or two in a class. But here is a room full of you –waiting to be inducted into an old academic honor society and, for theseniors at least, getting ready to leave this university. Before you go off, letme steal five more minutes of your time to talk about Moby-Dick. I knownone of you came expecting a whaling voyage on this rainy Sundayafternoon, but it’s hard for a teacher with a captive audience to resist alesson. It was in 1851 that Herman Melville publishedMoby-Dick – his storyof the mad Captain Ahab leading his doomed crew on a hunt for a greatwhite whale. That’s the plot.

Moby-Dick, a book I know we all think we should have read, is just toolong to fit into any modern college course. So this past semester, I decided toread the book with a Byrne First-Year Seminar. I had an idea that a hardycrew of first-year students would sign on for the semester and that, comespring, they would have read the book. Nothing else. Just one credit, for onebook.

*Email: afabian@rci.rutgers.edu

Rethinking HistoryVol. 15, No. 1, March 2011, 135–138

ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online

� 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2011.546978

http://www.informaworld.com

Well, classes don’t always work as planned, and my small crew wasblown off course, twice, by the Thursday storms that shut down theuniversity this winter. As all of you know, classes are fragile things, and it ishard to get them back on track after even minor interruptions. But wepressed on anyway, carrying our dog-eared copies of Moby-Dick aroundcampus through the semester.

I was surprised when several of my very well-educated colleaguesconfessed to me that they had tried to readMoby-Dick but had never finishedit. Something was wrong with the book. They liked the first chapters, theysaid, the story of narrator Ishmael and his encounter with the tattooed SouthSea harpooner, Queequeg. But once the whale ship Pequod left NantucketIsland, they lost interest in the story. They couldn’tmake it through the book’sfamous digressions on whales, ropes, sails and all the other associationsthat author Melville and his storyteller Ishmael found in whaling.

But those were the chapters that took on weight in our class this spring –not the friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg, or Ahab’s obsession withthe whale that had bitten off his leg, or even the symbolic world of Melville’srich imagination, but the digressions on the fact-laden world of whaling.I was determined to get my crew through those doldrums, and in doing so,the book opened for my class as a sort of college curriculum outside theclassroom, an invitation to continuing education, even in the first decade ofthe twenty-first century.

My colleagues had their whispered confession – ‘never finished it.’ Myclass adopted a different mantra – puzzled surprise: ‘everything is here!’ Thesemester’s challenge then was how to make sense of this everything. That’syour university, I told them; everything is here. Moby-Dick is pretty specificon this university idea. The whale ship, storyteller Ishmael comments, was‘my Yale College and my Harvard.’ For today, we will imagine the whaleship as my Rutgers.

Picture Herman Melville, mind on fire, dreaming up the story thatbecame Moby-Dick and reading the Rutgers College catalogue from1845-46. ‘Published by the Students’ and printed on Albany Street. If youare curious, you can find it online. The catalogue describes a very oddcollege, heavy on administration. Well governed, I guess. There were sixsuperintendents and 41 trustees, a group that included the governor, thechief justice and the attorney general of the State of New Jersey. Those 47managers lorded over nine faculty and around 100 students.

The faculty included a Professor of Constitutional and InternationalLaw (who doubled as the college president), a Professor of MoralPhilosophy, of Metaphysics and the Philosophy of the Human Mind, ofMathematics and Natural Philosophy, of Oriental Languages and Litera-ture, of Chemistry and Natural History, of Greek Language and Literature,of Latin Language and Literature, and of Modern Languages andLiterature. That was your entire faculty.

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You had access to a library with about 15,000 books and the use ofvaluable ‘Philosophical and Chemical apparatus, and a rare and extensivemineralogical cabinet.’ (Your labs.) You attended a regular Sunday sermon,and a weekly biblical recitation. In your senior year you read Greek tragedy,studied natural philosophy, political economy, Christian ethics, and geologyand mineralogy. You would have paid a term bill of about $148 a year – aprice that placed the ‘advantages of a complete Collegiate education . . .within the reach of the students at what will be found a remarkablymoderate expense,’ the Rutgers students wrote. And all in that ‘mild andproverbially healthy climate of New-Brunswick.’ (That was New Brunswickthen. Maybe that promise belongs on the website.)

Of course, like Ishmael’s shipmates, you were all men. Your classmateswere from New Jersey or New York, except for Joseph and BenjaminScudder, brothers who gave a home address in Madras, India.

Herman Melville’s own education was spotty. He was a good student,but when his father went bankrupt and then died, teenage Herman went towork. In 1832, 13-year-old Herman would have passed his school-boundclassmates on his way to a job in an Albany Bank. (Maybe if he had pickedthe bank as a setting for a great novel – hard to imagine – my colleagueswould have pressed on through the story looking for clues to our recentgreat collapse – a mad banker looking for meaning in money. For Melville,whaling was a better bet. When he was a young man, whaling was the centerof the American economy, producing the oil that lubricated early industriesand burned in the lamps of hard-working students. If you make it throughthe book, you know whaling was a weird business.)

In school or not, Melville absorbed information from the world aroundhim – from the stories his father had told him, from reading newspapersor Spenser, Shakespeare, and the Bible, from ideas he found in libraries orin the debating societies – intellectual clubs that welcomed curious youngmen like Herman and his brother. All his eclectic learning – generous andunstructured – seeped into the pages of this odd, long novel, leaving us acurriculum for a life-long education.

Let me try to convince you with a very quick look at the novel.Moby-Dick begins with elementary lessons in reading, writing, and

arithmetic. The novel opens with a chalk-covered schoolmaster dusting off‘old lexicons and grammars.’ An old librarian grubbing up whale referencesfollows the schoolmaster. And the plot begins with Ishmael (think of him asa freshman) struggling to learn about a new world - trying to read the signson New Bedford’s dark streets, stumbling into a black church, puzzling overpictures of whales, trying to decipher the tattoos on the arms of his cannibalbedmate. And then, as he signs on to the whale ship, Ishmael, the student ofarithmetic, is called to quick calculations. What percentage of the profits willbe his at the ‘777th lay,’ or a ‘275th lay’ (a whaleman’s word for his share ofa voyage’s profits)?

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Think of those first chapters as Ishmael’s college application. Did hehave the ability to make it through the adventure that was to follow? Thesewere the ‘Terms of Admission,’ as the Rutgers students put it. You had toknowLatin andGreek grammar, Caesar, Virgil, Cicero, the Gospels, the Actsof the Apostles, and Arithmetic. You needed ‘good moral character’ too.

Ishmael’s whaling voyage eventually called on everything a Rutgerssenior would have learned of Greek tragedy, natural philosophy, politicaleconomy, Christian ethics, and geology, as well as every lesson inastronomy, geography, psychology, anthropology, and anatomy. Readcarefully, Moby-Dick offers lessons for carpenters, blacksmiths, and cooks,for lawyers, surgeons, and obstetricians, observations for scientists andexperiences for sensualists – things to taste (a whale steak cooked rare), totouch (a hand mashing lumps of spermaceti), to hear (the bark of a sealmistaken for the moan of a drowned sailor), to smell (the body of a rottingwhale, the perfume of ambergris or a whiff of Moby-Dick, still miles fromthe ship). We get to smell Moby-Dick before we see him, and his ‘peculiarodor’ annoys a reader really ready to see this white whale by chapter 133.

But what makes Moby-Dick fantastic for my imagined curriculumoutside the classroom is the simple fact that regular learning was neverenough. Conventional subjects went wildly off course – setting up poorwhaling students for challenges one impossible step beyond a final exam.Had Ishmael or any of his shipmates learned enough psychology tounderstand Captain Ahab as ‘madness maddened’? Did astronomy teachyou to steer a ship when lightning scrambled compass poles? Anatomy, tobehead a creature with no neck? Geography, to follow Queequeg to hishome on the island of Kokovoko, a place ‘not down on any map: true placesnever are’?

Of course not. For every education is sadly incomplete. A rough draft – a‘draught of a draught,’ Meville put it.

This dark, humorous book deserves more than this trite inductionspeech, but I figure the occasion calls for lofty sentiments. If you are in thisroom, your teachers have seen that you have mastered the subjects theyput before you. Your next step is to take us off the map - to true places likeKokovoko, not down on any of our maps. This is the challenge of yourcontinuing education. Think of Ishmael – carpet bag in hand, escaping agloomy November in Manhattan to embark on a whaling voyage. On thatvoyage, Melville writes, ‘the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swungopen.’

They surely will for each of you. Good luck.

Notes on contributor

Ann Fabian is a Professor of History and American Studies at Rutgers University.She has written books on gambling, on personal narratives, and, most recently, oncollections of human skulls.

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