Editing Moby-Dick (section)

===Whaling sources===
{{See also|Cetology of Moby-Dick}}
[[File:Houghton AC85.M4977.Zz839b - History of the Sperm Whale.jpg|thumb|Melville's copy of ''Natural History of the Sperm Whale'', published in 1839]]
[[File:Herman Melville by Joseph O Eaton.jpg|thumb|A portrait of ''Moby-Dick'' author [[Herman Melville]]]]
In addition to his own experience on the whaling ship ''Acushnet'', two actual events served as the genesis for Melville's tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship ''[[Essex (1799 whaleship)|Essex]]'' in 1820, after a sperm whale rammed her 2,000 miles (3,200&nbsp;km) from the western coast of South America. First mate [[Owen Chase]], one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 ''Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex''.{{sfnb|Philbrick|2000| p= xii- xv}}

The other event was the alleged killing in the late 1830s of the albino sperm whale [[Mocha Dick]], in the waters off the Chilean island of [[Mocha (island)|Mocha]]. Mocha Dick was rumored to have 20 or so harpoons in his back from other whalers, and appeared to attack ships with premeditated ferocity. One of his battles with a whaler served as subject for an article by explorer [[J. N. Reynolds]] in the May 1839 issue of ''[[The Knickerbocker]] or New-York Monthly Magazine''.<ref name="Reynolds, J.N">Reynolds, J.N., "Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal", ''The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine''. 13.5, May 1839, pp.&nbsp;377–392.</ref> Melville was familiar with the article, which described:

{{blockquote| This renowned monster, who had come off victorious in a hundred fights with his pursuers, was an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength. From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature ... a singular consequence had resulted — ''he was white as wool!''<ref name="Reynolds, J.N"/>}}

Significantly, Reynolds writes a [[First-person narrative|first-person narration]] that serves as a [[Frame story|frame]] for the story of a whaling captain he meets. The captain resembles Ahab and suggests a similar symbolism and single-minded motivation in hunting this whale, in that when his crew first encounters Mocha Dick and cowers from him, the captain rallies them:

{{blockquote|As he drew near, with his long curved back looming occasionally above the surface of the billows, we perceived that it was white as the surf around him; and the men stared aghast at each other, as they uttered, in a suppressed tone, the terrible name of MOCHA DICK!

"Mocha Dick or the d----l [devil]', said I, 'this boat never sheers off from any thing that wears the shape of a whale.'"<ref name="Reynolds, J.N"/>}}

Mocha Dick had over 100 encounters with whalers in the decades between 1810 and the 1830s. He was described as being gigantic and covered in barnacles. Although he was the most famous, Mocha Dick was not the only white whale in the sea, nor the only whale to attack hunters.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Whipple|first=Addison Beecher Colvin|title=Yankee whalers in the South Seas|year=1954|publisher=Doubleday|isbn=0-8048-1057-5|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=v4sGAQAAIAAJ&q=Yankee+Whalers+in+the+South+Seas}}, 66–79</ref>

While an accidental collision with a sperm whale at night accounted for sinking of the ''Union'' in 1807,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DMwEAAAAQAAJ&q=the+ship+union%2C+of+Nantucket+September%2C+1807+Edmund+Gardner&pg=PA115|title=Report of the Commissioner|date=February 20, 1878|via=Google Books}}</ref> it was not until August 1851 that the whaler ''[[Ann Alexander (ship)|Ann Alexander]]'', while hunting in the Pacific off the [[Galápagos Islands]], became the second vessel since the ''Essex'' to be attacked, holed, and sunk by a whale. Melville remarked, "Ye Gods! What a commentator is this ''Ann Alexander'' whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster."<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.melville.org/hmquotes.htm|title=Melville's Reflections|website=www.melville.org}}</ref>

While Melville had already drawn on his different sailing experiences in his previous novels, such as ''[[Mardi]]'', he had never focused specifically on whaling. The 18 months he spent as an ordinary seaman aboard the whaler ''Acushnet'' in 1841–42, and one incident in particular, now served as inspiration. During a mid-ocean "gam" (rendezvous at sea between ships), he met Chase's son William, who lent him his father's book. Melville later wrote:

{{blockquote|I questioned him concerning his father's adventure; ... he went to his chest & handed me a complete copy ... of the Narrative [of the ''Essex'' catastrophe]. This was the first printed account of it I had ever seen. The reading of this wondrous story on the landless sea, and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck, had a surprising effect upon me.<ref>Leyda, Jay. ''The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891''. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951, 119.</ref>}}

The book was out of print, and rare. Melville let his interest in the book be known to his father-in-law, [[Lemuel Shaw]], whose friend in Nantucket procured an imperfect but clean copy which Shaw gave to Melville in April 1851. Melville read this copy avidly, made copious notes in it, and had it bound, keeping it in his library for the rest of his life.{{Sfnb|Melville|1988| p = [https://books.google.com/books?id=jnNBh61lpjUC&q=Owen+Chase 971-77]}}

''Moby-Dick'' contains large sections, most of which are narrated by Ishmael, that seemingly have nothing to do with the plot, but describe aspects of the whaling business. Although a successful earlier novel about Nantucket whalers had been written, ''Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman'' (1835) by [[Joseph C. Hart]],<ref>Mary K. Bercaw, "A Fine, Boisterous Something": Nantucket in Moby-Dick, ''Historic Nantucket'', Vol. 39, No. 3 (Fall 1991); Philip Armstrong, ''What animals mean in the fiction of modernity'', Routledge, 2008, p.132</ref> which is credited with influencing elements of Melville's work, most accounts of whaling tended to be sensational tales of bloody mutiny. Melville believed that no book up to that time had portrayed the whaling industry in as fascinating or immediate a way as he had experienced it.

Melville found the bulk of his data on whales and whaling in five books, the most important of which was by the English ship's surgeon Thomas Beale, ''Natural History of the Sperm Whale'' (1839), a book of reputed authority which Melville bought on July 10, 1850.<ref>Vincent (1949), 128</ref> "In scale and complexity," scholar Steven Olsen-Smith writes, "the significance of [this source] to the composition of ''Moby-Dick'' surpasses that of any other source book from which Melville is known to have drawn."<ref>Steven Olsen-Smith (2010), [http://melvillesmarginalia.org/introductions.php?id=52 "Introduction to Melville's Marginalia in Thomas Beale's ''The Natural History of the Sperm Whale''." ''Melville's Marginalia Online''. Retrieved on 30 November 2016.] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141215023652/http://melvillesmarginalia.org/introductions.php?id=52 |date=December 15, 2014}}</ref> According to scholar [[Howard P. Vincent]], the general influence of this source is to supply the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings.<ref>Vincent (1949), 129</ref> Melville followed Beale's grouping closely, yet adapted it to what art demanded, and he changed the original's prosaic phrases into graphic figures of speech.<ref name="Vincent 1949, 130">Vincent (1949), 130</ref> The second most important whaling book is Frederick Debell Bennett, ''A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, from the Year 1833 to 1836'' (1840), from which Melville also took the chapter organization, but in a lesser degree than he learned from Beale.<ref name="Vincent 1949, 130"/>

The third book was the one Melville reviewed for the ''Literary World'' in 1847, J. Ross Browne's ''Etchings of a Whaling Cruise'' (1846), which may have given Melville the first thought for a whaling book, and in any case contains passages embarrassingly similar to passages in ''Moby-Dick''.<ref name="Vincent 1949, 131">Vincent (1949), 131</ref> The fourth book, Reverend Henry T. Cheever's ''The Whale and His Captors'' (1850), was used for two episodes in ''Moby-Dick'' but probably appeared too late in the writing of the novel to be of much more use.<ref name="Vincent 1949, 131"/> Melville did plunder a fifth book, [[William Scoresby]] Jr., ''An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery'' (1820), though—unlike the other four books—its subject is the [[Greenland whale]] rather than the sperm whale. Although the book became the standard whaling reference soon after publication, Melville satirized and parodied it on several occasions—for instance in the description of narwhales in the chapter "Cetology", where he called Scoresby "Charley Coffin" and gave his account "a humorous twist of fact": "Scoresby will help out Melville several times, and on each occasion Melville will satirize him under a pseudonym." Vincent suggests several reasons for Melville's attitude towards Scoresby, including his dryness and abundance of irrelevant data, but the major reason seems to have been that the Greenland whale was the sperm whale's closest competitor for the public's attention, so Melville felt obliged to dismiss anything dealing with it.<ref>Vincent (1949), 132–134. Quotation on 134.</ref>

In addition to cetological works, Melville also consulted scattered literary works that mention or discuss whales, as the opening "Extracts" section of the novel demonstrates. For instance, [[Thomas Browne]]'s essay "Of Sperma-Ceti, and the Sperma-Ceti Whale" from his ''[[Pseudodoxia Epidemica]]'' is consulted not only in the extracts but also in the chapter titled "Cetology".<ref>{{cite book |last=Browne |first=Thomas |title=The Major Works |publisher=Penguin |pages=216–220}}</ref> Ishmael notes: "Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne."<ref>{{cite book |last=Melville |first=Herman |title=Moby-Dick |publisher=Gutenberg |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm#link2HCH0095}}</ref> Browne's playful examination of whales, which values philosophical interpretations over scientifically accurate examinations, helped shape the novel's style. Browne's comment on "the [Sperm-Whale's] eyes but small, the pizell [penis] large, and prominent"<ref>{{cite book |last=Browne |first=Thomas |title=The Major Works |publisher=Penguin |page=217}}</ref> likely helped shape the comical chapter concerning whale penises, "The Cassock".