Wages of Rebellion Read Online Free PDF Page A

constitutional condition of the manufactured man … is sordidness,” and he plays to this sordidness. 41 The whale becomes, like everything in the capitalist world, a commodity, a source of personal profit. A murderous greed grips thecrew. Ahab’s obsession infects the ship, though Starbuck, the first mate, protests, “Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.” 42
    Ahab conducts a dark Mass, a Eucharist worship of violence and death, on the deck with the crew. He makes them drink from a flagon that is passed from man to man, filled with draughts “hot as Satan’s hoof.” Ahab tells the harpooners to cross their lances before him. The captain grasps the harpoons and anoints the ship’s harpooners—Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo—his “three pagan kinsmen.” He orders them to detach the iron sections of their harpoons, and he fills the upturned sockets “with the fiery waters from the pewter.” “Drink, ye harpooners! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby-Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby-Dick to his death!” 43
    Later in the novel, Ahab invokes Satan as he tempers his newly forged harpoon—forged specifically to deal death to the white whale—with the freely given blood of his pagan harpooners: “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli” (“I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil”). And with the crew bonded to him in his infernal quest, he knows that Starbuck cannot “stand up amid the general hurricane.” “Starbuck now is mine,” Ahab says to himself. The first mate “cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.” 44 “Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered.” 45
    The
Pequod
was black. “She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” The ship, Melville writes, was festooned “like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory,” with the huge teeth and bones of sperm whales. 46
    “Whales were described,” writes Nathaniel Philbrick in
In the Heart of the Sea
, his book about the real-life incident that inspired Melville’s novel,
    by the amount of oil they would produce (as in a fifty-barrel whale), and although the whalemen took careful note of the mammal’s habits, they made no attempt to regard it as anything more than a commodity whoseconstituent parts (head, blubber, ambergris, etc.) were of value to them. The rest of it—the tons of meat, bone, and guts—was simply thrown away, creating festering rafts of offal that attracted birds, fish, and, of course, sharks. Just as the skinned corpses of buffaloes would soon dot the prairies of the American West, so did the headless gray remains of sperm whales litter the Pacific Ocean in the early nineteenth century. 47
    The fierce and massive fires used to melt the whale blubber at night turned the
Pequod
into a “red hell.” 48 Philbrick quotes a green hand (a sailor with no previous sailing experience) from Kentucky: “A trying-out scene [in which the blubber is boiled down aboard a whale ship] has something wild and savage in it, a kind of indescribable uncouthness, which renders it difficult to describe with anything like accuracy. There is a murderous appearance about the blood-stained decks, and the huge masses of flesh and blubber lying here and there, and a ferocity in the looks of the men, heightened by the red, fierce glare of the fires.” 49
    Our own raging fires, leaping up from our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordnance across the Middle East, bespeak our Stygian heart. And in our mad pursuit, we too ignore the suffering of others, just as Ahab does when he refuses to halt his quest for forty-eight hours to help the frantic captain of a passing ship find his twelve-year-old son, who is adrift in a missing whaleboat.
    And yet Ahab is no simple tyrant. Melville toward the