As soon as I learned that places existed on the planet called Mount Ahab, Whitewhale Bastion, and Tashtego Point, among many others, I knew there’d be no stopping until I’d exhausted every resource available to figure out the who, when, where, and why of it all. It’s been a long and often frustrating trek, but I hope at least a small crew of readers are still with me.

We left off last time with a revelation from Antarctic surveyor Norman Leppard who wrote in a report that the Moby-Dick name group “was started after Blaiklock had been able to confirm the detail as shown by Francis.” I didn’t know who Blaiklock was yet, and while it doesn’t technically say that Blaiklock was personally responsible for the names, it felt like I was narrowing in on an answer.

So today we turn to Ken Blaiklock, a man whose name is far less known than other Antarctic explorers but whose feats and perseverance are no less remarkable. And with some luck, maybe—just maybe—we can add this literary baptism to his legacy.

A Gam at the South Pole

Stepping back for a moment, recall that the UK Antarctic Place-names Committee (UK-APC) report on names proposed in 1957 mentioned just two men involved in surveying the area where the Moby-Dick name group now dots the landscape. Mount Ahab, for example, was “first roughly surveyed by S.J. Francis of F.I.D.S. in November 1947” and “Re-surveyed by N.A.G. Leppard of F.I.D.S. in October 1955.” Leppard’s off-hand comment about Blaiklock in some kind of intermediary role thus came as something of a surprise. So who was this guy, anyway?

Although we’re primarily interested in his work at Hope Bay base, there’s no other way to begin telling his story than with a role for which he’s far better known, as a surveyor for Vivian Fuchs’ monumental Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1957-1958. Accomplishing what Shackleton failed to do 40 years earlier, Fuchs’s expedition was the first successful overland crossing of the continent, trekking more than 2,000 miles from the Weddell Sea all the way to the Ross Sea—albeit primarily on Sno-Cats and tractors.

Blaiklock had already spent the previous austral winter of 1956 leading a small advance party, sheltering in a makeshift hut with temperatures often below −22ºF. The rest of the expedition team arrived in December 1956 and spent another year establishing a proper base and making preparations, finally setting off the following October. Clearly unbothered, Blaiklock opted to ride not in one of the tractors but instead to drive a dog sledge all the way to the South Pole. (The dogs were then flown to McMurdo courtesy of the US Base Commander).

In one of the most outlandish gams in history, greeting them at the South Pole was Sir Edmund Hillary, who just four years earlier had conquered Mount Everest and become an instant world icon. Hillary’s seemingly boundless endurance made him an ideal partner to Fuchs, leading a parallel support team laying supply depots from the Ross Sea to the pole.

All that said, don’t let the supplies and gas-powered vehicles fool you into thinking they were simply along for a casual 8 mph ride. They of course faced regular temperatures of -58º F and white-out conditions, as you’d expect, but far more dangerous was a path strewn with crevasses hidden by thin sheets of ice. The three-ton vehicles were plagued by crevasses, slowing progress to a crawl. It took three days to travel across one especially perilous section of just a few hundred meters, “probing every metre of snow with long wooden poles, even where they set up their tents.” Somehow, the team sustained no deaths and none of the vehicles were lost—though not all made it all the way to the finish line.

After a 99-day journey, the team finally reached Scott Base on March 2, 1958. Among many other scientific achievements, the journey proved that Antarctica was a single, solid continental landmass rather than a group of islands connected by ice. And notched especially on the belts of Blaiklock and the survey team was the mapping of over 100,000 square kilometers of previously uncharted territory.

“Do thou, too, remain warm among ice”

Perhaps what’s most amazing is that when the expedition triumphantly reached the Ross Sea, Blaiklock had been in Antarctica almost continuously for a decade since joining FIDS in December 1946. Volunteering straight out of the Royal Engineers during WWII, he was first stationed at Stonington Island off the west coast of the peninsula working as the surveyor for Base E. Per a letter home, written up in a local paper, Ken made the experience sound like a semester abroad.

Ken wrote that he is one of a party of 11 in huts on a rock island with a glacier on the north side. They had 65 huskies and the lowest temperature was 16 degrees minus Fahrenheit.

“The cold is unnoticeable when it is calm,” he says.

Besides his work he was had plenty of fun catching seals and wrote that he was in charge of the greenhouse, which is heated naturally. He is growing daffodils, scillas, cabbages and cress.

Just six months into his stint, he asked if he could stay on an additional year—though still under 21 he had to ask permission from his parents. He even maintained this cheery attitude when the ship sent to collect him and the other scientists in April 1949 got stuck in the ice on its way to the base, forced to turn back. Newspapers called them the Lost Eleven and wrote sensationalist updates about them still being alive, something he laughed at in an oral history recorded later in life. “Well yes of course we were, we had been sending [meteorological] reports 3 times a day for the last 2 years! […] We had plenty of food and fuel.”

Blaiklock recalled that they went about their work as usual while they waited for the next opportunity to leave the following year. Even then, when the John Biscoe was sent to rendezvous with the marooned scientists in February 1950 the “rescue” almost failed again:

After crashing through an icefield, the John Biscoe has reached Stonington Island, in the Antarctic, to rescue the six marooned British scientists icebound on Stonington for two years…

To reach Stonington the Biscoe had to batter away at icebergs bigger than herself. Last year, on a similar rescue expedition, she was unable to penetrate beyond the Argentine Islands, 250 miles to the North.

The ship creaked with the strain as she nosed into the icefield. A South-West wind was driving pack ice ever tighter round us, and once the shuddering ship came to a complete halt. It was a tense and perilous moment.

Liverpool-born Comdr. Kirkwood radioed Sir Miles Clifford, Governor of the Falkland Islands, that the ship might be seriously damaged if she tried to push on. On the other hand, the ice was so thick it would be equally dangerous to try to turn round.

The Governor replied, in effect: “Make another attempt.”

The Biscoe, with engines at full speed, rammed the ice. It shivered apart, and open water lay ahead.

Needless to say, the Biscoe successfully located the team and delivered them home.

Blaiklock arrived just in time to participate in the 1951 Festival of Britain, a post-war expo which aimed to restore civic pride and get the country back on its feet. Millions of visitors flocked to the festival grounds in London that summer, reminded of the country’s achievements in science, technology, industrial design, architecture and the arts. Inside the massive “Dome of Discovery” building Blaiklock and his colleagues performed hourly dog sledging demonstrations in front of packed audiences, driving teams of huskies through fake snow made of sawdust and chalk.

But Blaiklock wanted the real thing, and by 1952 he was already back in Antarctica.

Knights and Squires

For his second stint in Antarctica, Ken was stationed at our familiar Hope Bay base leading sledging expeditions all around the upper peninsula. “There was plenty of survey to do,” he recalled in the oral history, optimistically calling the weather “pretty unsettled.” With only a compass and sledge wheel to measure distance, fixing their location by astronomical position, the sledging teams spent long periods waiting for whiteout conditions to pass. For every 10 days of surveying he estimated that four were spent “lying up” in their tents.

Nevertheless, the scientists covered an impressive amount of ground each year. An annual report for the base recorded Blaiklock alone traveling just under 800 miles in 1952, and 1,626 more miles in 1953. Many other trips, often to restock supply depots to support longer journeys, were made without him.

To finally return to our own investigation, there was one single sledge journey in the annual reports that looked intriguing. The only time Blaiklock traveled anywhere near the area in question was a 720 mile round-trip trek to Jason Island from May to July 1953. The report also gave the names of three other men involved in the journal: assistant surveyor David G. Stratton, geologist Anthony John Standring, and base leader/medical lead George W. Marsh.

If we go back to the image that started this whole investigation in the first place, you’ll see that the Jason Island (determined to be a peninsula a year later) is just below the Moby-Dick name group, and about 45 miles southeast of Tashtego Point.

A July 1954 article in the Polar Record journal by Vivian Fuchs, at the time Principal Scientific Officer for FIDS, confirmed that the team must have passed right through the soon-to-be Moby-Dick features on their way down.

The main sledge journey of the winter started on 4 May. A geological and survey party composed of G. W. Marsh, K. V. Blaiklock, A. J. Standring and D. G. Stratton, travelled down the east coast of Graham Land. Between Cape Longing and Borchgrevink Nunatak they were able to fill in some of the gaps in the 1947-48 survey between Hope Bay and Stonington Island.

Having spent several months studying maps and survey reports of the upper Antarctic peninsula, I recalled that Borchgrevink Nunatak was just a few miles from Ishmael Peak, the southernmost of the original 11 Moby-Dick features. I thought I might finally be onto something.

As critical to this journey as ever, BAS archivist Alexandra Tataran took the new information about the sledge dates and unearthed individual travel, geological, and meteorological reports which provide minute details. We learn, for example, that visibility was sometimes as low as 50 yards and as high as 40 miles, and that the team averaged about 11 miles of travel per day. While we’re on the subject of names, we also learn that the 18 sledge dogs were grouped into three teams called “The Wogs,” “Number Ones,” and “The Gangsters.” (One naughty dog, who went unnamed, broke into a box of pemmican on the night of May 20th and ate nine pounds).

Truthfully, though, little in almost 40 new pages of material got us any closer to an answer about the origin of the Moby-Dick name group. Much of the travel report dryly reported sledging conditions, camp sites, and various hurdles they overcame with a stiff upper lip. Meteorological reports taken four times daily recorded the temperature and cloud coverage for all of posterity though probably sensible only to a meteorologist.

It isn’t until you get to a handwritten field notebook that things get interesting. It begins with a table used to track the distance traveled each day and occasional comments about the surface conditions.

Then, paperclipped to the following page is a legend for what’s underneath, noting that “NP" is Daggou Peak, “NR” is Tashtego Point, and “NN” is Spouter Peak—the earliest mention of the names we’ve found yet. The legend is followed by a note which reads: “Identification made by D.G. Stratton [at?] R.D.F.O. January 1955 from SG Francis traverse and photographs; also Otto Nordenskjold and others, 1905, p. 229.

The page underneath is full of delightful sketches depicting Spouter Peak (NN), Daggoo Peak (NP), and Tashtego Point (NR) made on June 9th, which based on the travel report was just before the team arrived at Jason Island/Peninsula .

Using a snippet of the map that Bill Wheaton graciously made for the first post in this series we can see that the artist (whether Blaiklock or Stratton) was actually looking at the peaks from the east, standing on the Scar Inlet portion of the Larsen Ice Shelf. Comparing the two side-by-side, it’s also possible that the peak labeled “NO” might even be Fluke Ridge.

G.W. Marsh’s corresponding travel notes for June 9th mention running north along the west coast and making frequent stops for surveying. (The “B” in June 9B refers to the second stopping point of the day).

Two days later, with the temperature at -28º F, the team “decided to run up on to the Island so that the surveyors might obtain some angles,” casually climbing 950 feet in such temperatures for a better vantage point.

As one last treat, the notebook includes a drawing labeled “Sketch of photograph from Nordenskjöld’s ‘Antarctica,’” referring back to that citation to a 1905 book by Otto Nordenskjöld.

A geologist, geographer, and polar explorer, Nordenskjöld was the leader of 1901–1903 Swedish Antarctic Expedition, the first extensive mapping of the region of the Oscar II Coast, named for Swedish King Oscar II. When he returned, he published a narrative of the journey including a number of photos and sketches in his book Antarctica: or, Two Years Amongst the Ice of the South Pole. The image on page 229, mentioned in the note above, depicts a familiar-looking scene of peaks and glacier beds.

I don’t fully understand the context of why Daggoo Peak and Tashtego Point were being singled out, but thanks to the sketch in the field notes we can now add Nordenskjöld’s drawing to our collection of images of the Moby-Dick peaks, fifty years before they received their names.

Penguin Books

Beyond just how cool it is to see these original survey field notes—and impossible it is to imagine making these tiny drawings in such insane temperatures—I wanted to include all of the above because, well, it’s all I’ve got. The archival trail was at a dead end and I only had a few long-shot ideas left.

I got in touch with Blaiklock’s son John, presenting my evidence and asking him directly: did his father start the Moby-Dick name group? It seemed to ring a bell.

I believe that your supposition on the names is true. I remember his talking about it at a presentation he gave to a Probus club that I transported him to.

It was encouraging, but of course not enough.

John added that “expedition members were avid readers when over-wintering as there were long hours with little to do.” He recalled that, strangely, children’s literature was especially popular, and sent me a photo of his father’s copy of Winnie-the-Pooh carried all the across Antarctica, commemorated with an enormous Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition bookplate.

That there were expedition members were big readers was actually something I already knew. While looking into the S.J. Francis expedition I came across an article about meteorologist Michael “Mac” Choyce who told a local newspaper back home that Hope Base had “a well-stocked library of over 300 volumes,” though many were technical scientific in nature.

Many other former FIDS members brought up the base libraries in oral histories collected and digitized by the British Antarctic Survey Club. FIDS engineer Ken Powell, for example, remarked that he “did a lot of reading down there,” quipping that “there are two groups of people who are very widely read: Antarctic explorers and prisoners.”

Always on back of my mind through all this research was the realization that the Moby-Dick names accurately paired each mate and harpooner in order, a small feat of memory that felt somehow significant. Was it possible that Blaiklock and Stratton had the book in hand while sledging to Jason Island in June 1953?

There was unfortunately no inventory of books at Hope Bay in the 1950s, but the BAS Archives did have a few photos of the interior of the base with glimpses of their library. While I can often spot a copy of Moby-Dick a mile away, I had no such luck. In the second photo, the top shelf is obviously full of the iconic Penguin Books orange-and-white tri-band branding. Sadly, as far as I can tell Penguin never did publish Moby-Dick in that classic orange, despite what Starbucks would lead you to believe.

Beside the orange-and-white editions are their green-and-white cousins published by Penguin’s non-fiction imprint Pelican Books. I spotted one of them in the hands of ex-FIDS surveyor Donald McCalman (1958-59) in a book of his photos published by author Marilyn Reid. McCalman, lying up in a tent on a sledging journey, is reading "Body and Mind in Western Thought” by Joan Wynn Reeves.

Other glorious photos in McCalman/Reid’s book, however, were a reminder of how far off course I had gotten in a monomaniacal attempt to answer this admittedly inane question. It was time to climb out of the rabbit hole and appreciate the beauty of the images I’d collected and the fortitude of those who braved the unbelievably harsh conditions to take them.

Despite months and months of research and taking up way too much of Alexandra’s time at the BAS Archives, I was never able to strike through that pasteboard mask and find an definitive answer to the question. I have, in the process, become slightly obsessed with Antarctica, and have one or two more posts wrapping up some other things I learned about its surprising connections to Moby-Dick. For now, my endless thanks to the dozens of folks who helped inch this investigation along and for anyone (anyone?) who made it this far reading about it.

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With that done, I was next determined to figure out exactly who was responsible for suggesting this naming convention which we learned was approved by the UK Antarctic Place-names Committee (UK-APC) in 1957. I had to know whether the culprit was an obsessive fan who left behind a monumental tribute, a reference to the peninsula’s history of whaling and sealing, or if it meant nothing at all.

What I knew for certain from the first part of my research was that there would be loads and loads of records—this was mid-century Britain, after all—and that it was only a matter of getting the attention of the right people to help out. As it turned out, Antarctic researchers, historians, scientists, archivists, explorers (and their descendants) are some of the friendliest I’ve yet to encounter in these strange investigations, and without whom this trail would be as cold as the South Pole.

Chapter 46: Surmises

To keep things focused, I narrowed the scope of the investigation to the origin of just the first 13 places named for Moby-Dick, those accepted by the UK-APC in September 1957. These would be:

• Melville, Pequod, Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask Glaciers;

• Mount Ahab and Mount Queequeg;

• Ishmael, Daggoo, Peleg, Spouter, and Bildad Peak; and,

• Tashtego Point.

The gradual addition of 17 more names over the years merely expanded on the existing theme and, I assume, would have little to add in our understanding.

Before I dug into the archives, though, it was worth considering the possibility that the names had no particular meaning at all, maybe even a case of mere word association (snow + white + big = white whale). Dumb riffing like this is, we’ve learned, how Jackson Pollock came to title a painting “Blue (Moby Dick)” and allegedly how the Led Zeppelin song got its name. In fact, I’d guess this was the most likely origin.

The timing of the first 13 names arched my eyebrow even further. The John Huston film adaptation of the book was released stateside in July 1956 and in November that year in London. The UK-APC approved the first batch of names the following year in September 1957, and all of them could conceivably have been inspired by the movie instead of the book. That is, while not every character from the book made it into Ray Bradbury’s script, all of the Antarctic names do appear in the film. Conversely, nothing was named for Fedallah, who was written out of film entirely.

That said, a closer read of the British Antarctic Territory’s gazetteer (the spreadsheet I used to identify and map all 30 places) led me to believe the film theory was red herring. Each feature, if you recall, came with not just coordinates but a brief history of when it was first surveyed. Mount Ahab, for example, was “roughly surveyed by FIDS from Hope Bay in November 1947, and resurveyed in October 1955 and August 1962.” Pequod Glacier was surveyed by FIDS “in its lower part in November 1947 and over its whole length in September 1955.” All 13 features, I noticed, were first explored in either these 1947 and/or 1955 expeditions.

But I also realized that between the coordinates and month and year, there was actually enough information to roughly trace the routes of these two expeditions. In this quick map I made, the green pins mark the locations first surveyed from November to December 1947. Many of the features were later resurveyed in 1955, which also added Bildad and Peleg Peak. Take a look and see if anything jumps out to you about the order of the names (and note that the position of the glacier pins are a bit deceiving as they’re many miles wide).

What stood out to me was that according to the dates and the south-southwest path, it seems that the names began with Melville Glacier, Mount Ahab, and Pequod Glacier—a logical place to start. Just below is Starbuck Glacier and his harpooner Queequeg at the eastern end of the mountain ridge. Next is Stubb Glacier and Tashtego Point, Tashtego of course being Stubb’s harpooner. Then we have Flask and his harpooner Daggoo. Curious, no?

This level of detail seemed very telling as to how much the naming party recalled about the precise relationships between characters, something which is also not easily discerned from the film. Ask any casual to moderate fan of the book to pair them perfectly off the top of their head and I’d bet it would at least take a minute to work out. (On the other hand, why all of these characters and even the Spouter Inn came before poor Ishmael is still puzzling.)

But this was all just speculation and amateur cartography. It was time for some good old fashioned research.

O Pioneers!

Clearly, I needed to get my hands on whatever reports came out of the surveying expeditions in 1947 and 1955, plus anything from that UK-APC meeting. With nothing available online, and no details in particular beyond the dates, I thought I would try to find someone at the British Antarctic Survey who could help me out.

In the meantime, I started learning about the history of the Antarctic peninsula and following any leads concerning names. Quickly scrolling through the 5,000+ rows in the gazetteer spreadsheet I’d noticed that there were many other themed groupings from the sciences, arts, and history, and I was especially interested in any other authors or books which received a similar honor. A corollary of my worry that the Moby-Dick names were essentially meaningless was the possibility that there might be dozens of classic books which had received the same honor, making the distinction little more than a cartographical “Top 100 Books” list.

One helpful early resource was a chapter in Antarctic Peninsula: A Visitor’s Guide by former UK-APC Secretary Adrian Fox on the “Origin of Place-Names.” After a brief history of exploration of the region, Fox discusses more generally how the colorful names began as a kind of creative outlet for survey teams enduring extreme hardship.

Many of the names show considerable wit and the dry humour characteristic of polar travellers: Eagle Island group; Fullastern Rock; Dismal Island; Stayaway Skerries and Achilles Heel — a subsidiary peak to Mount Achilles.

The names can be very evocative of the hardship endured in the days of long dog-sledge journeys into the unknown, and are probably the result of lamp-lit discussions over mugs of tea in storm-bound tents: Cape Disappointment; Exasperation Inlet; Blow-me-down Bluff; and many more. Alternatively, Dream Island and Picnic Passage recall days when things went well. Some place-names visualise concisely the spectacular terrain, such as The Amphitheatre, Citadel Bastion, The Dragons Teeth, The Black Thumb, The Needles, Reptile Ridge, Witches Cauldron and Damocles Point (overhanging ice cliffs).

Such creativity, however, can only go so far when tasked with naming an unimaginably vast and monotonous landscape. Expedition members soon became “exhausted… making duplicate or confusing names hard to avoid.” As a remedy, the UK-APC decided to implement the use of regional themes to generate unique names, including such categories as composers, pioneers of various sciences and expedition tools; literary characters, astronomy, and Greek myth. A map included in the chapter was a real “a-ha” moment in starting to understanding the broader context of the Moby-Dick names.

Features in The Iliad group, for example, include Mount Helen, Trojan Range, Mount Agamemnon, and Menelaus Ridge. The composers group includes Brahms Inlet, Dvorak Ice Rise, Vittoria Buttress (for Tomás Luis de Victoria), Lassus Mountains (for Orlando di Lasso), Boccherini Inlet (for Luigi Boccherini), and more named after Bach, Mozart, Bartok, and so on. I took this as an indication of the rather high-brow tastes of the people behind the names.

A more in-depth review of Antarctic place names comes from BAS geologist and glaciologist Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith, a FIDS base leader from 1948-1950. Published in 1991, by page count the two volume “History of Place-names in the British Antarctic Territory” is primarily a hardbound version of the gazetteer spreadsheet, with thousands of places and names listed alongside a brief description like so:

Its first 60 pages or so, however, are a veritable treatise on the art of naming things, with consideration given to “principles in place-naming,” “brevity and euphony,” and special rules for “subglacial” and “submarine nomenclature.” It was something I hadn’t considered before, but without any native population, the geography of Antarctica was terra innominata, if you will, which presented some interesting challenges which Hattersley-Smith takes very seriously.

Most importantly, the report finally provides our first hint at who might have been responsible for selecting Moby-Dick as one of the themes: Dr. Brian Roberts, a polar expert and one of the most important figures in expanding British interests in Antarctica in the 20th century. While there’s no time here for his full CV, among other roles Roberts was one of the leaders of Operation Tabarin, served as the first head of the UK Foreign Office’s Polar Regions Section, and was the first Secretary of the UK-APC, appointed in 1945.

It was Roberts, writes Hattersley-Smith, who first realized that surveyors needed to expand beyond descriptive names and took a role in brainstorming ideas.

To resolve this problem of the need for new names outrunning the traditional sources, the late Dr. Roberts thought of naming groups of geographically related features after corresponding associated groups of persons or ideas. After initial experiments in the nationalist context then prevailing, which provided names in northern Alexander Island after Anglo-Saxon kings, and on the Foyn Coast after members of the British War Cabinet, the scope of this device became increasingly nonnational, and an attempt was made on a large scale to commemorate the names of pioneers in those fields of knowledge that have made the most significant contributions to the techniques of polar exploration and research, as for example in the design of equipment and in cold-climate physiology… To these groups of names were added groups taken from western mythology, literature and music, and groups taken from astronomy and meteorology, which are of worldwide interest.

The full list of categories as of the 1991 report is far too long to include here (see page 43 here if you’re curious) but a large number of them honor extremely specific subsets of scientists who made the expeditions possible, including pioneers of prevention of snow blindness, biochemists and designers of sledging rations; pioneer designers of oversnow vehicles; and pioneers of cold-climate physiology. Other closely-related categories include the Voyage of the Beagle (which visited the Falklands Islands twice), stars and constellations, winds, and types of seals and whales.

The complete list also reveals several additional literary themes, putting Melville and Homer in the company of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Rudyard Kipling’s story “The White Seal,” and “Characters connected with Jason’s search for the golden fleece.” Interestingly, though, that’s it. That’s the whole list of books and stories paid tribute in this way, eliminating the concern that Moby-Dick was simply one of dozens or hundreds works of classic literature given a few glaciers a piece. They are also notably all stories having to do with some kind of roving adventure, journey, or even global search, making the selection seem that much more intentional.

Was Roberts our guy, easy as that? I wasn’t finding anything about his unbridled love for Moby-Dick, nor could I find a local copy of Roberts’ delightfully-named biography Penguin Diplomacy, a reference to Roberts’ leading role in crafting the Antarctic Treaty in the late 1950s. So instead I reached out to one of its authors, Steve Heavens, asking if he knew whether Roberts had anything to do with honoring Melville.

Steve replied that while Roberts did own a copy of Moby-Dick, there was no evidence to suggest his involvement. In fact, the only grouping he was known to have been involved was the composers group on Alexander Island, “a subject that he favored.”

I’m afraid that nothing I have will help you much in your quest. The answer to both your questions (a) and (b) is no. Brian Roberts was indeed obsessive about Antarctic place names but purely for administrative purposes; the actual names chosen were not usually of particular concern to him. The only instance we have on his personal involvement in selection of place names concerns Alexander Island, in which the choice of names based on composers (Mozart Ice Piedmont etc) was an intentional attempt to identify a large group of names on a subject that he favored. We have no connection at all between himself and Moby Dick, although he did have a copy of the book and he had been involved in sealing expeditions around South Georgia.

Steve also noted that Roberts “was at heart a conservationist” and found the whaling and sealing industries “somewhat distasteful, to say the least.” While Melville might have agreed with this sentiment to some extent, without further evidence it seemed dubious that Roberts would have gone out of his way to etch the names of the most famous (fictional) whalers into the the ice and stone of his beloved peninsula. So onward we trek.

Surveying the Whale’s Spine

In the meantime, I connected with BAS Archivist and Records Officer Alexandra Tataran, without whom this entire post would have been simply impossible. For reasons beyond me, Alexandra took my questions seriously and quickly sent over something she found in the records of the UK-APC from the 1950s. Under the sub-heading “King Oscar II Coast, East Graham Land. Proposed New Names,” were entries on Mount Ahab and Melville Glacier with some critical new information.

Transcribed they read:

Mount Ahab: First roughly surveyed by S.J. Francis of F.I.D.S. in November 1947. Re-surveyed by N.A.G. Leppard of F.I.D.S. in October 1955. Named after Captain Ahab of the Pequod, the central figure in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or the Whale.

Melville Glacier: The lower reaches of this glacier were first surveyed by S.J. Francis of F.I.D.S. in November 1947. The glacier was re-surveyed by N.A.G. Leppard of F.I.D.S. in October 1955…

I could finally attach some names to those 1947 and 1955 expeditions mentioned over and over in the gazetteer: surveyors S.J. Francis and N.A.G. Leppard. It felt like I was closing in, and I asked Alexandra if she would be able to locate the original survey reports for more clues.

In the meantime, I started piecing together the little biographical information I could find about S.J. Francis, i.e. Samuel John Francis who went by John. Born in 1915 in Cornwall, Francis spent two years with FIDS in his early 30s and, like most people involved with Antarctic exploration at the time, was awarded the Polar Medal for his efforts. He even has an island there named for him, sitting about 140 miles south of the Moby-Dick mountains and glaciers in the middle of the Larsen Ice Shelf.

Francis’ name also led me to several contemporary accounts of the journey in papers back home, which told of the thousands of miles he traversed with team leader Frank Elliott, geologist Raymond Adie, and meteorologist Michael A. “Mac” Choyce. Over 80 days traveling on dogsleds and sleeping in tents, the team mapped and studied the eastern coast of the peninsula before traversing heading west toward Marguerite Bay.

Back home, Commander E.W. Bingham boasted to the Daily Telegraph about how these indomitable men relied entirely on their own resources, restricted to the curiously specific 25.9 oz of food per day, while navigating constant danger.

“They had three dog-teams. With all their tents, sleeping and cooking gear and survey equipment, their sledges must have been very heavily loaded and difficult to manage.”

“Their main guide in determining where, under the ice shell, the land ended and the sea began would be the tide cracks in the ice. The chief hazard in the trip would be these and other cracks in the ice, which might be like deep crevasses, possibly with sea water at the bottom and covered with snowdrifts. This danger would be increased by the fog, which they would be certain to encounter for several days on end.”

An article published in the journal of the The Royal Geographical Society two years later goes into even more depth on the expedition, including suffering an unfortunate false start which cost them a week of effort and “perfect” weather conditions. By the time they set off again two feet of snow had fallen and melted, and they had to wade through icy slush up to their knees.

The party… set out on October 19, but after covering over 40 miles in two days on perfect surfaces, it was forced to return to base as the bridges of the sledges, of poor quality wood, were breaking down. They set out again on October 26, but during this week’s delay the surface had deteriorated in a most extraordinary fashion; over 2 feet of soft snow had fallen, and high temperatures had caused great lakes of melt water to form in Crown Prince Gustav Channel.

They took eleven days to cover the 100 miles to Cape Longing, which they had hoped to reach in five—eleven days of miserable, wet sledging with men wading at times up to their knees, relaying loads over the worst patches, and pitching their tents on the drifts in the lee of bergs: the only dry places to be found.

What the paper doesn’t provide, though, is any mention of the Moby-Dick names or really any information about that particular region. The narrative skips straight from the Crane Channel to Cape Disappointment to the Borchgrevink Nunatak (in yellow below, from north to south). It notes only that “rocky ridges run eastwards” from a central plateau “with glaciers flowing between them,” which certainly sounds like it could be our region of focus.

Meanwhile, Alexandra at the BAS had located and digitized Francis’ official report submitted in May 1949, but there was no sign of Melville there either. Mirroring what was presented to the Royal Geographic Society (or perhaps vice versa), the Moby-Dick section of the Oscar II Coast is reduced to a brief comment about some narrow ridges projecting eastward, apparently obscured by persistent cloud coverage.

Persistent low stratus cloud obscured much of the detail in this part of King Oscar II Coast, and the plateau was not observed. The general trend of the coast is to the south-south-west. Many narrow ridges of partly ice-free rock project eastwards from the plateau, forming the retaining walls of long narrow glaciers.

Looking at a photo from the journey, you can see how the weather might not have been exactly ideal for appreciating the grandeur of Mount Ahab. I mean, you try to measure the whale’s spine in these conditions.

With Francis et al. exonerated, it was time to turn towards the other survey mentioned in the UK-APC papers completed by N.A.G. (i.e. Norman Arthur George) Leppard in 1955, which Alexandra had also graciously located and scanned. Leppard, I learned, was born in 1932 in West Molesey outside of London and was just 23 years old at the time of the survey—about Melville’s age when he shipped on the Acushnet. He had previously worked for the Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency in Chessington, but Norman was not destined for office work.

After a year spent at Hope Bay base preparing for the journey and restocking supply depots along the route, a team of six men set off on August 6, 1955 that included Leppard, meteorologists W.E. Anderson and M.F. Tait, and sledge dog physiologist R.J.F. Taylor. Two more men, radio operator D. Willis and meteorologist R.F. Worswick, trailed as the support party, .

Retracing Francis’ steps, Leppard wrote that the resurvey was undertaken to fill in the gaps left by Francis, which he reiterates was hampered by poor weather and persistent cloud coverage especially along the Oscar II Coast.

The main plan for the sledge surveys was the resurvey of the areas of weak detail in S.J. Francis’ survey in 1947… During this journey they had bad weather and low cloud nearly all the way along King Oscar II coast and consequently Francis was only able to see a few of the peaks and the lower reaches of the glaciers. They were on a limited time schedule and could not wait for conditions to clear up, so the area had to be left.

As with Francis’ report, much of Leppard’s is written in surveyor-speak, discussing the finer points of azimuths, astro fixes, and theodolite tangents as they trekked hundreds of miles on dog sleds. More than a month after they left base, they finally reached Cape Disappointment and camped in a notable spot.

18th September. A nice day after an overcast morning. Temperatures about zero all day. The course was set on Borohgrevink Nunatak, but we had to detour round the two rifts that come from the southern side of Cape Disappointment. We camped off “Tashtego Point” and took a round of theodolite angles. Jason Peninsula stood out well all day but probably was miraged.

Tashtego Point! There it was! And this was only the start. On October 3rd, Leppard wrote that “Camp was made off ‘Spouter Peak’” and the following day off of “Stubb Glacier.” (As was the custom in these reports, names that had been proposed but not yet officially accepted by the UK-APC are always given in quotes.)

Later in the report, Leppard discusses the geography of the Oscar II Coast more generally, writing that it can be divided into three sections: 1) North of Crane Glacier, 2) Between Crane Glacier and “Flask Valley,” and 3) South of Flask Valley, describing the latter two using plenty of references to the crew of the Pequod.

(2) Between Crane Glacier and “Flask Valley”

This area, as opposed to the last one, has no definite plateau escarpment behind it. The main features of this area are the largely snow free mountains, which form the retaining walls of valley glaciers, and the long finger of Cape Disappointment which projects about 8 miles from the coastline. “Melville” and Pequod” glaciers flow in to Exasperation Inlet to the north and south of “Mount Ahab” between Delusion point and Cape Disappointment. The ice shelf hereabouts is disturbed and rifted. An obvious rift runs from Cape Disappointment towards Delusion Point and there is much broken ice between the rift and the coast. Two other rifts come from the southern side of Cape Disappointment for about 5 miles.

South of Cape Disappointment “Starbuck and “Stubb”Glaciers flow into the ice shelf either side of “Mount Queequeg”. Both these glaciers slope gently down until they reach their mouths where they fall quite steeply to the ice shelf. South of “Stubb Glacier” the coast turns westward round “Tashtego Point” to”Daggoo Peak” and the mouth of “Flask Valley” where there is a large broken and crevassed area. “Daggoo Peak” is conspicuous from east and south “Flask Valley is another gently sloping valley glacier rising to 1400 feet above ice shelf level after 22 miles. […]

(3) South of “Flask Valley”

The mainland in this area is more broken into smaller isolated rock peaks than the last area and is considerably flatter.. Between “Flask Valley” and “Leppard Glacier” there are a number of isolated nunataks and mountains. “Ishmael Peak” is very prominent on the coast as are “Bildad” and “Peleg” peaks on the southern side of “Flask Valley”. “Spouter Peak” is only prominent from the south-east when it becomes detached from nearby detail.

Leppard had to be our man. Or at least it was one of the six men on the sledging team assuming that everyone was allowed some input on the names. After all, this particular crew left behind their legacy with the Leppard Glacier, Taylor Nunataks, Tait Glacier, and Worswick Hill. (They apparently ran out of features before they got to Anderson and Willis. Sorry guys.)

I was just about dancing in my chair to Pip’s tambourine as I quickly scrolled through the rest of the report. Another Melville mystery solved, hats off to me! I could wrap up my research with a little more background on Leppard and his team, maybe even try to contact their descendants to figure out exactly who among them was the Melvillean.

But then, on page 31 I found a brief section titled “Place Names,” which discusses the new names they had proposed over the course of their journey. It was supposed to confirm all my suspicions, but instead contained a bombshell.

Several new names have now been proposed for King Oscar II Coast. The “Moby-Dick” name group was started after Blaiklock had been able to confirm the detail as shown by Francis so when I returned I found the “Moby-Dick names in process of proposal. I personally do not like the associated name grouping but as the idea had been started it was logical to finish it off completely and this has been done.

It wasn’t Leppard or anyone on the 1955 survey but rather someone named Blaiklock. Leppard even admits he didn’t like the names!

It was initially dizzying, but it also made more sense. Recall that the gazetteer notes that 11 of the 13 original names were first surveyed in 1947. Two more, Bildad Peak and Peleg Peak, were only first sighted in 1955, and these must be the two that Leppard added. In other words, if there were no Moby-Dick names in 1947 and two more added in 1955, there must have been something in between. It was back to the archives for me and Alexandra.

For what it’s worth, I did end up finding and contacting Leppard’s son Guy, just to see if he had any information about his father’s preferences in naming Antarctic features. He replied only to say that while he had no knowledge of the history of the names, he recalled that his father had indeed read Moby-Dick. Guy and his siblings even recall him quoting from it from memory.

And while it’s neither here nor there, Guy also kindly alerted me to this series of sledge dog postage stamps issued by the British Antarctic Territory in 2024, featuring a cameo of his father based on this BAS archival photo.

All of this leaves us with a “K.V. Blaiklock” to whom Leppard refers earlier in the report as having some intermediary role between his survey in 1955 and Francis’ earlier survey in late 1948. But we’ll pick up his story next time.

Thanks again to Alexandra Tataran, Elena Field, Steve Heavens, Guy Leppard, Adrian Fox, Jan Tent, Bob Headland, and everyone else at BAS for their generous assistance with this post!

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You see, a few months ago I came across a Reddit post simply titled “guyyyysssss” which included a map showing places called Melville Glacier, Mount Ahab, Pequod Glacier, Pippin Peaks, and Whitewhale Bastion, all dotting the shores of a body of water called Exasperation Inlet. It looked as if it came straight from a video game or fantasy novel, possibly an alternate dimension.

My suspicion that this was nothing worth investigating seemed confirmed when I gathered that the post, submitted to the subreddit r/fishmaell (??), had something to do with a video game called Limbus Company which draws character names and themes from the likes of Dante’s Inferno, Moby-Dick, Faust, and Don Quixote. I know nothing else about it, but the game has occasionally come to my attention through overlapping search terms, and so I dismissed the map until I read on.

so uhhh turns out there’s an entire REGION of Antarctica with a Moby Dick inspired naming convention… including Mount Ahab… sooo…

My interest piqued, I thought it was at least worth a simple reverse image search to find the origin of the map. To my surprise, not only was it real but it was nicked from the website of something called the UK Antarctic Place-names Committee, an organization which had crowned these Moby-Dick sites “Place-name of the Month” back in October 2019.

After just a few more minutes of research I learned that these six features are actually only a handful of a host of Moby-Dick place names on the Antarctic Peninsula. My eyebrows went up and a litany of questions unspooled in my mind: how many places were there total and what are their names? Why were they given these names and when? Who was the Melville fanatic behind this? Had anyone ever actually been there? Are there photos of these places? How much does it cost to get to Antarctica, and is now the right time for me to get into extreme alpine climbing? (A lot, and no.)

Antarctica isn’t a place I’ve thought about very much, but my initial reaction was that it might be the last place on Earth I’d associate with Herman Melville. His adventures at sea as a young man and many of his best-known novels will forever tie him to the Pacific Ocean. In fact, explorers had never even set foot on the continent proper before his death in 1891—though a few saw it at a distance. In his lifetime it was still an almost mythical place, a blank, white setting for the frozen fantasies of speculative fiction. There is, of course, the overwhelming whiteness of it all, but that’s about all I could come up with. But like we’ve seen so many times before on this blog, if you keep chipping away at the icy tundra you’re bound to discover all sorts of unexpected connections in the soil.

So over the next few posts we’ll be headed south from Cape Horn and exploring how one of the most remote, inhospitable parts of the world memorializes Melville and the crew of the Pequod in ice and stone. It’s a place where an explorer could “gaze himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him,” and in turn seems to be a blind spot in the Melville literature. Although the peninsula’s early history is inextricably linked to pioneering whaling and sealing ships, to my knowledge this frigid tribute has never been noted by scholars. So, as ever, the duty falls to this Sub-Sub-Librarian to put it back on the map.

The Log Books

My first task was to get a handle on the extent of the Moby-Dick place names and create a custom map, and the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee had just the resource I needed. The peninsula is, after all, part of the enormous wedge of Antarctic land claimed by the British since 1908, and naturally they appointed themselves responsible for doling out names going forward.

The odd politics of the real-but-also-mostly-fake territorial claims to Antarctica is a complicated issue which we won’t get into here, but I can’t help but mention that the British Antarctic Territory even has its own flag on which an Emperor Penguin stands side-by-side with the British lion. Above them is the RRS Discovery, the ship that took Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton to the continent in 1901.

Part of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee (UK-APC) is the body which makes recommendations for place names in the British Antarctic Territory (BAT), bringing together experts in “Antarctic toponymy, science, geography, navigation, international relations and exploration.” Their recommendations are then presented for approval to the BAT Commissioner, though I assume most of the quibbling is done at the committee level. (While we’re on the topic of awesome names, I was delighted to learn that the present BAT commissioner is a woman named Jane Rumble, which sounds like a roller derby skater or the bass player in a punk band.)

This elaborate and bureaucratic naming procedure dates back to 1943 and Operation Tabarin, a secret British expedition to Antarctica during World War II to strengthen British claims to the peninsula and nearby island groups by establishing strategically positioned research bases. Beyond ongoing scientific studies and exploration, their presence was also meant to help monitor and control shipping lanes around Cape Horn, protecting Allied merchant ships from attack by the Germans.

These early explorers staffed the bases continuously for several years through the war, recording hundreds of suggestions for names as they scouted further and further into the unknown. The establishment of the UK-APC naturally followed, responsible for keeping track of the new names as well as their precise position—not such a simple task in Antarctica. The first batch of over 120 names were officially approved in November 1949, including Nobby Nunatak, Egg Island, Botany Bay, and uh, Nipple Peak. (A nunatak, from the Inuit nunataq, is a rocky peak protruding from glacial ice).

Since then, the UK-APC has assigned more than 5,000 names to the islands, capes, mountains, peaks, rocks, glaciers, coasts, bays, etc. in the British Antarctic Territory, plus over a thousand more in the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands. To keep them all straight, the organization maintains a master list in a giant spreadsheet, available on its website. Included in the data are columns for names, class (peak, mount, glacier, etc.), date accepted, latitude and longitude, and a short description with information on when it was first surveyed and for whom or what it was named.

To bring us back to the topic at hand, when you filter the description column for the word “Moby” you’re left with 30 rows, the somewhat anticlimactic answer to our first question. Feel free to zoom in here but we’ll be looking at them all on a map shortly.

I had some immediate takeaways from the results.

First, that there are Moby-Dick place names already starts to make a little more sense when you realize that coming up with 6,000+ new names must be incredibly tedious, especially when there’s so little variety in the physical objects you’re describing. There can only be so many places with names like Jagged Rocks, View Point, The Hump, Conical Rock, and Round Island, and pretty soon you’re going to run out of notable British explorers and their beloved mothers too. Breaking into classic literature, mythology, and so on seems inevitable.

It’s also intriguing that there are features named not only for the book’s main characters (e.g. Ishmael Peak, Mount Queequeg, Starbuck Glacier) but also for relatively minor figures like Mount Mayhew, Bildad Peak, and Mapple Glacier. This felt like a clue as to a particular depth of knowledge possessed by whoever suggested the names, but more on that later.

I also noted some recurring pieces of information in the descriptions, including acronyms like FIDS (Falkland Island Dependencies Survey), references to the same expeditions and reports, and geographic reference points like Cape Disappointment, Exasperation Inlet, Delusion Point, and Scar Inlet. All of them are said to be located on the Oscar II Coast, in red on the map below.

Here, for example, is the description for Mount Ahab:

rising to 925m between Melville Glacier and Mapple Glacier, Oscar II Coast, was roughly surveyed by FIDS from Hope Bay in November 1947, and resurveyed in October 1955 and August 1962. The name, after Capt. Ahab of the Pequod, in association with names in this area from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or the whale, was originally applied in error to a feature between Melville Glacier and Pequod Glacier (APC, 1958, p.4; BA chart 3570, 29.ix.1961), but was later re-applied to the present feature (APC, 1964, p.2).

… and for Pequod Glacier:

flowing ENE into Exasperation Inlet, Oscar II Coast, between Caution Point and Delusion Point, was surveyed by FIDS from “Hope Bay” in its lower part in November 1947 and over its whole length in September 1955; named after the whaling ship Pequod (Capt. Ahab) in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or the whale, in association with other names from that book in this area (APC, 1958, p.6; BA chart 3570, 29.ix.1961); further surveyed by FIDS from “Hope Bay” in 1961.

Note that both descriptions also reference Hope Bay, one of the bases set up during Operation Tabarin (Base D).

The data also clarified that the names came in waves rather than a single moment in time. The first 13 were accepted by the UK-APC in 1957, including Ishmael Peak, Mount Queequeg, Starbuck Glacier, Mount Ahab, Daggoo Peak, Peleg Peak, Spouter Peak, Pequod Glacier, Melville Glacier, Tashtego Point, Flask Glacier, Bildad Peak, and Stubb Glacier. The next name, Mapple Glacier, wasn’t added until 1964. Eleven more came in 1976, and the last group in the 1980s.

Altogether, the spreadsheet data suggested a kind of momentum in which the UK-APC established a naming convention with the first 13 places in 1957 and then slowly expanded on them over the next thirty years. In other words, it was more gradual process and with many more hands at work than I had initially assumed. Perhaps there would be more clues once I laid them all out on a map.

It was time for some amateur cartography. And then, some professional cartography.

“Not Down in Any Map”

Turning the spreadsheet into a basic map was as simple as importing the spreadsheet directly into Google Maps. All I had to do was tell it which columns were longitude and latitude and voilà, there it was. I’ll explain the various pin colors another time, but you can see how tightly clustered they are, no more than about 40 miles from Mapple Glacier and Mount Ahab at the top and Fleece Glacier at the bottom, or about 1,000 square miles.

Ah, but that view isn’t very inspiring, is it? Not only is there very little topography, it doesn’t even distinguish where the land ends and the Larsen Ice Shelf begins, just east of Mount Queequeg and Tashtego Point. Nor does the map display all the names until you’re so zoomed in that you’ve lost all sense of where they are on the peninsula.

Incidentally, though, I recently became acquainted with retired geographer and GIS expert Bill Wheaton, who in 2025 self-published A Gazetteer to Moby-Dick cataloging the 1,600 (!) real and fictional place names used in the book along with the line in which it appears. It’s also available as an online database.

Clearly, Bill has exactly the kind of the expertise I needed and he agreed to help in a heartbeat. I sent him the spreadsheet with all the data and back came this amazing map which gives a much better sense of the ridges and valleys to which they belong, extending right to the edge of the Larsen Ice Shelf.

It’s hard not to read into some of the naming choices and wonder how intentional they might be. Pip Cliffs, named for the castaway cabin boy, is out by his lonesome on the western edge of the cluster. (It’s also interesting that Pip gets two features, Pip Cliffs and Pippin Peaks, named in 1976 and 1988, respectively). Bildad and Peleg, co-owners of the Pequod, have matching peaks on the same mountain ridge. The white New England-born mates Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask all have glaciers named for them, though the diverse harpooners from around the world are a mixed bag: Mount Queequeg, Daggoo Peak, and Tashtego Point. Tashtego, meanwhile, overlooks the Larsen Ice Shelf as if from his perch on his main-mast perch as the Pequod was sunk.

Over-analysis aside, there was a lot more work to be done. I wasn’t totally satisfied that I really understood what I was looking at. A dot on a map can hardly represent like the grand, ungodly, god-like Mount Ahab, or the side-by-side profiles of Bildad and Peleg Peak. What are these places, really, and what do they all actually look like? Surely someone had gotten a closer view?

“Girdled by Amphitheatrical Heights”

Luckily, it turns out that the Oscar II Coast has been the site of relatively frequent studies over the last half a century, some exploring its volcanic geology and others its rapidly diminishing glaciers and ice shelves. Occasionally these studies include maps, some even labeling the very specific part of the peninsula that we’re interested in.

One of the better maps comes a study of the region in the 1960s by British Antarctic Survey geologist Michael Fleet. Just below the enormous Crane Glacier at the top you’ll find Mapple Glacier followed by the Melville, Pequod, Starbuck, and Stubb Glaciers, which are more clearly seen as the valleys between mountain ridges, many of which peaks named for Moby-Dick. Mount Ahab, for example, is marked on the map between Mapple and Melville Glaciers. Mount Queequeg is toward the bottom of the map, between Starbuck and Stubb Glaciers.

This alternative map from the same study is a little easier to parse, highlighting the kinds of volcanic rock, granite, and sedimentary beds that make up the mountains. Queequeg, for instance, is composed of a substance appropriately called tuff, a pyroclastic rock formed during volcanic explosions. (“There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff.”)

A different view of the area comes from the US Geological Survey’s interactive Antarctic Research Atlas, increasing the the contrast between rock and and glaciers so that we can get a better understanding of all the nooks and crannies of the region. Notice how the mountain ranges below Stubb Glacier become more segmented, and include Mount Mayhew, Cachalot Peak, Mount Rorqual, Finback Massif, Daggoo Peak, and Ishmael Peak. Lying between them are the Jeroboam Glacier, and Flask Glacier. (The Ambergris Glacier is also in the mix, though its description in the BAT Gazetteer does not mention that its part of the Moby-Dick place name group.)

Altogether, the series of mountain ridges actually form a distinct range known as the Aristotle Mountains, named in 1964 for the philosopher-scientist who was the first to conjecture the existence of Antarctica and even gave it a name, Antarktikos. And though Melville only made a few passing remarks about him in his works, that it should be Aristotle for whom the massive mountain system is named is only too appropriate. One of the book’s many lines forever stuck in my head comes after Ahab relentingly orders the crew to bring all the oil casks to the deck to find a leak, setting up Ishmael’s wry punchline:

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

‘Valleys between the mighty, heaven-abiding peaks’

Finally, it’s time to descend even further and see what these features really look like. The Oscar II Coast isn’t exactly a place frequented by tourists, so these precious few images mostly come from aerial photography and satellite images, though I did dig up a few photos taken from the ground, including one that’s going to require a bit of backstory.

In short, some of the earliest photos taken of the interior of the Antarctic peninsula come from a pioneering 1928 aerial expedition in which Australian polar explorer Hubert Wilkins dragged two Lockheed Vega monoplanes to Deception Island aboard the S.S. Hektoria, a steamship recently converted into a whaler. The mission, the first-ever attempt at a flight over Antarctica, was incredibly risky; a forced landing anywhere but where their launch point would mean almost certain death.

Nevertheless, when the weather was just right in late December 1928 he and his team took off from the South Shetlands and surveyed the entire coast of the peninsula over the course of a ten hour flight, taking photos and naming everything in sight in honor of the trip’s benefactors including Lockheed Mountains, Detroit Aviation Society Plateau, Hektoria Fiords, Mobiloil Bay, Cape Mayo (after William B. Mayo of the Ford Motor Company), Scripps Island (after William Scripps of Detroit), and Hearst Land (after William Randolph Hearst).

His report, along with a map of the flight path and many breathtaking photos, were published in the Geographical Review in July 1929 and reprinted in newspapers across the world. What’s more, Wilkins recorded the location and even the direction of every photo, labeled on the map with letters A through Q.

Here, for example, is Cape Mayo, marked “M” on the flight map above along the Casey Channel.

It was a long shot, but I wondered if Wilkins might have captured a photo of the mountains and glaciers that would be named for Moby-Dick some thirty years later. Many of his suggested names ultimately didn’t stick, and even his understanding of the geography from the air was rudimentary at best, so placing these features on a current-day map posed some problems.

Encouragingly, though, one name that did survive was the Crane Channel—later recognized as a glacier—in honor for paper product magnate C.K. Crane who helped fund the trip. Just below the channel, which we already know from above is just above the Mapple and Melville Glaciers, was photo “K” of what he dubbed the Lockheed Mountains.

Here’s a close-up of the approximate location and angle where the photo was taken, overlooking what he called the Lockheed Mountains. It looked improbably close to where I’d place the Stubb Glacier relative to the Crane Channel/Glacier, looking up toward Mount Queequeg.

In fact, in 1964, the UK-APC wisely renamed the too-corporate Lockheed Mountains to the Aristotle Mountains, the exact range to which the Moby-Dick peaks belong. So while there’s probably no way to definitely figure out which peak this is, it’s almost certain to be one named for Moby-Dick, among the very first to be photographed anywhere on the continent.

Now, let’s return to that 1968 BAS study of the geology of the Oscar II coast, which included a series of photos showing the Pequod, Starbuck, and Stubb Glaciers from the ground.

The report also included a “panorama of the upper reaches of Starbuck Glacier from the east.” Depending on where the photographer was standing at the time, Mount Queequeg may be the darker mountain on the left—or thereabouts.

Another view from the ground comes from a 1969 study of several glaciers at the base of the Aristotle Mountains including Flask Glacier. This image from the report even labels Bildad Peak with its “flat ice-capped summit,” and Peleg Peak, which has “a prominent horn shape.” (Note also that one of the authors of the report was a man named G.M. Stubbs…)

For reference, Bildad Peak at 3,250 feet high is about the same height as Mount Monadnock (3,165 feet), the peak to which Melville compares the white whale’s “great, Monadnock hump.”

A more recent study published in Scientific Reports in 2024 uses aerial images taken by U.S. Navy cartographers in the 1960s to create high-resolution elevation models, here showing the Melville and Mapple Glaciers as well as Flask Glacier a bit further south.

Closest of all was Alastair Milne, investigating the geology of the southern part of the Oscar II Coast in the 1980s. Below is a photo of “dark-coloured metasedimentary rocks north of Flask Glacier,” very possibly Daggoo Peak.

While we’re all here, we may as well also take a look at one last series of images from U.S. Geological Survey’s EarthExplorer website, taken on overflights during the late 1960s. These are, I believe, the same as those used to create the elevation models above. The USGS didn’t actually note the names of what they were photographing, just the coordinates, but if you plug a few dozen of these into a map you can essentially plot out the flight path until it was just overhead of something of interest.

Here, for instance, is the vicinity of Gabriel Peak (65°35’11.8”S, 62°36’01.1”W):

… Jeroboam Glacier (-65.609333 , -62.598801):

… Bildad Peak (-65.812342 , -62.577597):

… and Melville Glacier (-65.48564 , -62.393827):

If you really can’t get enough of these mountains and glaciers, check out the Google Earth 3D satellite imagery from the area. Some spots, like Mount Ahab, have an incredible amount of detail.

Next time on All Visible Objects…

Bundle up, folks, because we’re going to keep on trekking through the frozen Antarctic terrain for a few more weeks. First we’ll thaw out the original British survey reports, some of which haven’t seen the light of day in almost 80 years, to try to figure out who was responsible for the Antarctic tribute to Melville in the first place. Then we’ll wrap up by looking at the surprising connections Moby-Dick has to Antarctica and its early explorers. As Melville said of the book: “A Polar wind blows through it.”

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We’ve previously looked at Moby-Dick tributes in art, illustration, philosophy, comedy, restaurants and bars, game shows, coffee, more coffee, cartoons and even serial killers. Today, we’ll sort through some leftover links all having to do with music. There’s no particular through line or narrative, just a collection of curios I wanted to share but which couldn’t sustain much of a deep investigation. I’ve got a real interesting one coming soon but, for now, headphones on! 🎧

Led Zeppelin’s song “Moby Dick” may not be the song for which the pioneering English rock band is best remembered, but it may be the most emblematic of the almost unfathomable excess of 1970s that defined and eventually destroyed the group. Released on their October 1969 album Led Zeppelin II, the song was intentionally crafted to be a showcase for drummer John Bonham’s unbridled talent and energy.

The instrumental song, as recorded, is essentially a three-minute long drum solo bookended by a blues-rock riff pilfered from Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step.” The Beatles actually had the same idea a few years earlier with their own Parker sound-alike “Day Tripper,” though John and Paul sure as hell weren’t going to let Ringo enter a drum fugue state for 90 percent of the length of the song.

The album version is only the beginning of the story, though, and the arc of “Moby Dick” tracks closely with that of the band’s original run as live performers. For much of their touring career in the 1970s, writes Stephen Davis in the Zeppelin 1985 bio Hammer of the Gods, “Stairway to Heaven” may have been the crowd’s favorite song but “Moby Dick” was the one that consistently drew the loudest cheers from fans. Over the years—and encouraged, enlivened, enraged by a particular white substance—the drum solo grew longer and longer, extending to 15, 20, even 30 (!) minutes straight while the other three members of the band went back to the green room to hang out and do more drugs. Meanwhile, Bonham held down the stage working in more and more sly percussive references to his favorite drummers and inspirations. If his sticks snapped in half he’d use his hands or his entire body, eliciting ravenous applause.

The most classic performance of the song was undoubtedly at Zeppelin’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970, one of surprisingly few in their career to be professionally recorded. Here, the solo was kept to a modest 13 ½ minutes before Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones returned to the stage.

Of course, the drum schtick (ba-dum-tss) eventually grew old. Audiences took advantage of the self-indulgence as an unofficial halftime act and left to go to the bathroom or refresh their drinks. By 1977 the grumblings had grown to the point that the song was taken out of the set, reflecting a shift in musical preferences for shorter, simpler songs that would lead to an explosion of pop music in the 1980s. To this day, though, “Moby Dick” is considered one of the greatest drum tracks of all time and a benchmark for the pros. Just last year drummer Cotter Ellis of the jam band Goose made headlines for his practically note-for-note tribute to Bonham’s masterclass.

All that said, I’ve always wondered why Led Zeppelin named the song “Moby Dick,” and after just a little digging the answer was simple enough. Originally titled “Pat’s Delight” in honor of Bonham’s wife, somewhere along the process of rehearsals and recording it was allegedly changed following a comment from Bonham’s young son Jason. Per C.M. Kushin’s biography Beast: John Bonham and the Rise of Led Zeppelin, after one rehearsal Jason sang out: “‘It’s big like Moby!’, referencing “one of his favorite bedtime stories.”

I’ll leave it to readers as to how credible this story seems. I’m not going to die on this hill, but the album version of the song was recorded from May to June 1969, pieced together from multiple sessions. Jason, born in July 1966, would have thus been not even three years old when he is supposed to have made this abstract connection between some version of Moby-Dick and his father’s drum solo. It’s a little suspect.

For what it’s worth, the track preceding it on Led Zeppelin II, “Ramble On,” also had a literary connection, taking some weird inspiration from The Lord of the Rings.

'Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor
I met a girl so fair
But Gollum and the evil one
Crept up and slipped away with her, her, her, her, her, yeah

It’s also worth mentioning that the band were all big fans of the San Francisco psychedelic rock band Moby Grape. When Jimmy Page first laid eyes on Robert Plant in 1968, Plant was performing with a band called Obs-Tweedle doing covers of Moby Grape songs. “Since I’ve Been Loving You” straight up rips off Moby Grape’s song “Never.” So perhaps it was this connection that led to the title or at least gave it some personal meaning? Moby Grape, by the way, took its name from the punchline to a viral 1960s joke: “What’s big and purple and lives in the ocean?” (I guess you had to be there.)

Anyway, John’s son Jason, who turns 60 this year, has for many years been the bandleader and drummer of the Zeppelin tribute act Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening, playing “Moby Dick” regularly on their 2018 tour but only once since. As Jason alludes to in this video of one of the performances, his father performed the ferocious and exhausting solo live on tour while he was still a young man. Bonham was only 32 when he drank himself to death in 1980. In other words, it’s not surprising that Jason, now twice as old as his father ever was, seems to have put “Moby Dick” marathon performances behind him.

Speaking of all that, the band that would soon become Nirvana covered Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” at one of their earliest ever gigs on January 23, 1988 at Tacoma’s Community World Theater. At the time, Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic were performing under the name Ted Ed Fred with drummer Dale Crover, better known for his career with The Melvins. Amazingly, the entire concert—the earliest surviving footage of the band—is available on YouTube, including “Moby Dick” which starts around 45 minutes in. That said, rather than a proper drum solo it’s more of an extended noise freakout session by all three members of the band.

Earlier that same day the trio had recorded its first official demo tape. Two of these songs were remixed and released Nirvana’s first album Bleach. Another five were released untouched on the band’s 1992 compilation album Incesticide. One has to wonder if “Moby Dick” (or Moby-Dick) had been on their minds in the studio that afternoon, though there’s nothing suggesting they tried to record it.

One last strange coincidence: it had been several months since the band’s last gig, also at the Community World Theater in Tacoma. That night the bill included the thrash/hardcore band Sons of Ishmael as one of the supporting acts—though the reference seems to be more Biblical than Melvillean. But if only to bring the whole thing full circle, at the time of the show Sons of Ishmael had recently released its album Pariah Martyr Demands a Sacrifice, which included a “Mystery Bonus Track” on the B-side: a “cover” (of sorts) of “Stairway to Heaven.”

On a totally different note, Moby Arena is an 8,000-seat arena on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The arena is primarily the home of the school’s Rams basketball team but has hosted fairly sizable—if especially dad-rock oriented—concerts over the years, including the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa, Steve Miller Band, the Doobie Brothers, Chicago, and Van Halen.

So why is it called Moby Arena? Well, just take a look.

It’s not just a nickname either—at least not since Van Halen was still topping the charts. Ahead of its grand opening in January 1966, sports editor of the school newspaper Steve Kewskin solicited ideas for a name from students, most of which poked fun at its unusual shape: “Giant Mushroom,” “Great Arch,” “The Saddle,” “Pumpkin Palace,” and one that caught Kewskin’s eye: “White Whale.”

With a writerly instinct, Kewskin simplified the idea to Moby Gym and began using it in all of his articles in the Rocky Mountain Collegian paper going forward. For obvious reasons, the student body also quickly adopted the name and by 1988 the school’s athletic director made it official. It would henceforth be known as Moby Arena.

While I admit Moby Arena isn’t primarily a concert venue (I mostly just wanted to share that amazing photo), it has hosted performances in acts in a variety of genres over the years including Steve Aoki, Ludacris, Yellowcard, And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Gov’t Mule, O.A.R., 311, and Hoobastank.

It has not, so far as I can tell, hosted Moby.

Frankie Laine was a singer, songwriter, and actor whose career spanned practically the entirety of the 20th century, beginning his career as an entertainer at 1930s dance marathon contests (like the one at the center of the 1969 Sydney Pollack film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) and last performing in 2005 two years before his death at the age of 93.

Laine sang in a variety of styles but certainly his legacy is having recorded the theme song to a number of classic westerns including Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 3:10 to Yuma, Blazing Saddles, and even the TV show “Rawhide” (“Rollin’ rollin’ rollin…’”). And while it’s neither here nor there, I can’t fail to mention that Laine’s nicknames included “Old Leather Lungs” and “Mr. Steel Tonsils,” both of which are apparently compliments and not medical conditions.

Somewhere along that old dusty trail Laine was convinced to record a song written by Sid Prosen as an unofficial tie-in for the upcoming John Huston/Gregory Peck Moby-Dick film, riding the whale’s flukes as it were. Released in April 1956, the track is squarely in the genre of 50s novelty songs—maybe even children’s music, though it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference in that era—and, accordingly, it doesn’t take the story too seriously.

The lyrics go like this:

Yo-ho, yo-ho, a-whaling they did go

Oh Moby Dick was so big and slick, there was never such a whale

He’d sink a ship with the slightest slip with his mighty, mighty tail

Oh Moby was the toughest whale living in the seven seas

His breath was like an icy gale that could make a man’s blood freeze

‘Tis said this whale of purest white with a heart as black as coal

Was always in a mood to fight, the devil had his soul

Yo-ho, yo-ho, a-whaling they did go

The bravest men chased after him and each one of them he fought

And every ship he did outswim, til this day he’s not been caught

They couldn’t pierce his hide of steel, no harpoon made would hold

But take my word that he was real as the stories that I’ve told

Yo-ho, yo-ho, a-whaling they did go

The captain would not heed the mate, the crew was tired and worn

No sailing man should fight his fate for a whale so scarred and torn

This kind of man won’t be denied what’s on the briny deep,

And that is why the captain died way out where he lies asea

Close enough, I guess.

The B-side to “Moby Dick” was another seafaring song called “A Capital Ship,” which one review called “a sort of nautical nonsense song” and complained that its lyrics were even worse than the title track. Shockingly, the 45 failed even to become a kitsch hit and did not merit a mention in his autobiography.

Avoiding the problem of lyrics altogether was the British alto saxophonist and big band leader Johnny Dankworth, one of the “totemic figures of British jazz” in the mid-20th century and considered the UK’s “first major jazz musician.” I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of him before this but I do love the name. Officially, he was the much more British-sounding John Phillip William Dankworth and was even knighted in 2006, so make that Sir Dankworth to you.

Like Frankie Laine, Dankworth was inspired by the 1956 film and titled a track off his May 1956 album Memories of You as a tribute—to cross-promotion, anyway. Listen and you may note that the two minute instrumental song makes not even the slightest nod toward a nautical motif or anything else that might connect it to the title.

Dankworth actually dipped into literature for musical inspiration on a number of occasions. Among his many, many recordings are albums like Shakespeare and All That Jazz, Windmill Tilter (The Story Of Don Quixote), and What the Dickens?, a thematic tribute to some of the author’s most notable books and characters. He was also commissioned to write a piece for the 1967 Farnham Festival in Surrey, England, composing music for the first chapter of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the style of “Peter and the Wolf” meant to be playable by youth orchestras.

Despite all of this literary name dropping, though, Dankworth once said that “Dickens is the only author I’ve ever really read,” which I suspect is kind of like saying that Melville is the only author I’ve ever really read: not literally true, but extremely true on a certain level.

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But Kent wasn’t quite finished with Moby-Dick when the book was published in late 1930, and today we’ll look at several commissions he took on over the next two decades branching off from his illustrations. That he accepted them was no surprise; Kent’s singular and instantly recognizable style was always as much of an advertisement for himself as it was for whatever it was selling. Still, some of these ideas were, simply put, bizarre. But if nothing else they’re relics of a time when literature and art played a central part in American life to a degree that’s almost unrecognizable today.

Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of the Rockwell Kent deep dives if you missed them.

The House of Weyhe

Before we dive into the more unusual side of Moby-Dick merchandising (a trend which continues to this day), let’s start with the first stop of the Kent’s Moby-Dick victory tour, held at a small gallery in New York City.

Even as Lakeside Press was still readying the proofs and engravings to send to the print room in late 1929, Kent knew he was sitting on a gold mine. Part of his contract with the company stipulated that he owned the rights to his illustrations and could dispose of the original drawings as he pleased. As it happened, his dear friend Carl Zigrosser was the director of the Weyhe Gallery, a space specializing in prints, photography, and sculpture situated above Erhard Weyhe’s renowned bookstore at 794 Lexington Ave. Zigrosser was an adoring fan who, years earlier, had sought Kent out at home after attending a lecture as a student at Columbia University. The gambit paid off, becoming lifelong friends, and it was no trouble at all to slot Kent into the gallery’s rotation and show off his illustrations to the world.

The space was also a perfect match for Kent’s illustrations. Weyhe, wrote the New York Times in his obituary, was “one of the last of the great art book dealers” with wide-ranging tastes that drew in the city’s literati and rising stars of the art world.

To connoisseurs of art books and fine prints, Mr. Wehye (pronounced Vay‐ya) was a dealer of impeccable taste and sagacity, whose combination bookshop and gallery at 794 Lexington Avenue was a treasure trove. The books ran the gamut of art from gardening to incunabula (works written before the introduction of printing), while the art gallery up stairs might contain Renaissance drawings, African masks and Aztec jade jewelry.

During the 1920’s and 1930’s, his shop was the meeting place for many young artists who later became famous, some of whom received their first exhibition at E. Weyhe’s. Among the Americans to whom he gave early exposure were Alexander Calder (his first wire sculpture display), Alfred Maurer, and John Flannagan. Mr. Weyhe was also among the first American dealers to introduce the works of such foreign artists as Lehmbruck, Kolbe, Barlach, Maillol, Kollwitz, Redon, Masereel, Rivera and Tamayo.

Kent was no stranger to the gallery, either. In 1924 he’d exhibited drawings there inspired by a sailing trip to Tierra Del Fuego (published in his book Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan), and in 1927 he showed watercolors and drawings from a trip to Ireland. He even did the iron work in the doorway and, if I had to guess, the lettering too.

While I couldn’t easily find photos from inside the gallery, we can get a sense of the interior from this sketch by artist Mabel Dwight who exhibited there in 1928.

Kent’s Moby-Dick exhibit opened on February 24, 1930, displaying an astonishing 277 drawings—so many that only a handful of the drawings could be hung. The rest, per the New York Times, were “stacked in piles on the shelves inviting exploration.”

The invitation, printed by Lakeside, called the work “undoubtedly Rockwell Kent’s highest achievement in illustration,” prominently featured three images from the book of the ship, New Bedford, and the white whale looking curiously black.

The Times’ review of the show called the drawings “disciplined, often monumental and imaginative,” revealing more “elasticity” than his previous work.

Mr. Kent appears to have found this task of illustrating “Moby Dick” congenial. Well, it is the sort of task that would especially appeal to him, being, as we know, something of a seaman himself, with a background of nautical romance that includes shipwreck. The drawings are disciplined, often monumental and imaginative, often peculiarly fine in the quality of their pattern (note the splendor of his ship with full-blown sails); beyond that they reveal more elasticity than this unpliant woodcut style has in the past (except upon occasion) enjoyed. No getting away from it, Kent’s severely decorative style does have about it a strong literary atmosphere. It is bookish. It reports adventure, not on the spot, but in the glow of a quiet retrospective lamp. Thus the drawings are cerebral rather than emotionally enkindling. For this reason they recommend themselves, in a sense, as artistic accompaniment to text that surely doesn’t require any piquant seasoning.

Possibly of more practical importance to Kent was having an open forum to sell his work and make even more cash from the arrangement. Per the arrangement detailed in correspondence digitized by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, Kent sold the entire lot to Weyhe ahead of the show for $12,500—nearly a quarter million dollars in January 2026 dollars—whereupon they were resold for upwards of $200 each.

Though the book wouldn’t hit shelves until later that year, it seems that Kent and Weyhe were both dead on with their bet on the work’s value. Two years ago, for example, a set of six original illustrations (including that ‘black’ white whale) sold for an incredible $201,600.

A Noble Dish

We now fast forward a some years, long after the Lakeside Press sold (pre-sold, in fact) all 1,000 copies of its three-volume edition, and Random House sold 69,000 copies of the trade edition. Just when you think Melvillemania might have been slowing down, Garden City Press issued a reprint of the trade edition in 1937 that sold another 25,000 copies. Even today this is mega-best-seller territory.

Eager to capitalize on the sustained fervor was Vernon Kilns, a California-based ceramics company primarily producing tableware and collectible figurines. Much like R.R. Donnelly’s idea to wrap itself in the flag with the Four American Books campaign, Vernon Kilns had… well, basically the same idea, and in 1938 reached out to Kent to gauge his interest in designing a set of dinnerware based on Moby-Dick.

Whatever Kent thought about the soundness of the idea, he was always game for adding a new medium or craft to his repertoire. A quick study of how his precise line work was informed by the shape and firing of the pottery, he had soon recreated the vibe if not specific scenes from the book, wisely focusing on ships at sea, soaring birds, and rocky landscapes rather than, y’know, harpooning whales or stripping its blubber off in giant chunks to throw in the try pots.

Customers could purchase pieces individually or as a set, printed in single colors in either blue or brown. The full 45-piece set came with a variety bowls and plates, butter trays, casseroles, coffee cups and saucers, salt and pepper shakers, coffee pots, jam jars, egg cups, mugs, pitchers, sauce boats, muffin covers (?), and, most appropriately, chowder bowls.

Here’s a closeup of one of the plates and a pepper shaker, which are undeniably remarkable if a little strange even to a Melville fanatic like me.

The set was marketed in full-color ads in magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Life, Better Homes and Gardens, and Sunset Magazine, suggesting to homemakers that “the possession of a set of Vernonware in Rockwell Kent’s ‘Moby Dick’ pattern will stamp you as a person who appreciates beautiful objects of intrinsic worth and lasting value.” Even if the set was a little to out there to eat and drink from, the ads allowed that the pieces were “so unusual and beautiful that they can be considered collectors’ items.”

Ongoing correspondence between Vernon Kilns and Kent indicate that the set sold fairly well, especially to the Kent family themselves who ordered quite a few themselves. (The archive includes a thank you letter to Vernon from Kent’s wife who wrote that “Rockwell received a nice check from you other day” while ordering another 45-piece set for his mother). The relationship established, the company even ordered two more designs from Kent. First came a full-color sets based on Salamina, his book about his time in Greenland, and one titled “Our America.”

Decent sales, however, didn’t necessarily translate to the kind of profit that Kent expected and through a series of cordial yet grimacing letters he urged the company to find a way to send him more money. “I don’t know which of us is the golden egg,” Kent nudged, “but we’ll agree that the goose must be fattened and not killed.” The company politely declined, citing high production costs and flat sales numbers Friendly follow-ups about money also failed to move the needle “It is obvious to me that I have in you a publisher who both out of the goodness of his heart and his sound business intelligence will want to have his artist prosper at crockery designing” (the first and last time those words have ever been strung together, surely).

It was the “Our America” set that sank the ship this time, though, proving to be such a failure that the relationship collapsed. Kent was finally free to speak his mind about the whole ordeal, blaming the failure on poor design and ergonomics of the set:

I wish that you would consider putting my designs on pottery that, in respect to a few essential articles, is not so eccentric and impractical in design. Our own conclusion at home supports the criticism of our many friends who have the Rockwell Kent pottery, that such things as upside-down handles, cover knobs that slip from your finger-nails, and pitchers that won’t pour, are the source or constant exasperation and tend to make them just not use the stuff. I believe that a structural handicap like this alone would be sufficient to explain the relative failure of potential best-seller designs.”

To be fair, he’s not entirely wrong. Here’s the Moby-Dick tureen, for example.

Kent was still sore about the venture many years later, complaining in his autobiography about the “topsy-turvydom” of the set. The metal design plates, he notes, were melted down during the war.

But what a pity Vernon Kilns thought cups should have their handles put on upside down! People don’t like gratuitous topsy-turvydom. And people do like pitchers that will pour. These didn’t. And so when the war came along and zinc and copper were in great demand, the metal plates of the designs were melted. That was too bad!

Kent generally seemed to be at a loss at how to make sense of the project. Of all the gutsy and novel things he tried throughout his life, he wrote, the dinnerware set seemed to make the least sense to him.

In writing these past twenty chapters of my life I have, as it were, taken that life to pieces, spread out its parts to look them over and evaluate them (and, incidentally, to brush them up a bit), then tried to reassemble them into at least a plausible semblance of a human entity. But like the amateurs at clock repair who discover that they have more parts than places to put them, I find myself, now that I have completed the job, with left-over odds and ends of things accomplished that for the life of me I can’t fit in. How in the world, for example, could I between 1938 and some time in 1940, have made pictorial designs for the decoration of three large breakfast-luncheon-dinner sets for the Vernon Kilns of California?

The good news for collectors is that eBay is usually awash with individual pieces from the sets, in both brown and blue—though you’ll have to accept some cracks and chips along with the upside-down handles. But as the good book says, “we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”

Woodcut Portrait of Melville

Cut to early December 1944. President Roosevelt has just been elected to his fourth term, Americans celebrated another Thanksgiving under rationing, and Nazi Germany is about to launch the Battle of the Bulge, its last major offensive on the western front and the largest engagement ever fought by the US Army.

Meanwhile, the Saturday Review of Literature was pressing on with the important business of literary biography, printing a review of the new biography Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind by William Ellery Sedgwick. Although Sedgwick actually died two years before the book’s publication, Thorp calls him a “spokesman for the Melvilleans” whose testament on the author “will endure, no matter what may be written hereafter.”

The ideas advanced here are, in the main, so closely knit and page after page is so prodigal of new insights, that the reveiwer must content himself with pointing to a few, only, of Sedgwick’s leading propositions. Dominating the organization of the book is the idea that Melville’s power as a writer proceeds from the fact that nearly everything he wrote was an “act of being.” On his deepest creations and most vital symbols, his consciousness (which possessed a masculine force as well as a feminine receptivity) impressed itself, moulding them to its own realization of itself. The dynamic relationship between what he objectively questioned and what he experienced generates the force which gives life to his novels. Moreover, for Melville the implications of his fiction were, in each in-stance, as broad as they were high, and as concrete as they were abstract. Each of these “acts of being,” since it was extended in a world of four dimensions, was rich and universal, as only the greatest art can be.

And why do we care about any of this? Aside from another Melville biography to add to your shelf, it’s because printed beside the review was a woodcut illustration by none other than Rockwell Kent.

If there’s any correspondence about the commission between Kent and editor Norman Cousins in the Smithsonian’s vast archives, I couldn’t find it. But the image appears to be based on Joseph Oriel Eaton’s 1870 portrait of Melville, though with a slightly meaner or maybe irritated look in his eyes.

It’s interesting that for all the length Kent went to make his pen and ink drawings for the book look like woodcuts, the technique was only ever used for an image of Herman Melville himself.

“… the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing”

Kent revisited Moby-Dick one last time in 1947 at the request of Associated American Artists, a New York City art gallery which specialized in selling cheap art prints to the middle class after the Great Depression. Then, as the economy recovered and boomed after World War II, writes historian Erika Doss, the gallery began branching off into a wider variety of art-inflected household goods like draperies, “dust ruffles,” and couch covers.

While the AAA had always linked culture with consumerism, it did so blatantly after the war. Despite their intent to avoid the taint of consumer culture, postwar abstract artists saw their signature styles employed in a variety of ways by the AAA and others. In joint ventures with fabric and ceramics manufacturers, the AAA appropriated modern American art as the design fodder for household goods from curtains to ashtrays. Pictures by Anton Refregier, Grant Wood, and several nonobjective artists were translated into "art by the yard" and manufactured by Riverdale Fabrics as ready-made draperies, dust ruffles, and couch covers.

Sounding a lot like Vernon Kilns, a promotional campaign for AAA’s new line of ceramic stoneware, for example, explained that the company had “entered the field of home accessories in the belief that an important contribution can be made by uniting the efforts of American artists and craftsmen to make the vessels man uses daily a more beautiful part of his life—to add to them that touch of creativity which raises them above the level of pure utilitarianism into the realm of art.” For better or worse, Doss explains, it was an important moment in linking modern art and consumerism in the mid-20th century.

Along with Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, Rockwell Kent was one of the bigger names who agreed to work with AAA, commissioned to create a scarf with a Moby-Dick motif. Whether anyone recalled from Chapter 67 that a “scarf,” in the business of whaling, is a strip of blubber which “uniformly peels off” the whale during flensing, is anybody’s guess. Kent, for one, wasn’t deterred, writing of the project: “I will be glad if they go ahead with it, for I think it’s a lot of hooey that ladies don’t want whales around their necks.”

The final design celebrated breeching whales, whaling ships, and very Kentian landmasses all radiating out from a central sperm whale attacking a boat.

If any of these images look vaguely familiar to you, it’s because most of them come almost directly from his illustrations for the book.

• In the center of the pattern is an image of a sperm whale with a boat in its teeth taken from Chapter 76: The Battering Ram (p. 487 of the Random House edition).

• At the top, about 12 o’clock, is an image of a whale’s spout from Chapter 85: The Fountain (p. 535). (As far as I can tell, the whale just below the spout is not from his original set of drawings).

• At about 1 o’clock is an image of a whale’s tail from Chapter 86: The Tail (p. 548)

• At about 3 o’clock is an image of a whale tossing a boat on its back, is taken from Chapter 82: The Honor and Glory of Whaling (p. 523)

• At about 5 o’clock is a ship in full sail taken from Chapter 12: Biographical (p. 81)

• At about 6 o’clock is a blue whale from Chapter 2: The Carpet-Bag (p. 15)

• At about 8 o’clock is a whale from Chapter 134: The Chase—Second Day (p. 794); and

• At at 9 o’clock is an image of Moby Dick from Chapter 41: Moby Dick (p. 265), though the smaller whales inside the circle appear to have been added later for the scarf’s design.

Elizabeth Botten, a reference specialist at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, went deep into the background how the scarf commission came about and ultimately failed, but suffice it to say that the relationship soured when he learned that the company had begun manufacturing the scarves before he’d had a chance to see and approve the final design. When Kent received a sample in each of the two color schemes, he wrote a vicious letter complaining that he was “deeply disappointed” with the changes they had made, particularly the wide borders. The secondary color scheme in lilac and cerise, he added, “only caused us to scream when we saw it.”

But what happened next is not entirely clear. It would seem there was no agreement on how to move forward and production was limited to about 200, at least according to one auction site. And yet, in March 1948 the Ohio-based H&S Pogue department store briefly ran ads promoting the scarf as one of several in their collection designed by famous artists.

Aside from the one at the Smithsonian, I’ve only seen evidence of one other surviving scarf which was auctioned off in 2003 for an estimated $1,500-2,500. What happened to the other 198? Were they ‘remaindered’ like some pre-printed Super Bowl hats for the losing team? Were they such poor quality that they disintegrated over the years? Did ladies decide that, in fact, they did not want to wear whaling scenes around their necks? I suppose we’ll never know.

Kent lived another 28 years, dying in 1971 at his home in Au Sable Forks where he had operated the Asgaard Farm and Dairy for decades alongside his work as an artist. But as far as I could find, the scarf was the last time he waded into the waters of Moby-Dick, fluttering in the wind like a flag nailed to the mainmast of a sinking ship.

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References

• Rockwell Kent, It’s Me O Lord (1955)

• Rockwell Kent papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

• Weyhe Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Kent drove his Lakeside Press partners to the brink of insanity

Supportive and cordial as Kent’s relationship was with Kittredge and Littell, one of the main motifs of their correspondence, if you will, is that of a responsible, professional commercial printing company accustomed to hard deadlines pleading with an iconoclastic artist who stubbornly worked at his own pace. The exchanges are often comical (some intentionally so, I think?) as Kittredge’s inquiries about a status update are increasingly unable to mask his frustration, desperation, and hair pulling.

After working out the broad details of the contract through late fall, Kittredge wrote to Kent on December 30, 1926 that he hoped they could get started immediately with the aim of having it ready by that November and ship by the holidays. Judging from the near identical set of copies from Kent’s end at the Smithsonian and Kittredge’s at the Newberry Library in Chicago, it appears that Kent simply ignored the suggestion without comment.

Meanwhile, Kent was getting his feet wet with some preliminary research. Just as that sub-sub-librarian Herman Melville buried his nose in Beale, Bennett, and Cuvier in order to write Moby-Dick, Kent began his process with visits to the Museum of Natural History, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the Charles W. Morgan whaling ship at the Mystic Seaport, and, like Melville, bought numerous books on the history of whaling. In fact, a number of his illustrations were copied directly from this source material.

Kittredge waited more than three months before sending a sheepish follow-up about the deadline and offering his assistance in getting it done in time.

I wonder if there is anything we can do to assist the enterprise of your edition of “Moby Dick.” If this can be produced in time for the holiday season this year, it should be a real sensation…. Mr. Littell told me of your work in painting for some exhibitions, and so I have tried not to bother you with letters.

To Kittredge’s dismay, no doubt nervously eyeing the calendar, Kent informed him in late May that he’d finally begun sketching but hadn’t “struck my stride enough to have produced any that are satisfactory to me.” After the fourth time Kittredge asked about the holidays, now in mid-June, Kent finally shipped him a single completed illustration to keep him at bay. The image was intended for Chapter 21: Going Aboard, he noted, assuring Kittredge that more would be on their way shortly. Kittredge and Littell, perhaps trying to encourage him to speed up his work, called the picture “one of the finest things you have ever done.”

Only… there were not more illustrations on their way. In September, Kittredge nudged Kent again for even a few more to start the engraving process, employing a classic ‘blame it on the boss’ strategy. He resigned himself to there being no chance of making the 1927 holiday season, but what about 1928?

Mr. Littell asks me every now and then when we are going to have some more drawings for engraving. I have no doubt that you have a number of these under way… The first drawing delights us in every way and promises a book which will be one of the finest illustrated books in aIl time.

Our enthusiasm for this work is as great as ever, and we hope the book can be ready before the holiday season of 1928 if we are going to miss the holiday season this year. The book will be so good that it probably will not matter whether it comes out at a holiday season or not.

I won’t belabor the entire three years of correspondence, but excerpts from some of the more amusing exchanges should get the point across that Kittredge was losing his mind as the holiday targets for 1927, 1928, and 1929 flew by.

December 29, 1927: If I can hoe potatoes in your garden, work on your farm at anything, care for your horses and cattle, clear a field or build a road for you, I am ready to do so.

February 2, 1928: Can you send us some more drawings soon? We are hungry for them and eager to push this work forward… We pray that the book may be printed this Summer or early in the Autumn. What do you think about this?

March 1, 1928: Do you think it would be possible for you to lay out some kind of a schedule for the completion of this work? If you can be thinking this over and give me your candid thought about the finish of the book, we will appreciate it very much.

March 26, 1928: PLEASE MR KENT MAY WE HAVE SOME MOBY DICK DRAWINGS SOON

May 18, 1928: Now that you have completed your wonderful drawings for “Candide”, we wonder if you have “Moby Dick” scheduled as the next book on your list… The making of this book is constantly in our minds, as I am sure it must be in yours… I do not wish to become bothersome in any way, but only to tell you that we will go to any pains to push the work forward at this end… I hope you will soon find time to begin concentrating on Moby Dick

June 5, 1928: Will you P L E A S E reply to this letter and give us some information regarding the illustrations for “Moby Dick”?

The message in all caps, I admit, was actually a telegram, so the capitalization is just from the formatting. But still, it got a chuckle out of me.

Even as the illustrations began to trickle in throughout 1928, Kittredge and Littell understood that they weren’t in any way in the clear. Kent, as we’ll see in a moment, was spontaneous and occasionally reckless, regularly disappearing without a word and leaving his wife to reply to Lakeside’s letters. But the obvious potential of the finished book only gave Kittredge and Littell more anxiety about whether any of them would live to see it through.

January 8, 1929: Really, I am scared to death an automobile will run over you, and we don’t even know where the illustrations are supposed to go! You know when you are associated, even three times removed, with what you think is going to be the greatest book done in this generation, and all you can do is sit and wait and not even push—well, it’s a good deal like sitting in the next room waiting to see if it’s a boy or a girl.

The truth is that Kent, as ever, was doing a thousand things at once, including operating a dairy farm, rebuilding his house after a fire (he was a skilled architect and carpenter), taking care of his horses, and completing illustrations for Adventure magazine and jewelry ads just to name a few.

As Kittredge mentioned in a letter above, Kent also illustrated an edition of Voltaire’s Candide for Random House in 1928 to celebrate the founding of the company. (Their logo actually comes straight from one of his illustrations for Candide.) The following year, Random House also published The Bookplates & Marks of Rockwell Kent, highlighting yet another side gig he regularly took on. Kittredge and Littell were to blame here themselves, interrupting Kent several times with bookplate commissions for themselves and their friends.

He was also at work on—or at least beginning to conceive of—illustrations for his edition for The Canterbury Tales for publisher Covici-Friede, which also came out in 1930. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote of his prolific output in this period that “Every three or four years there is a Rockwell Kent season. That of 1930-31 promises to be such.”

But as much as anything else, the extended production time for Moby-Dick was due to Kent’s enormous vision for the book. Consider, for example, the other entries in Lakeside’s Four American Books campaign. Rudolph Ruzicka’s Walden included 15 full-page illustrations and 18 head-pieces; Edward A. Wilson handed in 16 full-page and 10 half-page illustrations for Two Years Before the Mast; and W.A. Dwiggins submitted 32 black and white illustrations and 22 ornamental headpieces. Kent’s Moby-Dick, on the other hand, neared 300 total illustrations.

This was not according to plan. While Kittredge never prescribed a set number for illustrators to aim for, Moby-Dick was explicitly intended to be a single volume. Kent had bigger aims from the start, asking way back in November 1926 if Lakeside would consider bringing it out in three volumes, giving the illustrations some space to breathe. Kittredge demurred, writing that “management here thinks that three volumes would be too much for this book.” The goal was something “that one could with pleasure read in bed,” and not too large or bulky, at that.

Kittredge and Littell started to change their tune after seeing that first illustration in June 1927. Still hoping to get it out by the holidays that year, they asked how many illustrations he had planned. His reply must have been dizzying, implying the number would exceed 150 and that the final count would be entirely at his discretion.

First, about the number of drawings that I propose to make — I would rather not state a definite number, because, as it has been has been understood between us, I am to decorate the book in whatever way the galley proof of the text may suggest. I count on making at least one hundred and fifty (150) drawings of the sizes I have already made — a number of full page drawings, say at least ten, and smaller drawings wherever I think they will appear to advantage in the book. Besides these, I will design the cover and the title page.

Whether it was that they were so enamored with the single image they had in hand or the realization they were in too deep, Lakeside started to see things his way. They agreed to expand the book to two volumes and even doubled his fee, now offering him $2,000. Later that year Kent pressed his luck again, resurrecting his original idea of a three-volume edition. Lakeside backed down this time, doubling his fee again to $4,000 total. Kent recalled their support (or perhaps their obedience to his will) with glee, writing in his autobiography:

[I]t speaks for a generosity that must be rare in business dealings. I have never known employers more generous, more tolerant of my own shortcomings and delays, and more appreciative of whatever work I did for them than Lakeside Press, its then vice-president, Littell, and William Kittredge, its typographic chief.

In the end, Kent’s Moby-Dick would contain 280 total illustrations spread throughout 845 pages over three volumes, just like he envisioned it from the start. It was a monumental feat which, looking back, we might say impressively took him only three years to complete.

Kent was supposed to write an introduction to the book

As they neared the end of the project, Kittredge proposed to Kent that he put one last stamp on his personal version of the book with an introduction, allowing him to append another credit to the title page.

As, for all time, this will be known as “the Rockwell Kent edition of Moby Dick”, I think it would be a splendid thing if you would furnish the Critical Introduction, which is customary in such works. Then, on the title page, you would be credited for your literary as well as illustrative work.

Somewhat disturbingly, Kittredge seemed fairly blasé about the other introductory material at the start of the book, casually suggesting to Kent that he might consider putting “Etymology” and “Extracts” at the end. Kent does not seem to have considered or even responded to the idea—it’s never brought up again.

Should you decide that there is too much matter to come at the front of the book, it is quite likely that the parts marked “Etymology” and “Extracts” might appear at the end of the book instead. However, these pages do give the book a flavor of scientific authenticity, as well as establishing the author’s deep knowledge of his subject.

Kent continued to mull over the idea of writing an introduction but ultimately decided it would be in “bad taste,” replying:

I have chosen not to after the most careful consideration. I appreciate the honor that might accrue to me through identifying myself in every possible way with this edition of Moby Dick, and yet I feel that for the illustrator to obtrude himself beyond the bounds of his art would be in bad taste.

Though ultimately it feels like the right decision, I did search for quite a while through various archives of Kent’s files for any indication that he drafted something that we could now read and enjoy separate from the book—to no avail.

Kent nearly died on an ill-fated adventure to Greenland

There was one other major undertaking that delayed Kent’s completion of Moby-Dick by several months at least. In August 1928, Kent learned that his friend’s son and a companion planned to sail from Nova Scotia to Greenland the following summer. Though the boys were less than half his age, Kent insisted on joining them in order to get away from his work for a while. The boys, all agreed, could benefit from his experience as a sailor and he was welcomed along. Kent later said it was “intended as a return call for Lief Erickson's visit to America.”

Despite his many other obligations, Kent met the two young men in Baddeck, Nova Scotia in June 1929 and, following some repairs and upgrades, set sail aboard the 33-foot cutter Direction. It would be the first yacht to ever known to attempt this particular voyage, possibly for reasons they were about to discover.

A few days from the harbor, just about the time that Kent was turning 47 years old, the Direction hit foul weather. It was the wrong time to learn that the ship was overrigged and that “her huge mast and heavy gaff made her heel under even light breezes.” For nine days after exiting the Strait of Belle Isle the yacht was battered by storms out on the open sea. When a gale destroyed the port jaw of the gaff, Kent managed to craft a replacement to tide them over until they reached land. They were already within sight of land when the fog finally lifted, not far from the capital Godthåb (now Nuuk).

Rather than pressing on to safety, though, Kent and the boys decided to anchor for the night in the bay of a small fjord, “a beautiful site, completely surrounded by huge, steep mountains and overhanging glaciers,” wrote Kent’s biographer David Traxel. “Rockwell was excited by the thought of painting such a spectacular landscape.” But the relative calm of the inlet turned out to be a trap, the focal point of a nasty williwaw, a word which you and I both just learned means a “sudden blast of wind descending from a mountainous coast to the sea.” Within an hour, the Direction was sunk. Kent grabbed some of his canvases and painting supplies and the three men desperately made their way to the shore.

I’ll abbreviate the rest of the story which Kent recounts and illustrates at length in his book N by E (also in the public domain this year), but the short version is that Kent loaded a bag with supplies and trekked on to find help all by himself, walking for 36 hours straight along the coast. He eventually flagged down a native Greenlander fishing in a kayak and managed to mime what had happened to his ship. After explaining their predicament to local leaders at Nuuk, they commenced a search party to rescue his companions.

Undeterred by the narrow escape, Kent fell in love with the natural beauty of Greenland and stayed there to paint for several months that summer, leading to some of the most striking paintings of his career—all completed at a time when Kittredge was frantically corresponding with his wife about his progress.

In the fall, Kent sent a message to his wife in Maine telling her to meet him in Denmark with the collection of his unfinished Moby-Dick drawings. The time had come to put the project to bed, and so it was that after three long years Kent mailed the final 157 illustrations to Kittredge from Copenhagen in November 1929.

Though they would miss the holiday season for a third year in a row, Kittredge was generous as ever with their praise for N by E — and without a hint of bitterness that it beat Moby-Dick to bookshelves by a few months. Kittredge wrote him just after its publication by Random House: “N by E is a thrilling narrative and is bound to captivate everyone who reads it. You have surpassed your own best work in this.”

Kent, for what it’s worth, did indeed return to Greenland several times in his life to keep painting its landscapes, living among the native population on the island of Illorsuit. In 1935 he published a book about his time there titled Salamina, named for the young Greenlandic widow hired as his “housekeeper” and who later became his paramour. (In addition to his many skills and positive traits, it must be said that Kent was an incorrigible philanderer).

In any case, it’s a strange tangent in a story about that an All-American book illustrated by an All-American artist to promote an All-American industry was, to a great extent, executed in in Copenhagen, Denmark where Kent could finally get some work done.

Kent personally arranged for the publication Random House edition

Kent finally submitted the last of his Moby-Dick illustrations in November 1929, to Kittredge’s great relief. The last drawings even came with an apology for his tardiness and regrets that the all-consuming project was over.

My work on “Moby Dick” is finished, except for the supervision that I hope I may be allowed to exercise over the making of the cuts and the printing of the book.

I realize how very trying it must have been to you that I have so often laid the work aside for other things, and yet I hope that you can realize from the quality of the drawings that I am now sending you that my interest in the work has been sustained until the end. I may even say that I now miss that single dominating interest that “Moby Dick” has for three years furnished me.

Kent, meanwhile, had led the efforts to have one of the major publishing houses issue a trade edition of the book, writing Kittredge early on that “a popular and unlimited edition of the book… would continue indefinitely in public favor, and be a source of income for us all.” It was clear that work of this caliber shouldn’t be contained to a 1,000-copy limited edition run, to be seen only by in-the-know book collectors.

The deal was made with the Random House, of course, which had recently been founded by Kent’s friend Bennett Cerf, and all parties made out handsomely. The trade edition was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and sold 69,000 copies over the next seven years. A second edition using Lakeside’s plates, released in 1937 by Garden City Publishing sold an additional 25,500 copies, and more reprints would follow in the decades to come.

Next time on All Visible Objects…

All that said, Kent was not quite done with Herman Melville. Several opportunities presented themselves to revisit this most fruitful and honored period of his career, and Kent was more than happy to oblige no matter how outlandish the idea. We’ll look at these last forays between Kent and the white whale in the final piece on Rockwell Kent next week.

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References

• Clare Badaracco, American Culture and the Marketplace: R.R. Donnelley’s Four American Books Campaign, 1926-1930 (1992)

• Fridolf Johnson (ed.), The Illustrations of Rockwell Kent: 231 Examples from Books, Magazines and Advertising Art (2012)

• Rockwell Kent, It’s Me O Lord (1955)

• Rockwell Kent, N by E (1930)

• Rockwell Kent papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

• William A. Kittredge papers, The Newberry Library, Chicago

• David Traxel, An American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent (1980)

But first, just as a peek behind the All Visible Objects curtain (its pasteboard mask, if you will), it may be worth mentioning that this idea was meant to be the very first post on this blog, an introduction to the idea of applying investigative research methods and mentality to a work of fiction with endless reverberations in the real world. My photos of the Lakeside Press edition from the last post, for example, were taken in December 2023 (!), a month before this Substack launched. I meanwhile collected virtually every known interview with Kent, read biographies of the artist, watched an obscure and hard-to-find documentary about him, and pored over hundreds of pages of correspondence between Kent and Lakeside Press, miraculously available through the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art digital archives.

In other words, it got a little unwieldy. Meanwhile, I got carried away by other strange topics like determining how Starbucks Coffee really got its name and creating a spreadsheet of every time Jeopardy! has ever referenced Moby-Dick in its 40 years of TV trivia. Every time I steeled myself to return to the vast archive I’d built on Rockwell Kent, a new idea would pop up and back it went into draft purgatory. In the meantime, though, Kent’s images lurched closer and closer to public domain status. It wasn’t the reason for the delay, but it does make decorating this post a lot easier!

So more than two years later and in the interest of finally moving this post from the Drafts folder to Published, let’s take a look at the history of this extraordinary work through the lens of ‘things that I was surprised to learn about Kent’s Moby-Dick.’ If you’re also guilty of simply taking these magnificent images for granted, they might just surprise you too.

Moby-Dick is just one of four books in a series

Although it’s stood alone since the day it was published, Moby-Dick actually has three “siblings” which have been all but obscured in its leviathan’s shadow. The set, which also included books by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Richard Henry Dana Jr., was the product of Lakeside Press’ “Four American Books” campaign conceived in the mid-1920s, and it turns out we have a calculated marketing strategy to thank for Kent’s illustrations.

To back up a bit, if you’ve ever wondered why you’ve never heard of Lakeside Press outside of Moby-Dick, it’s because classic literature was hardly the company’s bread and butter—it wasn’t even really a publisher at all. Rather, Lakeside Press was an imprint of R.R. Donnelly, a printing company founded in the 1860s which was (and still is) one of the largest of its kind in the world. By the 1920s, Donnelly was best known for manufacturing catalogs, broadsides, and newsletters including, for example, the famous mail-order catalogs for Sears, Roebuck & Co., Montgomery Ward, and Marshall Field’s—all fellow Chicago-based companies. Lakeside Press, a Donnelly subdivision, meanwhile printed commercial books and magazines like the Encyclopedia Britannica, Time Magazine, Life Magazine, and the Chicago city directory.

But the price of Donnelly’s enormous expansion from its mid-19th century roots and adoption of the latest printing machinery was a decline in quality control that began to tarnish their reputation for dedication to the craft. Lakeside’s answer to the problem was William A. Kittredge, hired in 1920 as its Director of Design and Typography. Per a short biography preceding a catalog of his work (printed, of course, by R.R. Donnelly), “there was need for a man with taste, judgment, and creative imagination, who would serve as the arbiter of design and prescriber of typographic quality; and one, moreover, who could play an important part in making the torch of Quality blaze brightly in every department of the business.”

Kittredge, who had been born into the printing trade on the East Coast, had a keen eye for design but just as importantly an “instinctive feel for promotion,” writes historian Clare Badaracco. To give a sense of his flair, when Kittredge was hired he was given carte blanche by management to design and print an announcement of his arrival. What he produced was “an eight-page tabloid with blue paper covers, on Italian paper (Tuscany) in eighteen-point Bodoni type, with French Empire borders, after the early nineteenth-century work by the French designer Gille.” He may have been slightly overqualified to print the phone book, but Kittredge had bigger ideas.

At the time, industrialization of the publishing industry had flooded the market with practically limitless machine-printed books. Profit margins were shrinking but so was the quality and craftsmanship which had been the company’s pride. Mass-market trends had put books into the hands of millions more readers through cheap trade copies and Book-of-the-Month clubs, but also created a niche for a company that wanted to stand apart.

Kittredge and senior vice president C. G. Littell thus set out to reposition Donnelly as a leader in the graphic arts industry, aiming to attract publishers interested in printing special or limited edition books. To get the ball rolling, Kittredge and Littell came up with what they would call their Four American Books campaign, a showcase of the company’s capabilities and a demonstration of “American competitiveness in printing, papermaking, bookbinding, and illustrated books.” Naturally, they would select only books written by American authors and have them illustrated by American (or at least naturalized American) artists.

To be clear, Lakeside had no aim of being a publisher itself. The Four American Books were intentionally sold in limited editions of about 1,000 each “in order to touch as lightly as possible on the business of publishing,” in their words, to assure publishers they had no intentions of infringing on their business. In the letter he sent to potential illustrators, Kittredge emphasized that the books were for demonstration purposes only and would be sold “at cost or less to collectors of taste and prominence.”

Included in Kittredge’s pitch to illustrators was a tentative list of books they might choose from, describing them as “American books which should have a place in every reading library and books which people really want to read.” Interestingly, Moby-Dick is just one of three of Melville’s books on the list alongside Typee and Omoo. Others included on the list were Huckleberry Finn, My Antonia, The Red Badge of Courage, The Last of the Mohicans, and many others which I admit I’ve never even heard of.

In the end, Kent was of course paired with Moby-Dick. Czech-American artist Rudolph Ruzicka was selected to illustrate Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Edward A. Wilson would illustrate Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast; and William A. Dwiggins took on Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales, a collection of 22 short stories.

Each artist was offered $1,000 to complete their books, a meager amount even at the time. Dwiggins called the offer "sacrificial" and, after accepting the job, laid out in a letter to Kittredge that he earned $200 from Alfred A. Knopf for just the layout and cover design of a book, plus another $150 for twelve small chapter headings. Other publishers paid $75 per drawing, and illustrations for advertisers might earn him up to $250 each. In the end, Kittredge and Littell likely came to regret the low offer. The artists continually put off their work for Lakeside whenever better paying jobs came along, delaying the campaign for years to their endless frustration.

The Four American Books were finally printed and sent to out in 1930, primarily to customers who had prepaid for them ages before, though none have had anything like the lasting impact of Moby-Dick. With all due respect to the other artists, the illustrations don’t stand out from those of other books from its era in the way that Kent’s do, nor do they give that impression of a unified artistic statement which Kent so vividly achieved.

Here, for example, is a page from Dwiggins’ illustration for “The Fall of the House of Usher,” done in a kind of pointillist style above a large font pull quote from the story.

Wilson’s illustrations for Two Years Before the Mast are occasionally more interesting, but still fall far short of Moby-Dick.

Ruzicka’s Walden gets my vote for runner-up but even compared to his other (quite interesting!) work, the Lakeside project seems to have been quickly tossed off at best.

We’ll hear plenty more about Kent’s output, but needless to say Kent’s timeless images, which have ended up as tattoos, sculpture, Soviet postcards, dinnerware, and more are simply a step above. Whether this is a credit to his genius or a reflection of the source material I can’t say, nor whether the other artists took the job less seriously or were more burdened by the meager pay. All four have become collector’s items, to be sure, in part due to the care taken by Kittredge and Lakeside Press in their production, though as we’ll see only Moby-Dick was received as a literary event in itself. Today, Ruzicka’s Walden can be had for $50 on eBay; Kent’s Moby-Dick goes for a minimum of about $10,000.

Kent’s Moby-Dick almost never happened — several times over

Although Kent was high on the list of Lakeside’s most coveted artists for the Four American Books campaign, it was Kent who decided — insisted, really — that he take on Moby-Dick. Though he was sent the same list of books as everyone else, it was already a book he’d had on his mind to illustrate for some time, and we have both chance and sheer will power to thank for the pairing.

It wasn’t even his first offer to work on the novel. Earlier in the 1920s, as the Melville Revival was still picking up steam, publisher Alfred Knopf asked Kent to illustrate their own edition of the book. Per his autobiography, the unusually-titled It’s Me O Lord, he rejected it because their offer of $200 for a month’s work would have amounted to a “starvation diet.”

Some years previously, Carl Zigrosser, either knowing of my love for Moby Dick or believing that I ought to love the book and, therefore, ought to illustrate it well, had interested the publisher, Alfred Knopf, in getting me to do it. And Knopf, liking the suggestion, had offered me two hundred dollars for the job. Now, however questionable it may be that an artist should live-and there are those who say that artists do their best work starving—no one can well question my obligation to support my wife and five small children; all things considered, two hundred dollars for some months of work was not enough. I told Knopf that I'd need five hundred. But I guess the publisher figured he had to live too—for, so far as I know, no one has ever hinted that men of business thrive on a starvation diet. So Alfred Knopf said no.

The gig instead went to Rowland Hilder, who added only occasional images to A. E. W. Blake’s abridged text of 1926.

That he was given a second bite at the apple for Lakeside Press was another bit of strange circumstance. C.G. Littell laid out his criteria for which books would be selected at the outset of the project, insisting that they must be written by an American author (☑️), must lend themselves to illustration (☑️), must tell something about American lives (check ☑️), and must not have been illustrated previously (❌❌❌). I can’t speak to the history of the other three books, but by 1926 Moby-Dick had been illustrated many times, first by August Burnham Shute in 1896, then by I.W. Taber in 1899, Mead Schaeffer in 1922, Charles Golden in 1924, and on and on. Whether it was that these previous illustrated editions were missed by Littell and Kittredge or this rule was tossed aside is unclear.

One final obstacle stood in the way: Edward A. Wilson, who answered the letter first. When Kittredge sent out his invitation to artists in September 1926, Kent was away on an extended honeymoon trip in Ireland with his new wife Frances. By the time he returned, Wilson had already accepted Lakeside’s offer and submitted Moby-Dick as his top choice. Kent returned to the U.S. in October and apparently missed the original letter, seeing only Kittredge’s follow-up that tried to steer him towards Two Years Before the Mast. There was no question in his mind which book he was meant to tackle in such elaborate fashion. “Would you consider another American classic, that, to my mind, has a great many more possibilities?”

Kittredge caved and gave the assignment to Kent, who was not only the far more experienced and acclaimed artist but was also an avid sailor and adventurer. Earlier in the decade he’d published illustrated memoirs like Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, Voyaging Southwards from the Strait of Magellan which clearly demonstrated the potential for Moby-Dick.

There’s no doubt that Kent was ultimately the right man for the job, a true iconoclast who sought out adventure, wilderness, self-reliance, and independent thought at every turn. American poet and critic Louis Untermeyer called him “the most versatile man alive.”

I have known him as a painter, pamphleteer, poet (in private), politician (a poor one), propagandist, lecturer, explorer, architect (he re-designed my home in the Adirondacks), grave-digger, farmer, illustrator, Great-Dane-breeder, typographic designer, xylographer (‘wood-engraver’ to the uninitiated), friend, and general stimulator.” Who else but such a renaissance man be equipped to tackle Moby-Dick?

The honor and gravity of illustrating Moby-Dick wasn’t lost on him, either. “Moby Dick is a most solemn, mystic work,” Kent wrote to Kittredge as he gathered his thoughts on how to approach the project, with “each chapter… a poem.”

Moby Dick is a most solemn, mystic work, with the story and the setting serving merely as the medium for Melville’s profound and poetic philosophy. Each chapter is in itself a poem, and should be presented with all the separate distinction and dignity possible. The whole book is a work that should be read slowly, reflectively; the large page and type induce such reading. The character of the type should be homely, rather than refined and elegant, for homeliness flavors every line that Melville wrote. […]

If I should choose adjectives that might describe at once Moby Dick and some style of type I would say homely and rich. One does, to be sure, associate “starkness” and “coldness,” as you have with the theme of the sea; but Moby Dick is decidedly not of that character. Its prose is ample, voluminous, rich, warm; it is above all not refined, not studied; it blunders through to triumphant success by the dramatic intensity of the visionary mind it serves. It is literary woodcutting, not engraving.

Kent was involved in every last detail of the book

Once each artist was matched to his book, Kittredge and Kent immediately began working out nitty-gritty details like the layout, paper, and typefaces, shipping samples back and forth between Chicago and wherever Kent happened to be in the world at that moment. Kittredge evidently had the utmost trust in Kent, giving him the authority and a practically limitless budget to make every last decision about the book. “We will leave no stone unturned in our effort to make this the perfect book,” he told him. Even Littell, who may have flinched at the financials, intended this to be the “definitive” edition, so imposing that illustrators might never try to illustrate it again. (It was, and they would).

In Kittredge’s mind, though, the assignment went even further, melding Kent and Melville into one, federated along one keel. He encouraged Kent to think of the project not as merely decorating adding illustrations to the novel but creating something wholly new.

It would be as though you were Melville, and Melville you; that as you engrossed your book, you charted, illuminated, and illustrated it — such a book as you might do if there were only to be one copy, entirely done by your own hands.

It seems to me that the Rockwell Kent edition of “Moby Dick” can be made a much more personal and stirring thing, modeled page by page, then when too formal an arrangement is set up and followed. Certainly, it would permit your neglecting the least dramatic and moving chapters in favor of others of greater significance.

Kent was no less enthusiastic and frankly dramatic about the undertaking, invoking things like the “midnight darkness enveloping human existence” when discussing formal questions about lines and typography.

I would like to determine the typography of the book before I commit myself to the style of drawing; for even more important than the color of the cuts is the scale of the line. The color, so far as, I can see, is determined; night, the midnight darkness enveloping human existence, the darkness of the human soul, the abyss, — such is the mood of Moby Dick.

Ultimately, the collection of correspondence between Kittredge and Kent, is primarily the story of two men obsessively scrutinizing minute details about paper, ink, manufacturers, printing methods, and so on, making the hundreds of pages of letters a bit of a dry read with those occasional bursts of poetry. They often go something like this:

I have gone into the paper situation exhaustively. Of the American papers I liked Worthey’s best, and in consultation with Mr. Alligar and Mr. (I forget his name) of the Worthey Company, I have chosen what I consider the most suitable Worthey paper. I however, very much prefer Arnold unbleached. It is a mold made paper, practically the same on both sides, beautiful in texture and just right in color. The Japan Paper Company are agents for it.

I like the specimen type pages that you sent me very much in color but they seem to me to have two very serious faults. One is that the page set without lids is not easily legible and the other, which I assume to be a disadvantage inherent in the use of monotype, is that the page is spotty. You can at one detect certain combinations of letters wherever they occur. They look like dirty fingerprints on the page. I wish that you would please consider whether or not this would be somewhat remedied by spacing the lines a little further apart or by actually separating the offending letters.

Kent exercised his creative control down to every last aspect of the book, from the cloth in which the book would be bound to the precise weight and welding of the aluminum cases in which the three-volume set would be encased. When Lakeside balked at the cost of the aluminum cases, Kent personally reached out to the manufacturer and secured a lower price based on the value of being associated with the project.

Kent was still blissfully reminiscing about the experience decades later in It’s Me O Lord, rarely given opportunities to work so freely in his career.

Meanwhile we studied the problem of what type would be most suitable to Moby Dick, to Melville’s era, and to the character of my drawings. And of what paper had the qualities that the character and blackness of my drawings called for. For type we chose a Monotype Caslon Old Style, the matrices to come from England; and for paper, imported, hand-made unbleached Arnold. These books to the last, least detail were, by Littell’s and Kittredge’s intention, to be mine. And when, finally, we considered the problem of how to box the three big volumes, my employers gladly fell in with my brainstorm to make the boxes of aluminum. Even the paper in which the boxes were to be wrapped, and the labels to be pasted on the packages, were, by their wish, to be of my design. I tell you: when you’re shown such respect you do good work!

However romantic Kittredge’s notions were about Kent inhabiting the mind of the author, against all odds they pulled it off. To this day there is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Rockwell Kent’s Moby-Dick, a unparalleled example of an illustrator having wholly transformed an untouchable classic. And while it holds up even in the trade copies, the unified vision of the original Lakeside Press edition makes the distinction all the more evident.

Of course, the synthesis between author and illustrator would famously go a little too far when the Random House trade edition forgot the tiny detail of including Melville’s name. Both the cover and spine display only the title and Kent’s name.

While the omission was by all accounts an unintentional mistake, plenty of people at the time poked fun when it came out. The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” page in its January 3, 1931 issue called the error Melville’s “final rites,” already practically erased by John Barrymore’s second film adaptation the previous autumn.

Final rites seem to have been said for Herman Melville, whose name doesn’t even appear on the jacket of the latest edition of “Moby Dick.” Only Rockwell Kent’s name appears, and the name of the whale itself. Possibly this is fame, but fame and oblivion are sometimes so like. One would think Melville would get at least a mention. Book by Melville, the jacket might say.

Incidentally, this reminds us of a fragment of conversation we overheard in a bookshop the other day. “Have you ‘Moby Dick’?” asked a customer of the salesgirl. “Oh, you mean that Barrymore thing?” the girl replied.

Poet Ogden Nash and illustrator Otto Soglow also got in on the fun in Nash’s 1931 book “Free Wheeling” with one of his trademark two-line poems titled “In Memoriam—Herman Melville.”

Next time on All Visible Objects…

A month of Rockwell Kent continues! This post was running pretty long so we’ll continue the journey with Kent as he finally gets to work on his illustrations and nearly drives Kittredge to insanity in the process. Until then!

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References

• Clare Badaracco, American Culture and the Marketplace: R.R. Donnelley’s Four American Books Campaign, 1926-1930 (1992)

• Fridolf Johnson (ed.), The Illustrations of Rockwell Kent: 231 Examples from Books, Magazines and Advertising Art (2012)

• Rockwell Kent, It’s Me O Lord (1955)

• Rockwell Kent papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

• William A. Kittredge papers, The Newberry Library, Chicago

• David Traxel, An American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent (1980)

The year 1930 in the title of that YouTube video is a hint, but in case you haven’t already guessed the answer is that as of January 1st, 2026 all of these works have entered the public domain after 95 years of copyright protection. Congratulations, they’re yours to use! Reprint them, remix them, sample them, and pay no licensing fee!

Of course, when I include Moby-Dick in the list I don’t mean the original text of the book, which will celebrate its 175th birthday later this year. But just as exciting is that joining it in the public domain afterlife are the nearly 300 illustrations by Rockwell Kent originally created for the three-volume Lakeside Press edition, followed by the Random House trade edition and several others licensing the images. Expect to see several new editions of the book and possibly t-shirts, posters, postcards, baby onesies, beach towels, and breakfast cereals (Cap’n Ahab Crunch?) all using the images and making a fast buck from Melville fans. You’d better believe there’s already a new edition of the book using Kent’s illustrations published on New Years Day.

But this post is more than a mere public service announcement about copyright protection. Rather, unless you’ve really invested time and perhaps $10,000+ on an original Lakeside Press edition and its fancy aluminum slipcase, there’s probably something you don’t know the illustrations: not every illustration from the original made it into the smaller, one-volume trade editions that followed. That’s right — there are 12 images which, unless you’ve flipped through Kent’s original vision, you’ve probably never seen before!

What’s more, even if you have gotten hold of a Lakeside Press edition, there are another eight which Kent apparently decided at the last minute not to use. It wasn’t until May 1977 that these images were quietly published in an issue of the Melville Society Extracts newsletter. But the only low-res digital scans available online to date leave at a lot to be desired.

With all of these images having now reached public domain status, however, I can at last publish them freely here and show you what us plebs have been missing out on for the last 95 years. Kent’s illustrations are no less breathtaking in 2026 as they were in 1930 when they were so celebrated that the publisher staged exhibits in art galleries around the country. To that end, I’ve also included a few side-by-side comparisons between the original Lakeside Press edition and the Random House trade edition to see how even the images we’re used to seeing pale in comparison to those printed in their full glory.

“The confounded state of the Copyright question”

A whole book—or a hefty article at least—could be written about Melville’s troubles with copyright issues when he was publishing his novels. Before international copyright, publishing dates had to be tightly coordinated between New York and London to prevent pirated copies finding their way to bookshelves first. It’s why Moby-Dick (or rather, The Whale) was published in London a few weeks ahead of the American edition, and why his publisher there was able to take liberties like removing “blasphemous” language, shifting Etymology and Extracts to the back of the book, and excising the epilogue completely.

Seventy-nine years later, the Lakeside Press issued their edition of Moby-Dick under a much more modern system though one which continue to develop throughout the 20th century. Kent’s contract also stipulated that he retained ownership of his illustrations, allowing him to license them several times in his lifetime, most notably to the Random House trade edition published simultaneously to the Lakeside Press, but also the 1937 Garden City edition, the 1944 Modern Library edition, and more published internationally.

Just for fun, let’s take a look at the paperwork that’s kept Kent’s illustrations under wraps all these years starting with the application for copyright filed on November 5, 1930 by R.R. Donnelly & Sons, owner of the Lakeside Press. Note that in keeping with the disregard that Random House had for the actual author of the book—famously forgetting to put Melville’s name anywhere on the cover or spine—Donnelly submitted Kent’s name as the author. (The copyright office seems to have corrected the mistake in its ‘official use only’ box).

Per the 1909 Copyright Act, R.R. Donnelly’s book and Kent’s images were protected for 28 years, thus we see a renewal of the copyright submitted in 1957, extending the protection for another 28 years through 1986.

I realize the history of copyright law is a real bore, so suffice it to say that the Copyright Act of 1976 and the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act further prolonged copyright protection to a maximum of 95 years from the date of publication, taking us to—you guessed it—December 31, 2025.

When Kent died in 1971, he passed ownership of his work to his widow, Shirley Johnstone Kent, who died in May 2000. She, in turn, designated in her will the Plattsburgh State Art Museum as the owner of the copyright related to all of his work. The museum, which also hosts an enormous collection and rotating gallery of his work in far upstate New York, has held it ever since.

That is, until three days ago.

A Wondrous Work in Three Volumes

So how did I, a simple sailor, get my hands on a copy of the immensely expensive Lakeside Press edition which typically sell for about $12,000? A sub-sub librarian, of course.

Specifically, it was brought to me by a student aide at the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen Library, the underground home of the school’s Archives and Special Collections Department. Though I’m not a student there, all it took was discovering that they hold one of the original 1,000(ish) copies and reserving time in their reading room where it waited for me at a table.

By the way, you too (yes, you!) can sit down with a copy at no expense. Go to the item record on WorldCat and filter by location to find one at a library near you. In most cases you won’t need to have any affiliation with the library or, at most, will need to create an account. Really folks! Take advantage of your local special collections!

Anyway, with my personal copy of the Random House edition in tow, I compared the two page-by-page to spot any differences, which begin before you even crack the spine. The first thing you won’t see on the trade editions is the highly-abstract line drawing of a whale diving into the sea with the volume number (I, II, and III), with another drawing on the spine which differs from the trade edition as shown above.

Another notable difference right from the get-go are the stark black title pages preceding each volume with three very Kentian figures in almost mythological poses. Unlike the rest of the illustrations done in ink, the title pages were prints made from copper-plate engravings which Kent etched directly on the metal, calling them “the only black title pages that ever were” in a 1969 interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Volume I shows a man hovering above the water with his left arm stretched across his body, almost in a yoga pose. In Volume II a figure leans with one leg on some rock or elbow of land, facing a strong wind. His hair is blown back, and behind him is a tree also being blown backward. There’s maybe even a hint of a beard sticking out from his chin. Volume III shows a man in baggy sailor pants upside down, falling among the stars or possibly sinking below the water.

I’m not sure whether Kent meant for the images to have specific characters or scenes attached to these illustrations, but what immediately comes to mind for me in Volume I is Ishmael’s declaration that “meditation and water are wedded forever.” Volume II is perhaps Ahab in a fighting stance, ready to take on nature itself. And Volume III may then show the fate of everyone else on the Pequod, i.e., slowly drowning.

In any case, compare it to the title page in the Random House edition which does away with these illustrations and the cold, sober serif font and replaces it with large, loopy letters and the publisher’s logo — which, by the way, Kent also designed.

The next image not reproduced in the trade editions is a landscape scene below the table of contents in Volume I. Here we see a group of six people on a kind of promontory watching the sunrise or sunset. Are they one of the crowds of water-gazers gathering at the water’s edge in the insular city of the Manhattoes?

Although you’ll surely recognize this image of Ishmael from the trade editions, I couldn’t help but show here just how immense the images were in the original and with such crisper detail.

The remainder of the illustrations in Volume I, so far as I noticed, were all reproduced in the trade editions, so let's jump ahead to Volume II. Once again, the first difference came before the text began. To back up a bit, the very first illustration inside both the Lakeside Press and the trade editions is this frontispiece, possibly an image of Ishmael on his side leisurely reading a book.

However, because the trade editions were just one volume, the other two frontispieces didn’t make the cut. Volume II shows a figure (Ishmael again?) draped over a beam at night. Interestingly, it’s very similar to another 1930 wood engraving Kent did titled “Bowsprit” separate from his Moby-Dick illustrations.

The frontispiece of Volume III is less ambiguous, almost certainly inspired by Ishmael “buoyed up by [Queequeg’s] coffin, for almost one whole day and night” awaiting his rescue by the Rachel.

Returning to Volume II we have another header image from the table of contents missing from the trade editions, the sperm whale skeleton illuminated in front of its “prodigious bulk” of flesh.

Just behind that page is another missing image, the shining doubloon nailed to the mast. It seems like the Lakeside Press used it as a kind of ‘filler’ on an otherwise blank page. Here’s a side-by-side of the two copies.

And a closeup of the doubloon:

To pause for another moment, it’s really worth emphasizing how Kent’s already-astonishing illustrations that much more spectacular at full size. Just look at this classic image of Ahab.

There are also at least a few printing errors in the trade editions. While I didn’t do a complete inch-by-inch comparison throughout, see for example the porpoise from Chapter 46 and the placement of its eye in the original (top) and trades (bottom).

In Volume III, we once again have a header for the table of contents, this time a starry sky above a rocky island.

There’s another missing image at the end of the table of contents of who I’m assuming is Daggoo (note the “ring-bolt” earrings).

As we saw in Volume II, this page is followed by yet another missing image which fills in the blank space before the first chapter, showing a top-down view of Moby Dick.

Here’s a closeup:

Note again in this view of Moby Dick how much clearer and finer in detail the Lakeside edition (top) is compared to the much smaller trade editions (bottom), which also used thinner paper such that the text often bleeds through.

See also this windswept tree in the Lakeside Press:

and in the Random House:

Lakeside:

Random House:

The final difference between the two, if minor, is on the colophon page in which the image of a Native American man is shrunk in the trades to fit the Random House logo, crushing out all of the detail.

Hopefully there will be a full-scale reproduction of the Lakeside Press edition coming out soon, complete with a heavy aluminum slipcase. I know I’ll first in line!

The Unused Illustrations

Ah, but that’s not all!

As I mentioned at the start, in May 1977 Kent’s biographer and and bibliographer Dan Burne Jones published an article in the Melville Society’s Extracts newsletter after discovering eight prints which Kent completed and sent to have engraved but which ultimately weren’t used in the book. Here’s what he wrote about their history and intended placement:

Recently, in collating a set of these engraver’s proofs with the illustrations as they appear in the three volumes, I found that the eight which decorate this article and the one on the cover of this issue of EXTRACTS had not been used.

Because of the procedure followed while all the volumes were in work, all drawings were sent to the engraving sections of the plant, plates made, and proofs pulled from them. These proofs were matted and were sent out for exhibit by the American Federation of Arts to various universities and colleges; the labels on the backs of the mats attest to this fact. Judging from the heights of the drawings all but one appear to have been drawn for chapter headings; though they vary, their widths remain constant to the type page. The height variances of the chapter heading drawings throughout the three volumes add to the variety of the illustrative matter, as do the full-page drawings which off-set the full pages of type. The one drawing, though it is the width of the type page, is of a shark or killer whale in side view, with a fin above the water; the areas above and below it, being white, might suggest that it was intended for a tailpiece drawing.

Although former editor of Extracts John Bryant long ago scanned and uploaded all of the old newsletters many years ago, I thought it would be worth getting a higher resolution scan for this post and ordered an upgrade from the Newberry Library in Chicago which has a complete set among their vast Melville archives.

The first image in the article, used as a header, is a whale boat in hot pursuit of a whale. I would guess the boat is led by Stubb based only on the appearance of what looks to be Tashtego, his harpooner, at the front, though possibly the figures are just generic sailors. If it is Stubb’s boat, perhaps the image was intended to illustrate Chapter 61: Stubb Kills a Whale?

The scene in the next image is much clearer, showing a team of a dozen men heaving up the anchor by turning round and round the capstan. We examined this moment in the book way back in June 2024 trying to determine which sea shanty they were singing longing for those “Girls of Booble Alley.”

Another lost scene shows Ahab in a confrontation with Starbuck, maybe illustrating Chapter 109: Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin before Ahab picks up the musket?

An illustration labeled “Implements Belonging to a Whale Boat” shows 21 tools and devices strewn about the deck with a number and corresponding description.

Kent did end up including several tools with labels in the book, but did so individually and closer to the part of the text in which they appear, such as the blubber hook in Chapter 68: The Blanket.

Another unused image is this one of a shirtless man at the ship’s wheel, though it’s unclear who this is supposed to be.

Kent’s illustrations in the book primarily show Moby Dick in the midst of some vicious attack on a whale boat or looming menacingly beneath the surface of the water. I don’t know why he chose to discard this angle though perhaps the realism ultimately made him look somewhat ordinary and indistinct.

I’m also not entirely clear if this was meant to be New Bedford or Nantucket, though I would guess it’s the latter as there is already an illustration of New Bedford in Chapter 2: The Spouter-Inn and none of Nantucket.

It’s not hard to guess why Kent or maybe his editor nixed this illustration looking head-on at a right whale. It’s not that he failed to capture this bizarre looking creature—see here for a comparison to a labeled photo/diagram—but the angle does make it hard to parse at a glance or even a good long stare.

Finally, the Melville Society Extracts used this ninth image on the cover of the issue, a profile of a killer whale I’d assume to illustrate Chapter 32: Cetology or maybe just fill in space where needed. (I forgot to ask the Newberry Museum to include the page when I requested the article scan so this is from John Bryant’s scan).

Dan Burne Jones adds that there are many more drafts and sketches that Kent chose not to complete which “have turned up in public and private collections.” Presumably some of these have ended up in the Plattsburgh Museum’s archives as well, but until I find myself near the New York-Québec border these 20 additions to the catalog will have to suffice.

That’s all I’ve got for this week. Happy new year, and happy year of Rockwell Kent!

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New illustrated edition of Moby-Dick

Experimental publisher Maudlin House released a new 650-page edition of Moby-Dick with rather impressionistic and chaotic ballpoint pen drawings by illustrator Dmitry Samarov. I haven’t seen the book in person but it’s steal at just $25. Dmitry also sells original ballpoint pen drawings on his website.

Vintage Melville Society Sweatshirt

Though I’ve gone back and forth on buying this for myself, I’ll toss out the eBay link for this vintage Melville Society sweatshirt (size Large) sold at the organization’s 1991 Centennial Conference. It looks to be in great condition but there is just one available, so act quickly! I might change my mind…

Very Truly Yours

Own a piece of history with this authenticated letter from Herman Melville to George Putnam, publisher of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. The text of the letter, dated January 27th (without a year) reads, in full: “Dear Sir: Re-enclosed is the proof. Very Truly Yours, Melville.”

Per the eBay listing, the letter was written between 1852 and 1855 when Putnam’s office was based at 1010 Park Place in New York, a time when the magazine published such stories at “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), “The Encantadas” (1854), and “Benito Cereno” (1855).

Having learned a bit about Melville’s career as a magazine writer last year, we might be able to narrow this down. For example, “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” and “Bartleby” were published in the November and December 1853 issues. Others also don’t seem to fit the January timeline, including “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” (June 1854), “The Happy Failure” (July 1854), and “The Fiddler” (September 1854).

This leaves us with three possibilities: “The Encantadas” was printed in three installments from March to May of 1854; “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” came in April 1855; and Israel Potter was released in nine installments ending in March 1855. It seems any one of those could have required Melville to send a proof in late January.

So for all you Israel Potterheads out there, consider picking up this signed letter, now 170 years in exile from proper archival care — a bargain at $16,000 (or best offer).

Harpooning With Friends

Back in the 1940s, a man named Reginald Leister of Toledo, Ohio produced and marketed a series of “puzzle packs,” kind of a Highlights Magazine for bored adults and party hosts. Each pack included brain teasers and ideas for games you could play with household materials, some of which were aimed at keeping U.S. soldiers busy abroad in WWII. It was a simpler time.

One such “party caper” has escaped its binding and is now for sale on eBay, giving instructions for a Moby-Dick game in which you’re told to—and you couldn’t make this up—“make a harpoon by sticking a needle into the end of a wooden skewer” or Q-tip and throw it at a bowl of floating cranberries. Small corks are also OK.

I’m not sure I could do this even before my ration of holiday grog, but maybe set this one up before the second measure is passed around.

Wooden Replica Arrowhead

For more than 40 years, a Wooster, Ohio company called The Cat’s Meow has been producing little wooden replicas of famous landmarks, historic houses, holiday scenes, and even custom versions of your own house. (What is it about these Ohioans?)

Well, wouldn’t you know that among its blocky creations is a miniature Arrowhead, part of its “Famous Authors” series from 1989 which also included homes owned by Longfellow and Louisa May Alcott.

There’s one tiny Arrowhead currently on eBay for the low price of $14.99.

Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo

Earlier this year, Grove Press published Xiaolu Guo’s new book Call Me Ishmaelle, “a subversive, rollicking, and feminist retelling of Moby-Dick.” Although it’s been available overseas since January, it only recently reached U.S. bookstores. I just bought a copy last week and it’s duly been added to my enormous stack of Melville and Melville-adjacent books to read.

Here’s the publisher’s summary:

One of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation, Xiaolu Guo is the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Nine Continents and a Granta Best Young British Novelist. In Call Me Ishmaelle, Guo turns Herman Melville’s masterpiece on its head with a modern feminist, diasporic sensibility.

1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. Years later, as the American Civil War breaks out, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors amidst the bloody male violence of whaling and discovers a mysterious bond between herself and the white whale who claimed Seneca’s leg.

Built on the bones of Melville’s classic, Call Me Ishmaelle is a dynamic new tale, imbued with a diverse, swashbuckling crew—from a Polynesian harpooner to a Taoist Monk—and a powerful exploration of human nature, gender, man’s place among the animals, and the nature of home.

All Visible Objects Party Pack

Finally, you can show your devotion to this strange blog by collecting memorabilia from each blog post this year. Of course I make no money from any of this, but if you’re going to spend your money on junk anyway, it might as well be stuff you heard about here first!

Some options include:

• The PBS biography “Herman Melville: Damned in Paradise” for which Bill Beckwith’s Melville bust was originally commissioned (from “Herman’s Head, Part 3”)

• A set of TLC’s “Great Books” series on VHS, including the episode on Moby-Dick which stars Melville impersonator Jack Putnam (from “Drafts of a Draft”)

• The National Lampoon Songbook, featuring the entire music and lyrics to the “Moby!” musical (from “National Lampoon’s Moby-Dick”)

• A real oil painting by Asa W. Twitchell of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, somehow lingering on eBay all year (from “Images of Melville, Part 1”)

• Make your own tintypes/ambrotypes with Rockland Colloid Tintype Parlor Kit (from “Images of Melville, Part 2”)

• Buy a print from Stefanie Rocknak, the sculptor of New Bedford’s forthcoming Melville statue, or from Andrew DeVries, who restored the Melville bust (from “The Ribs and Terrors at the Chapel” and “Herman’s Head, Part 5”)

• A copy of Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror: Heebie-Jeebie Hullabaloo, featuring the comic strip “Moby Homer” (from “Moby Homer”)

• A cheap print of Jackson Pollock’s “Blue (Moby Dick)” (from “On Pollock’s Moby-Dick Mythology”

• A real scrimshaw whaling logbook stamp to mark when and where you spot your next white whale (from “The Legend of Amos P. Smalley”)

• A copy of A Whaling Captain’s Daughter, an excerpted look at the diary of Laura Jernegan, who sailed on a whaling ship with her family in the mid-19th century (from “The Family Jernegan”)

• Spend a night at the Queensbury Hotel in Glens Falls New York and admire Griffith B. Coale’s Last of the Mohicans painting in the lobby (from “The White Whale is That Wall”)

• A postcard of Coale’s house in Stonington, very much not the former home of a whaling captain (from “Slipshod Signs in Stonington”)

• A t-shirt of the blue and gold-foil 1937 Garden City edition of Moby-Dick, proposed for banning in Texas in the 1950s because of Rockwell Kent’s supposed communist leanings (from “Sailing Forbidden Seas”)

• A White Whale Records t-shirt or refrigerator magnet (from “White Whale B-Sides”)

• Or you can always make a donation to the Ellen M. Gifford Cat Shelter and/or Mystic Aquarium’s beluga whales (from “The Dreams of Thy Youth” and “White Whale B-Sides”)

What a year! Happy holidays!

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White Whale Records

A recurring theme on this blog is looking into why notable companies, restaurants, bars, ship owners, etc. look to Moby-Dick when coming up with names for their new ventures. The recent death of Mark Volman, guitar player and backing vocalist for 1960s sensation The Turtles, reminded me of the curious fact that they were the flagship band of a short-lived label called White Whale Records. Knowing little to nothing about the band beyond their hit 1967 single “Happy Together,” I thought I’d poke around and see if there was a story behind this gam between two aquatically-named groups.

The abbreviated history of the Turtles is that in the early 1960s Volman and high school classmate Howard Kaylan formed a surf rock band—then all the rage in Los Angeles music scene—called The Crossfires. While still teenagers the group recorded and released a couple of singles, including the too-literal “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” smashing together one ‘normal’ section of surf rock followed by another more zany, Halloween-ish take on the genre. Local radio airplay got them a gig as the house band at a club in Redondo Beach backing bands like Sonny & Cher, The Drifters, The Righteous Brothers, and another surf rock group called Rick & The Ravens, who were about to undergo a drastic change to their name and style, becoming The Doors.

The Crossfires were headed for their own turning point when the British Invasion hit the west coast and effectively erased surf rock from the musical map. Already splitting their weekly $125 per week salary six ways, the band decided to call it quits one night after a gig. On their way to the club manager’s office to give him the bad news, Kaylan was stopped by what he recalls were “two bearded clowns in suits” who had heard their set and wanted to sign them to their new record company—so new it didn’t even actually exist yet.

As you might guess from Kaylan’s description, the relationship between the band and the two men, Ted Feigin and Lee Lasseff, would eventually sour like so many bands and labels before and since. In the moment, though, wrote Kaylan in a oral history published in 2023, the decision to trust these shadowy figures was unanimous.

So, when the guys said, ‘We want you to go into the studio and record three songs,’ we took a meeting backstage, and I said, ‘Look, I know we put out two records. They were both jerk-offs, this is probably going to be another jerk-off, but guys, what do we have to lose? We’re breaking up tonight. We can either do this, or not do this. Somebody says they’re going to pay for us to go into the studio and make a record. Are we really not going to do it?’ So, we had a discussion about it. It was weird on many levels. It was weird because A: we’re going to break up, B: we had no idea who these guys were, and C: these guys, Lee Lasseff and Ted Feigin, didn’t have a name for their record company yet. They had no artists at that point, either. They just had a dream. Ted Feigin said he was the PR guy from London Records. Lee Lasseff said, ‘I do the same thing for Liberty Records. And we’re sick and tired of doing this crap, we wanna start our own record company, and you’re the guys we’re going to launch it with.’

Kaylan and Volman, both still underage, had to have their parents’ sign the contract before a judge. The judge took one look at the language and warned the parents of the fine print. “He took both of our parents aside and said ‘You’re dong the wrong thing. This is a contract that is going to get them in huge financial trouble.” Of course, teenagers are gonna teenage and they convinced their naïve parents it could be their big break, so everyone signed on the dotted the line. The owner of the nightclub, now their manager, insisted they had to change their name. He suggested The Turtles, following the animal theme of bands like The Beatles, The Byrds, The Monkees, and so on, though this also rather degradingly played on the heavy set figures of most of the band.

Meanwhile, Feigin and Lasseff got to work on their side of the business, incorporating the White Whale record company and a publishing company, the side that handles copyrights, royalties, and licensing, named Ishmael Music. Obviously, it was at this point where I realized the Melville-mania went even deeper than I realized. It was Turtles all the way down.

The newly-christened band recorded a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe,” reframing the song as more angry than plaintive, and in a style closer to that of The Zombies. Released in the summer of 1965, the record prominently featured the new label’s logo, a cartoon Moby Dick floating above the surface of the water.

The single was also released on an album by the same name, alongside covers of “Like a Rolling Stone,” “It Was a Very Good Year,” and a handful of originals. The White Whale logo was again stamped on the cover of the record, as it was with every other album by the Turtles and the company’s stable of fly-by-night psych-pop bands.

Some of the label’s albums were even issued in sleeves adorned with endless processions of white whale logos, such as the honestly rad psych-rock single “Little Girl, Little Boy” by The Odyssey. (For real, if nothing else at least give this one a listen).

Thanks to a presumably-unaffiliated graphic artist, you can even buy the logo as a nice looking magnet or t-shirt, though you first might want to read up on what predictably happened to the Turtles after “Happy Together” sold a bajillion copies and they gave that contract a ‘business squint.’ There’s an entire documentary on the band free on YouTube which gets into the dire financial straits the band was put into by White Whale Records if you’re interested, but long story short, the band got screwed and broke up without much to their name—not even the rights to their own songs. Similarly, without their big money maker (and other financial mismanagement, to say the least), White Whale Records went bankrupt not long after.

Nevertheless, I was dead set on figuring out why the company was named for Moby-Dick, learning as much as I could about founders Lee Lasseff and Ted Feigin, about the bands and musicians they worked with, including Warren Zevon, Judee Sill, and Frank Zappa, and their careers in the music industry after White Whale Records folded. One nearly relevant find came from a March 1967 article in the Los Angeles Times in which Feigin remarked that they named the company White Whale because “Moby Dick, Ahab and Harpoon were all taken.” The reporter apparently had no further questions.

Alas, Lee Lasseff died in 2013 and the only person I found who might be the right Ted Feigin (now 90 years old) was unreachable. At the risk of upsetting family members I respectfully stopped emailing random Feigins after a few attempts. Then, at last, the barest version of the truth was revealed in a book about another label, The Rhino Records Story: Revenge of the Music Nerds, from 2013, which at the very least IDs which member of the label duo was the Melvillean.

Lee Lasseff and Ted Feigin… had worked as record promotion men, for Liberty and London, respectively. They didn’t have a name for their label yet, but wanted to sign the Crossfires. They were impressed with the band’s cover of the Byrds’ (Bob Dylan-penned) “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which was then in the top ten…. Lee and Ted thought that folk rock would be big, and they wanted the group to record another of Bob Dylan’s songs to release as their debut single.

It was nice to have the interest, but realistically, this wasn’t an offer from one of the established labels. The new label was named White Whale because Ted Feigin loved Moby Dick. He named the publishing company Ishmael after the book’s protagonist sailor, and a later publishing company, Pequod, after the whaling ship. Lee and Ted’s interest was a way for the band members to postpone giving up the rock ‘n’ roll dream and assuming adult responsibilities.

Blink and you miss it, but there it is. Feigin even named another publishing company later in his career after the Pequod. It’s unfortunate that Feigin and Lasseff were such shady characters in the end, but from now on whenever you hear “Happy Together,” or Judee Sills’ “Lady-O” (first recorded by The Turtles), or the vaguely familiar “All Strung Out” by sibling duo Nino Tempo & April Stevens… think of it as yet another excuse to tell everyone within earshot about 1960s psych rock’s unexpected connection to Moby-Dick.

Captive White Whales

When you start searching newspaper archives for keywords related to Moby-Dick and this various interests of this blog, you’ll inevitably come across unrelated hits which nevertheless open up a whole new can of worms—not to mention dozens of new browser tabs. It’s part of what’s kept this blog going for nearly two years.

Such was the case for an ad I found in Brooklyn’s Kings County Rural Gazette from August 25, 1877. What I was initially looking for I don’t recall, but just imagine how high my eyebrow arched when I spotted the Coney Island Sea Side Aquarium and Zoological Garden announcing its “LIVING WHITE WHALE,” not to mention Mrs. Benjamin and her Nine Wonderful Performing Dogs.

I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, but it was worth checking to see if this was some quaint 19th century scam or, as it of course turned out to be, the sad story of some unlucky beluga whales. I couldn’t help but wonder if Melville ever scanned the newspaper with a shock of recognition at these two words which have since become inextricably linked with his entire personhood. Did he feel mocked by the friendly, relatively petite white whales so easily held captive in a glass enclosure? What would he have thought of children tapping on the tank and making faces at a white whale, his indomitable, supernatural leviathan?

It’s unlikely that Melville ever personally encountered a beluga in their natural habitat around the Arctic circle; his voyages on the Acushnet, Lucy Ann, and Charles & Henry whalers stayed put in the South Seas. If he read about them in Scoresby, who noted that they’re often called “white whales,” he didn’t bother to include this information among their Octavo and Duodecimo brethren such as the narwhal, possibly concerned this somewhat lessened the gravitas of “The Whiteness of the Whale.” (Their name in fact comes from the Russian word “bieluha” meaning white). Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if he ever stood there face to face with a living white whale behind a thick glass wall, and it turned out he had plenty of opportunities.

I began with that “Sea Side Aquarium, Zoological Garden and Aviary,” which I learned was the Coney Island outpost of the short-lived Great New York Aquarium in Manhattan. Opened in 1877, the aquarium was home to all kinds of animals from around the world, including hippos, seals, sea lions, tropical fish, and even chimpanzees and orangutans. Its main attraction, though, was a real live beluga whale caught and transported to New York by Captain Zack Coup. These were among the first leviathans (in miniature) ever held in captivity, and you can imagine the excitement of seeing one in person in midtown Manhattan.

That said, while the word “aquarium” might lead you to believe the exhibit was the work of well-meaning scientists and educators, Captain Zack was actually the brother of W.C. Coup, a pioneer of the railroad circus, shipping carnivals, sideshows, and museums across the country via railcars. In 1870, Coup partnered with P.T. Barnum to put together “P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Circus and Hippodrome” but a few years later was back in New York helping to launch the Great New York Aquarium with Charles and Henry Reiche, German bird and animal dealers.

Barnum had already experimented with exhibiting belugas in previous ventures, and Coup in learning the tricks of the trade must have insisted on procuring his own. But per a visitor guide printed in 1877, “there were innumerable difficulties and dangers to be met and overcome” in the capture of the aquarium’s first two belugas. The team led by Coup’s brother traveled by sleigh along the St. Lawrence River into remote parts of northeastern Canada, finishing the last segments on snowshoes. When they finally found their white whales they snared them “entirely free from injury” and then escorted them back to New York by schooner, rail car, and steamship in giant boxes.

As an aside, it does seem that belugas apparently are quite easy to catch. This short documentary from 1968, “Beluga Days” (Le Beau Plaisir in the original French), shows how they swim right into simple figure-eight enclosures and get stuck swimming in circles. That said, I’d recommend stopping after the first four minutes of the video unless you want to find out what these particular fisherman had planned for the poor whale.

The first two whales were brought to the main aquarium in Manhattan, less than a mile from Melville’s house on East 26th Street. His thoughts were likely far from whales, having recently self-published Clarel, an 18,000-line epic poem about the title character’s pilgrimage through the Holy Land. For others, their arrival was an “occasion of great excitement and curiosity,” per the visitor guide—slyly scampering past the fact that excitement and curiosity was all there ever was. When the 65,000 gallon round tank housing the whales was filled to the top with water in advance of their big public reveal, the glass burst and flooded the aquarium. Though Coup downplayed the incident in the New York Tribune, both belugas died, one of which seems to have been impaled on a piece of the iron frame. (Several employees were also seriously injured as well).

Captain Zack was thus sent to trudge once again through the snow to capture two more belugas, this time brought to the Coney Island outpost ahead of its own grand opening in May 1878. They arrived in rough shape by their own admission, carried to the finish line by a team of 24 men and “rolled in over thick layers of sea-weed.”

Two big boxes, each containing one whale, were carefully carried inside by twenty-four men, one of the sides of each box was knocked out, and the animals were rolled in over thick layers of sea-weed. Before they were placed in the water, they behaved as quietly as a turtle nailed to the deck of a ship. They breathed regularly through the big spouthole on the upper end of the head, but neither opened their mouth nor moved their tail or fin, and the big, unwieldy body looked almost like a corpse. The grayish-white skin was scratched and torn in many places, and a look both at the big animal in its narrow box and at the gang of rough, weather-beaten men that formed its escort plainly told of the hardships and fatigues which they must have undergone.

The whales allegedly bounced back after being transferred to the tank and fed copious amounts of live eels, “spouting vigorously” for staff and the gawking public. And they lived happily ever after, seeing out their natural lifespan of 35-50 years.

Ah, if only that were true. Many years later, aquarium superintendent Frank Mather spilled the beans about the operation in Popular Science magazine, copping to all of W.C. Coup’s circus tricks. On the more harmless side, for example, is that the belugas were said to be 20 feet long in the ads littering the city, but were in fact six feet at best—a slight difference which Mather said was quickly noted by the public.

Standing by the tank, I heard strange comments:

“Do you call that little thing a whale? … The papers said it was twenty feet long; I should think it might be six feet, but no more.”

“Well,” answered the attendant, “water is mitey deceivin’, an’ that whale is more’n three times as long as it looks. The fact is, the papers did report it to be longer than it is, for when we drew off the water to clean the tank yesterday we put a steel tape over the whale and it measured just nineteen feet eleven inches and a half.”

The much worse deception, though, was that the belugas were simply unable to survive with such a primitive understanding of their needs. Mather noted that the longest a beluga ever survived in captivity was nine months, though most died after just four or five. The belugas, sad to say, were replaced as readily as parents swapping out their child’s goldfish.

We had many white whales at different times, for the management would keep whales penned up on the St. Lawrence River to replace those which died, and would never show more than two at a time, claiming that they were rare animals and only to be had at ‘enormous’ expense... It would never do to have the public know that they were common during the summer in the St. Lawrence, and when one was getting weak another would be sent down, and the public supposed that the same pair was on exhibition all the time.”

Ultimately, I can’t say I found any reason to believe Melville ever saw any of the perhaps dozens of belugas that comprised a small part of New York City’s population in the late 1800s. He was still a working man patrolling the Hudson River docks for the U.S. Customs House and meanwhile suffering a litany of illnesses and ailments. Confronting a white whale might have been the last thing on his mind. Though, to be fair, he did make a day trip to Philadelphia in October 1876 to visit the Centennial Exposition where he may have spotted the skeleton of a finback whale hanging from the ceiling of one of the buildings.

Still unlikelier was that Melville visited the first ever belugas held in captivity in the United States. Arriving not long after Moby-Dick was published, white whales were part of the opening slate of animals exhibited by the Boston Aquarial Gardens, a venture co-owned by ambrotype inventor James Ambrose Cutting. (The Aquarial Gardens were purchased in 1862 by none other than P.T. Barnum, who obviously knew a profitable spectacle when he saw one.)

But the reason I bring up this particular example is because I’m obligated to share with you one final, lasting image from this aquarium, a feat described as the “WONDER FEAT OF THE WORLD!” and a “Realization of the Poet’s Dream!” It was, insanely, a woman on a clamshell chariot being dragged around by a beluga.

To give you a sense of how demented and ramshackle the whole thing was, consider that the Aquarial Gardens first tried to pull off the stunt with a dolphin. The creature apparently took to the harness well enough but before the show went public the poor thing “died of dyspepsia, it having injudiciously swallowed a number of iron nails that lay at the bottom of the tank.” An article about the gardens in Ballou’s Pictorial remarked: “This was a damper, but why not harness the whale?” Why not, indeed?

The question was considered, and the monster was measured for collar and traces. He took to them both kindly, and a piquant little piece having been written, the services of Neptune and Triton were enlisted, and Mademoiselle Leone, a charming young lady of Boston, boldly entered her boat, and drove the whale as deftly as if he had been the tamest of ponies… No one but a live Yankee would have dreamed of such a thing, or carried it out to a successful issue.*

Do I feel sorry for these poor whales and dolphins, all of whom died early deaths and often in bizarre ways? (Several belugas boiled to death in another of Barnum’s museums in 1865, for instance). Of course. But If you think I was about to hit Publish on this post without an illustration of a woman on a fairy boat pulled by a whale… you’re out of your mind. And you’re welcome.

If that wasn’t enough for you, 12-year-old Sarah Gooll Putnam, who would later become a noted painter, visited the Aquarial Gardens in February 1862 and recorded it in her diary along with a sketch.

In the evening I went again to the Aquarial Gardens, and there we saw the whale being driven by a girl. This was in a boat and the whale was fastened to the boat by a pair of rains [sic] and a collar which was fastened round his neck. The men had to chase him before they could put on the collar.

I realize we’re now far from the realm of Melville, but I’ll leave you with a reminder that this wouldn’t be the last time a beluga whale was ever fitted for a harness. You may recall a story from May 2019 in which Norwegian fisherman encountered a beluga wearing what appeared to be equipment to mount a camera, labeled “Equipment St. Petersburg.” After the harness was removed, the beluga continued to hang around the fisherman, indicating it was used to being around humans. Many speculated that whale had been trained as a spy by the Russians, known to have trained other mammals for that porpoise purpose. The public subsequently voted to name him Hvaldimir, a portmanteau of hval (meaning, as we can deduce, “whale” in Norwegian) and Vladmir, for Vladmir Putin.

Hvaldimir was eventually set free and seemed to live a normal life in Norwegian waters until 2024, when he too was suspected of having died under bizarre circumstances much like his imprisoned ancestors. When his body was found floating in the bay of Risavika, off the southwestern coast of Norway, animal rights organizations filed a police complaint alleging that he had “multiple bullet wounds” in his body. However, a later autopsy performed by a Norwegian veterinary institute found no evidence of bullet holes or projectiles, instead blaming his death on a 14-inch stick found lodged in his throat… which might be relevant to the case?

In any case, Captain Ahab could not be located for comment.

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The first clue that there was something fishy about the quote was that not only did I not recognize the quote, it’s also arguably somewhat out of character. Melville’s writing, and Moby-Dick in particular, is chock full of practical wisdom and aphorisms, but there’s something unusually nostalgic about keeping true to your younger self. Melville, let’s be honest, was a bit of a Gloomy Gus, and his musings on life are typically more along the lines of “The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows;” or “Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease;” or “Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely?”

So it won’t surprise you to know that the ‘dreams of thy youth’ quote, as a quick internet search will tell you, is actually from the pen of 18th century playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller, an author who Melville respected and who he read throughout his life. But the connection between Melville and the quote goes deeper than some simple confusion between who said what, deserving a proper investigation. It’s not the most linear journey—and I can’t promise we’ll end up with any definitive answers—but along the way we’ll trample through disciplines as diverse as handwriting analysis, German translation, auction houses, animal humane societies, cartoons, a little bit of GPS, and one of the world’s most celebrated illustrators.

Have Desk Will Travel

First, I needed to establish how this Schiller quote became associated with Melville in the first place, and the answer was simple enough. In her 1953 biography/memoir, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, Melville’s granddaughter Eleanor wrote that the quote was pasted on the side of a writing desk he used late in life.

To go back for a moment to that “paper-piled table” in Melville’s room at Twenty-sixth Street; on it stood an inclined plane that for lack of a more accurate designation one must call “desk” for though it had a pebbled green-paper surface, it had no cavity for inkwell, no groove for pen and pencil, no drawer for papers, like the little portable desks that were cherished as heirlooms in the late nineteenth century. Rather, it was open underneath; and pasted on one side wall, well out of sight, was a printed slip of paper that read simply, “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”

Technically, Eleanor got scooped by Jay Leyda, who published his two-volume documentary chronology of Melville’s life in 1951 and edited The Portable Melville the following year. The endnotes for the former, however, establish that Leyda relied extensively on Eleanor’s memories of her grandfather and the vast collection of documents which now comprise much of the Berkshire Athenaeum’s collection. Leyda seems to have swiped the story directly from Eleanor, including this passage in the Portable Melville as a preface to some of Melville’s final excerpted poems:

The leisurely process of Billy Budd’s composition went on through Melville’s last months, even after he gave the manuscript its terminal date; his own approaching end may have accelerated the revisions but not with sufficient speed to finish his book before his life, weakened by erysipelas, ended a half hour after midnight on the morning of September 28, 1891. Glued on the inside of the writing box on which Billy Budd and the last poems were composed was found a tiny clipping—Melville’s own motto—”Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”

Since then, the story has been told and retold in a number of biographies, often imagining him wistfully recalling his South Seas adventures and trying to square it with the more homebound life of his adulthood. Nathaniel Philbrick, for instance, retells Eleanor’s story in Why Read Moby-Dick?, pairing it with another of Melville’s cheery thoughts about life being “so short, so ridiculous and irrational.”

After Melville’s death, his family found a possible clue as to how he managed to survive the forty-year backwash left by the creation of Moby-Dick and, indeed, how he came to write that novel in the first place. Atop a table piled high with papers was a portable writing desk. Taped inside the desk, which had no bottom, was a piece of paper with a motto printed on it: “Keep true to the dreams of they youth.”

The phrase comes from the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, but what was its relevance to Melville? Late in life he wrote to his brother-in-law, “[A]t my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright good feeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless—well, finish the sentence for yourself.”

As always, stories like these are a game of telephone, slightly misunderstood and rearranged with each telling. In other versions, the quote shifts around Melville’s study. Edwin Haviland Miller’s 1975 biography suggests the quote was affixed to the side of his “great mahogany desk” (currently at the Athenaeum). Philip Hoare wrote that the quote was inside the mahogany desk. Giles B. Gunn’s 2003 book A Historical Guide to Herman Melville claims that the quote was posted on a side wall of the study, itself. Others even suggest he had the quote hung as a “banner” over his desk, as if he brought his idea to Kinkos and had it enlarged.

Future biographies written by A.I. might hallucinate the quote as having been tattooed on his arm like Queequeg’s hieroglyphics, but for our purposes, let’s just bear in mind that all references to the quote being pasted in his desk originally come from Eleanor’s recollection more than 60 years after his death.

“… but I do not pretend to quote.”

For what it’s worth, none of these proper biographies actually claim that the quote came from Melville directly, even if few bother to source it to Schiller. The earliest misattribution I was able to find came from the classically-trained stage actor Jack Aranson, whose theater company began performing a stage adaptation of Moby-Dick in 1961. Aranson initially took on the role of Ahab, but in the 1970s he reimagined it as a one-man show, performing 12 different characters himself. It was a feat he’d carry on for decades, becoming in the process something of a Melville authority, and many have hailed the production as the definitive adaptation of the book. (Here’s a clip of Father Mapple’s sermon from a filmed version of the show.)

In any case, in a October 1980 interview all of those lines and voices apparently got crossed in Aranson’s head when he put Schiller’s proverb in Melville’s proverbial mouth.

I get the sense that this wasn’t the first or last time that Aranson coyly reached for this line in conversation with a journalist, but needless to say the more times the story got told in subsequent Melville biographies, the more opportunities people had to misconstrue what they’d heard. But enough of the fabrications, let’s get to some facts.

Auctioneering

To take a step back, many of the ideas that became blog posts here began with a simple impulse which might be generalized: ‘I wanna see it.’ The Billy Budd breadbox? I wanna see it. The runner-up proposals for the Melville statues in New Bedford? Had to see ‘em. That Starbucks Korea Moby-Dick chapbook? I paid good money to see it. There was something inherently suspicious about this story and, naturally, I wanted to see this slip of paper. Frankly, it was suspicious that I hadn’t seen it.

The good news was that if you search for “Melville” and “portable desk,” as Eleanor called it, you’re instantly presented with pictures of this travel desk he was given sometime in the last few years of his life. Conveniently for us, the desk was sold by Bonhams at auction in June 2011 and the listing for the item is still online. To start, here are two images of it fully opened up and closed into its compact form.

Bonhams includes the following description:

Victorian brass-mounted mahogany traveling lap desk, third quarter of the 19th century. The rectangular top opening to a hinged brown velvet-lined writing surface before fitted compartments and a pen well, the lid interior with a red leather folio with brass securing clips, the writing surface lifting to reveal a storage well and removable guard concealing three secret drawers; the sides with brass bale handles. Height 5in (13cm); length 17in (43cm); depth 10 1/2in (26.5 cm).

Enclosed in the desk are a gilt-metal-mounted agate snuff box, two small pen knives, one inscribed "E M Marett," a molded glass inkwell with associated cap, a pair of tweezers, a glass intaglio seal engraved "EMM," and a gilt-metal and mother-of-pearl pen.

The “E M Marett” is Ellen Marett Gifford, a first cousin of Herman’s wife Elizabeth and a close friend. More than just a lifelong correspondent, she and her family were also significant benefactors to the Melvilles in their later years. Ellen’s mother left $20,000 to Elizabeth (i.e., her niece) and her children when she died in 1878. Ellen, herself, put the Melvilles in her own will, leaving another $15,000 to Elizabeth and $8,000 more to Herman upon her death in September 1889.

Considerable as Ellen’s largesse was to the perennially struggling Melvilles, biographers insist it came too late to make a difference. “Ellen Gifford left a fortune to the Melvilles,” writes Herschel Parker, “but at this stage another fortune made no outward difference at all.” By 1889, the couple had at last achieved a semblance of the financial stability which had eluded them their entire lives. Herman was able to retire from the U.S. Customs office a few years earlier in part thanks to the gift from Ellen’s mother. But as a near recluse who stubbornly refused to spend money on himself, he was far more interested in something else left to him: Ellen’s library card.

The legacy from Mrs. Gifford that gave practical benefit was her New York Society Library certificate, transferred to Herman for life, free from all annual payments, as of November 20. Melville now had a new library to borrow from — something he would not have laid out the few dollars to purchase but something more practically important to him than the sum of money willed to him.

It’s not entirely clear whether the desk was a gift to Melville during Ellen’s lifetime or whether this was also left to him after her death, but it’s possible this item went along with Herman on his vacation to Bermuda in 1888 and/or on his two-week trip to Savannah, Georgia the following year. If so, on it might have been scribbled some of his final output including John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), Timoleon (1891), and "Billy Budd," which he worked on til his death in September 1891.

That said, I should also mention here that it’s not entirely clear that this is even the same travel desk. Recall that Eleanor remembered it as having a “pebbled green-paper surface” with “no cavity for inkwell, no groove for pen and pencil, [and no drawer for papers.” Not a great match for the one sold Bonham. And crucially, while there are more compartments to the desk that we’ll get to shortly, the Schiller quote is nowhere to be found.

On the other hand, I’ll reiterate that we are going off the memory of someone in their 70s remembering an object they last saw as a child. The timeline also fits well with Ellen Marett Gifford leaving the desk to Herman around 1889, just when Eleanor would have just been about seven years old and spending time snooping around her grandfather’s office.

But for now, let’s put this question aside and crack open the desk.

Secret Compartments

The desk itself is a nice relic and all, but the good stuff is all hidden behind that red leather lining. Behold: a secret compartment full of quotes and pictures pasted onto its walls.

We’ll look at it as three separate areas.

1. The Addresses

At the top left are two small labels, one reading “Our Box at the Post Office is 1162” and the other his address: “Herman Melville / 104 East 26th St. / New York.” This, I presume, is what authenticated the desk as Melville’s along with the connection to Ellen Marett Gifford.

I’ll admit that I initially wasn’t convinced by the handwriting, which from Melville’s correspondence I’ve seen is usually inscrutable. Couldn’t these notes have actually been written by Ellen? After all, Melville had lived at 104 E. 26th street for nearly three decades — would he really need a reminder hidden inside his desk? I’ve also never seen any other references to the Melvilles having a post office box, nor does it come up in the collection of his correspondence.

Looking through digitized letters at the New York Public Library, however, those numbers are unmistakably the same. Here’s one example from December 1881.

Other letters compare favorably as well, like the similar O in “Our” and “Of” and the B in “Box” and “Believe” (p. 2) in this letter.

Just to be sure, I scoured archives around the country until I found a sample of Ellen Marett Gifford’s handwriting, a page from her journal in the special collections at Yale. I sent in a request for digitization in early September and several month later… I still don’t have the scans. I’ll report back if I find anything shocking, but these look to be authentically Melville.

2. The Torn Quote

Toward the bottom of the desk, is a torn scrap of paper with a quote—but not the one from Schiller. What’s legible appears to read:

membe that ___ reat __ to be happy in t___ way ___ it is a sin to be c___ to the_

If you stare at it long enough, though, it starts to come together, and I’m fairly certain it originally read:

Remember that God created them to be happy in their own way, ___ it is a sin to be cruel to them.

Even with a reasonable guess at the words, though, I couldn’t find the original source of the quote. Yet search after search brought me results suggesting it had something to do with humane societies, the kind of thing you’d find in books, pamphlets, and magazines advocating on behalf of treating animals kindly.

As it happened, this also made perfect sense. Preventing animal cruelty was Gifford’s central preoccupation throughout her life. In fact, aside from Herman and Lizzy, her go-to charity cases were organizations like the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She also wrote articles for the MSPCA’s animal welfare magazine called (hilariously to modern ears) “Our Dumb Animals,” a periodical which ran for more than 100 years. A free-roam, no-kill cat shelter in Brighton, Massachusetts still bears her name to this day.

Her interest in animals was actually somewhat remarkable for her time. When Gifford founded a home for stray dogs in Boston, for example, one paper wrote, “Charity covers a multitude of strange notions, and is exhibited in many curious ways. The Ellen M. Gifford Home for Vagrant Dogs illustrates one of those freaks of the charitably inclined.”

Her obituary in 1889 centered on her largesse given to humane societies, running under the headline: “A FRIEND TO ANIMALS” and listing more than a dozen generous donations from her estate.

In other words, whatever the exact quote said or where it came from, I think we can assume it was pasted into the desk by Ellen, not Herman.

3. The Illustrations

Finally, the entire right side of the desk is plastered with a collection of caricatures and illustrations which seem to show (clockwise):

1. A woman in the rain, followed by someone with an umbrella (maybe?),

2. A woman in a dress seen from behind;

3. A soldier with an upturned nose carrying a saber, staring at a mortar bomb; and

4. A girl looking at an anthropomorphized water pump and standing near a water jug and two buckets, also with faces.

Toward the bottom right corner is a fifth image, though so much of is torn that it’s impossible to say what it was. Possibly a ship on the water? Only the word “satchel” survives in what looks like a two-line caption.

Taking the top corner of that 5th image, reversing it, and adjusting the contrast, a few words seem to jump out: mast, “a boatswain,” “gray,” “for,” and “-ject,” seeming to confirm the image being of a ship on the water.

Despite great effort, though, including asking several groups of internet mystery solvers for help, I was never able to figure out anything at all about these images. The most intriguing suggestion was that the girl at the water pump was reminiscent of mid-19th century warnings about cholera and tainted water supplies, especially this one in which Death himself was pouring the water. (Why Ellen or Herman would have saved such an image is another question altogether.) Interestingly, the images of the two women seem to point toward Ellen (or at least away from Herman), while the other two seem to point toward Herman, with his interests in sailing and war.

By all means, if you can identify the source of any of the illustrations please let me know!

[Update 11/10/2025: Eagle-eyed Scott Norsworthy, who writes at Melvilliana, noted the trident symbol in the lower corner of the water pail and tied it to the artist Captain Henry Richard Howard, “who, in the Fifties and Sixties, contributed many pictorial drolleries (mostly signed with a trident)” to Punch magazine. In quick order he found the illustration in the April 23, 1853 issue of the magazine. The who/how/when/etc. of how it got pasted into the desk remains to be understood.]

[Update 11/11/2025: Scott kept on scrolling through Punch magazine and found two more! Here’s the lady with the umbrella from 1852, and the soldier from 1851.]

Where the Travel Desks Are

Where the desk was and who owned it between 1891 and 2011 is anybody’s guess — well, anybody but the seller (the “consignor”) and the tight-lipped auction house. But we do know where it ended up.

Two years after the gavel fell, an article in Fine Books & Collecting magazine revealed that author, illustrator, and Melville fanatic Maurice Sendak had purchased “a writing desk that had belonged to Herman Melville” as one of the last acquisitions for his collection before his death. Sendak, of course, illustrated the covers of Hershel Parker’s biography as well as what we’ll call a… “sensual” edition of Pierre. He even named his dog Herman.

Just to be sure I reached out to the Sendak Foundation and they confirmed that yes, Sendak was the buyer and yes, the desk is still part of their collection. But Bonhams never even told them who the consignor was, so I was probably out of luck. Of course I still had to test my luck and reached out to Bonhams myself, though they kindly told me to get lost:

“I checked our files and consignor information. The information provided in our catalogue description is all I can share.

Other attempts to thwart the system went nowhere, asking several Melville experts who I thought might have heard something about the sale through the grapevine (no such luck) and even contacting the family of one prominent collector of Melville memorabilia, much of which is now at the Berkshire Athenaeum. After a brief sibling conference, they reported back that it didn’t come from them.

Meanwhile, the Sendak Foundation confirmed that the Schiller quote was not attached to it when it came into their possession, and even gave it another look for me just to make sure. It was yet another dead end.

Schiller Schmiller

Having exhausted several branches of research already, there was still one last direction to go. What was the deal with this Schiller quote, anyway? What poem or play did it come from, what was it’s meaning in context? What did it mean to Melville and where/when did he come across it?

Suspiciously, I noticed that although you can find the quote all over the internet, in newspapers, in magazines, etc., not one even hinted at where or when Schiller said it. This wasn’t a modern phenomenon, either. In fact, I found the unsourced quote published in a book and/or newspaper in every decade going back to the 1840s! That’s almost 200 years of people repeating the quote (and small variations thereof) without ever wondering where it came from, beginning not long after Schiller’s death in 1805.

The earliest example I could find was in the July 1841 issue of The Dial, a literary magazine, which described it as “Schiller’s great command.”

The next place it appeared was as an epigraph to a poem titled “Schiller” by Elizabeth J. Eames, published in the New York Tribune in September 1847.

After endlessly searching for someone—anyone—to make my life easier and just provide a citation, I finally arrived at the answer not from the Schiller side of things but from Melville scholars, of all people, who noted that it was a line from his play Don Carlos, mentioned both in Hershel Parker’s biography and, of all places, an article by Thomas Heffernan about “Melville and Wordsworth.” (More on this in a moment). Heffernan even pointed to the precise act, scene, and speaker, leading me directly to the line—or nearly, anyway.

In short, the line is spoken in Act IV Scene XXI by the dying Marquis de Posa, who has just sacrificed himself to save Don Carlos, son of King Philip II of Spain. Together they had been plotting against the king to liberate Flanders from tyrannical Spanish rule. (On a more personal level, King Philip had also married Don Carlos’ love interest, making her the queen and his step-mother. It’s complicated.)

Anyway, in his final breaths the dying Marquis de Posa manages to share some parting words with the queen/step-mother, advising her on how she should counsel Don Carlos whose life is in turmoil. He urges her, among other things, to remind him to hold onto his idealism and the causes of political liberty and human dignity. In the original German, the relevant lines are:

Sagen Sie

Ihm, daß er für die Träume seiner Jugend

Soll Achtung tragen, wenn er Mann sein wird.

In the first English translation of Don Carlos from 1798, this line is rendered:

Tell him that he must remember and hold sacred the dreams of his youth.

The 1837 translation is even farther off from what we now recognize, reading:

Tell him, that, a man, he must respect his young days' dreams.

Yet another translation, published in 1847, reads:

Tell him, in manhood, he must still revere the dreams of early youth

But by 1847 the quote, as we’ve seen, was already in print all over in English as the more familiar “Keep true to the dream of thy youth.” So far as I could tell, this translation never appeared in a published translation of the play.

Feeling a little bewildered, I reached out to Steven Martinson, a professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona who has published several books on Schiller. I wondered if he had any insight into the quote, sending along the early examples in The Dial and the Tribune—and I’m glad I did. Martinson, of course, identified the quote as being a loose translation from Don Carlos, but more intriguing was his note about the author of that poem, Elizabeth J. Eames, and her friend and contemporary Margaret Fuller. Martinson wrote in an email:

Eames was a major proponent of Friedrich Schiller in America, as Margaret Fuller was for Goethe. They knew each other and both of them knew [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. In fact, Fuller co-edited The Dial with Emerson. It is very interesting that two women extolled the work of the German classics, Goethe and Schiller, bringing them to America. Fuller worked as a correspondent for the New-York Tribune at the very time Eames had her poem published. Fuller would have had considerable knowledge of Schiller’s work, perhaps, on account of her travels in Europe. Importantly, Eames wrote often for the NYT. She even became head of its literary department.

Puzzle pieces began to fall into place with Martinson’s background on The Dial. In fact, I went back to look at the article with Schiller’s “great command” and discovered it was written by Fuller, herself (signed “F.” as was her trademark).

Diving deeper into Fuller’s life, I also found a letters she wrote in the summer of 1837 in which she mentions reading and teaching Don Carlos to her students at the Temple School in Boston, and practicing her German skills by translating Schiller and Goethe. (Unrelated, I also learned that Fuller was the first American female war correspondent and wrote what is considered the first major feminist work in the United States, the essay “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.” The more you know…)

Fuller even had several tangential connections to Melville, including reviewing Typee for the New York Tribune as a favor to her friend—and thereafter Melville’s friend—Evert Duyckinck. Last but not least, she was also friendly with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who allegedly used her as the basis for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.

After some more back and forth, Martinson and I were convinced that the specific translation of the quote, “Keep true to the dream of thy youth,” must have come from either Fuller or Eames, directly or indirectly, and not Schiller. That is, Melville took the quote not after reading a translation of Don Carlos but from seeing one of the dozens, eventually even hundreds, of places the Fuller/Eames quote was repeated going forward. For one, while we know that Melville read several of Schiller’s works, including The Ghost-seer!; Pegasus in the Yoke; Poems and Ballads; and Fridolin, or The Message to the Forge (a gift from Ellen Marett Gifford); there’s no evidence that he read Don Carlos. Even if he had, he would have found the far clunkier translations I quoted above.

Putting the Words in Wordsworth

Amazingly, we even have some information about when and where Melville first encountered Fuller’s translation of the Schiller line. In fact, it was something he’d seen decades earlier, long before the elderly author was scratching out Billy Budd on his travel desk and perhaps looking to it for inspiration.

Among the vast collection of material scanned by Melville’s Marginalia Online is Melville’s copy of The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (hence that Thomas Heffernan article mentioned above). And buried more than three-hundred pages deep into the book is an annotation he wrote beneath Wordsworth’s poem “Character of the Happy Warrior.”

Even more surprising than seeing the quote written in Melville’s own hand are the specifics of the ‘when’ and ‘where.’ On the printer’s imprint page at the beginning of the Wordsworth book, Melville wrote in pencil:

Pacific Ocean, Sep. 14th 1860

5º 60” N.L.

Gulf of Mexico Nov 6th 1860

Steamer “North Star”

That is, he began reading Wordsworth during the voyage on his brother Thomas’ clipper ship, the Meteor, starting it in mid-September just north of the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean (the abbreviated coordinates only tell us they were somewhere off the coast of Central America). After abandoning the trip when they arrived in San Francisco, Melville finished the book about seven weeks later on his way back home to Pittsfield.

As it happens, also along for the ride was a copy of Schiller’s Poems and Ballads, which he had been reading a month earlier as the Meteor rounded Cape Horn, inscribing in it “H. Melville N. Y. 1849.” and “C. Horn 1860.” Though committed to memory, he may have been disappointed not to find the quote anywhere in Poems and Ballads, or might not ever have known where in Schiller’s work it originally appeared.

So where did he first see it? Of course we can only speculate, and it very well might have been in the New York Tribune or in any number of newspapers that reprinted it on a regular basis in the 1840s and ‘50s. But I came across one intriguing possibility as I searched high and low for the quote in archive.org’s vast library, something in Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, an illustrated periodical published in Boston in the 1850s.

What caught my eye when I saw this was that the Schiller quote—in the exact wording he wrote it in Wordsworth—was at the top of page 11 of the April 23, 1859 issue, not long before he sailed on the Meteor.

On the very next page was a notice about an English writer, Kinahan Cornwallis, being accused of having plagiarized Herman Melville.

(For more on the plagiarizing accusations, a whole topic in itself, see Scott Norsworthy’s post on his blog Melvilliana from 2015.)

Could someone have spotted this notice and showed it to Melville? It does seem that he or at least someone in his family was at least following the controversy. To return to where we started, Jay Leyda included this item in The Melville Logs, referring to an unidentified clipping (actually from the Boston Evening-Transcript, April 1, 1859) which he found among the Melville family’s papers.

But all this is neither here nor there. Within a year’s time, Melville would have the quote memorized and ready to spring on an unsuspecting book of Wordsworth, whether he knew where the line came from or not.

A Century Off the Books

For all I learned about the desk, the quote, and a long list of new figures, the central mysteries remained. Was the desk sold at auction the same one Eleanor saw when she was a child, or was it a different one? Did he really have the quote pasted onto a side wall, or was it something Eleanor misremembered many years later? Did he ever even own the desk from Ellen?

For what it’s worth, the Melville experts I polled about the desk thought the Bonhams desk was a red herring. I’m assuming they’d rather not go on the record with offhand opinions so I’ll leave them anonymous, but in short both independently agreed that Eleanor was describing something else entirely. Per expert #1:

My sense of Metcalf’s words is that she is not describing the travel desk, but a kind of make-shift work place, something like you might have set up in your first apartment after leaving the dorm. That is, a plank laid across a couple short filing cabinets. I used to think the “side-wall” was just an adjacent wall on which HM attached the printed aphorism, but I see now that it might also have been on the inner side of one of the structures that held up the plank. In any event, I don’t think she is describing something as small and portable as the travel desk. But I may be wrong.

… and expert #2:

I believe the passage from Melville Cycle & Epicycle indicates Eleanor is not describing the travel desk pictured at the Bonhams site. It’s not just that the descriptions don’t match--but that Eleanor there goes out of her way to differentiate what she described from “portable desks” that more or less match the features of the one sold by Bonhams. Further, I don’t think we can conclude that what she describes in MCE was a “travel” desk. It sounds more like a low-profile desktop lectern of simple construction--open in front, as she states, beneath its inclined surface. Admittedly, though, if it was a lectern it’s odd that it would not have been recognizable to her as such and that she instead describes what she saw in sui generis terms.

For myself, I’m still kind of torn. I see both of their arguments and can’t argue with the fact that her description just doesn’t quite match the Bonhams desk. On the other hand, how could anyone remember such details of a small and inconsequential desk from a lifetime ago, one that apparently slipped from the ownership of Melville’s descendants and made its way into an auction house 120 years later? Would he really have had two small portable desks? If so, where did the other one go?

We’ll have to keep waiting for the consignor to out themselves and give more details on the provenance, but I suspect we’ll likely never know.

That’s all I’ve got for you today! Keep true to the dreams of thy youth, y’all.

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Thanks & References!

Thank you again to David Laczak at the Pittsfield Athenaeum, Jonathan Weinberg at the Sendak Foundation, Bonhams, and Professor Steven Martinson!

In addition to hyperlinked sources above, here are a few more sources referenced for this post:

• Robert N. Hudspeth (ed.), The Letters of Margaret Fuller, Volume 1: 1817-38 (2018)

• Perry Miller (ed.), Margaret Fuller: American Romantic: A Selection From Her Writings and Correspondence (1963)

• Joan von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller (1994)

One such story came from a biography of Ray Bradbury, the unlikely science fiction author tapped to write the screenplay for the film. Bradbury often recounted the highlights (and lowlights) from his harrowing experience working on Moby Dick and eventually turned the saga into a loosely-fictionalized novel titled Green Shadows, White Whale. With some distance from director John Huston’s domineering, practical jokes, and demeaning comments—not to mention the endless disasters that plagued the production—Bradbury was able to laugh at how he was briefly sidetracked at the peak of his career to literally rewrite the great American novel.

The gig came shortly after Bradbury completed the manuscript of Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, invited to meet with Huston at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Though they barely knew each other, Huston got straight to the point, asking if he would join him for an extended excursion to Youghal (pronounced “y’all”) in County Cork, Ireland where the opening scenes set in New Bedford would be filmed. Bradbury tentatively agreed, but first had something to confess: he’d “never been able to read the damn thing.”

“I walked into his room. He put a drink in my hand. He sat me down and he leaned over and said, ‘Ray, what are you doing during the next year?’ “I said, ‘Not much, Mr. Huston. Not much.’ And he said, Well, Ray, how would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay of Moby-Dick?’ And I said, ‘Gee, Mr. Huston, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing.”

“He’d never heard that before and he thought for a moment and then said, Well, I’ll tell you what, Ray. Why don’t you go home tonight, read as much as you can, and come back tomorrow and tell me if you’ll help me kill a white whale.’”

Although Bradbury had expected to discuss possibilities for adapting one of his own stories, the opportunity was too enticing to pass up. Huston had been his favorite director his entire life, having watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon countless times. Bradbury rushed to a bookstore to buy a copy of Moby-Dick and finally got through the damn thing practically overnight. The relationship would have plenty of time to turn toxic—even traumatic—but for now Bradbury was “walking at least a few inches off the ground.”

In Old Dublin Town

In September 1953, as he began to flense and boil down the story into a script, Bradbury, his family, and an increasingly tattered copy of Moby-Dick boarded the U.S.S. United States and made their way to meet the director in Ireland. (Bradbury had a lifelong fear of flying, something for which Huston teased him endlessly).

But something unexpected happened when the family arrived in Dublin, and herein lies the mystery of the day. Going through customs, Bradbury was surprised to learn that he was carrying some unlikely contraband—about six hundred pages worth.

At customs, the agents searched Ray’s luggage and pulled out his copy of Moby-Dick. In the midst of a political crackdown, Ireland had banned certain books, and Meville’s masterpiece was one of them. Ray was unaware of this ban, and he found it terribly ironic, given the fact that he was in Ireland to adapt the book into a screenplay, and that he had just finished writing Fahrenheit 451, an anticensorship novel. After a brief holdup and an explanation of why he was carrying Moby-Dick, the customs agents moved Ray and his family along. Ray was allowed to keep his book.

Huh? Moby-Dick was banned in Ireland of all places? Moreover, it was banned while John Huston, Gregory Peck, and Orson Welles were over there making the definitive film adaptation? The question begged to be checked out.

I’ll admit my total ignorance on the subject of 20th century censorship in Ireland, but as I quickly learned the claim was all too plausible, and that the country had one of the more restrictive censorship regimes in the west, banning more works of literature than any other Western European nation. In the original 1922 constitution of the Irish Free State, the right of free expression of opinion was guaranteed “for purposes not opposed to public morality.” To this day, the restriction remains part of its updated constitution adopted in 1937 which states that “liberty of expression.. shall not be used to undermine public order or morality or the authority of the State.”

The clause was made enforceable by the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 which prohibited the sale or distribution of “unwholesome literature” in the country. It also established the Censorship of Publications Board which would review complaints about offending books and make recommendations to the prime minister about whether they should be banned. And this doesn’t mean ‘removed from libraries’ or ‘only sold to adults.’ A banned book would be illegal to import and/or sell anywhere in the Republic of Ireland. Anyone caught with the material was liable to a fine at best or sentenced to imprisonment with hard labor (!) for up to six months.

That said, the original intent of lawmakers wasn’t necessarily eliminating classic literature. There was a much more religious bent to its targets, and specifically a Catholic obsession. According to the text of the act, books would deemed indecent or obscene would be those which advocate “the unnatural prevention of conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage or the use of any method, treatment or appliance for the purpose of such prevention or such procurement.” (Recall that abortion remained illegal in Ireland until 2018.)

Even with these narrow aims, some members of parliament were incensed by the bill when it was brought up for debate. One member called it “the most monstrous proposal that has ever been made in this country,” raising concerns about certain “literary pimps” who would inevitably abuse the system.

The proposal is that we should make use of our recently-won liberty to fill every village and hamlet with little literary pimps who will be “recognised.” We all know the people who lay themselves out to be self-appointed moralists, greasy-eyed little fellows with a sensitive conscience and a strong stomach for drink. […]

[E]very village will have a “recognised” censor of literature…. We do not want that kind of thing, because there would be no end to these men’s capacity for moral felon-setting. They will turn into political organisations. It is quite democratic enough evidently, if this lamentable Bill is to go through, to allow everyone to have something to say to the Minister, but we should not allow people to grow Klu Klux Klansmen at the expense of their fellow-countrymen. We have had several attempts made already by individuals to exalt themselves morally at the expense of others. That should be scotched at once. I am surprised at it. It shows the supineness to which we have sunk when we can envisage such a state of affairs in this country. I never heard the like of it.

Nevertheless the bill became law, and in the decades to follow the government’s “Register of Prohibited Publications” was filled with thousands of titles offensive to the sensibility of the board. And unsurprisingly, that narrow framing of the law as an abortion issue soon expanded to include anything the board found obscene. As one critic put it, the list “included all the best living novelists” of the 20th century “and a formidable selection from the dead.”

By century’s end, the list included not only Irish authors like Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, and George Bernard Shaw, but others from around the world including [deep breath] Sherwood Anderson, Pearl S. Buck, Simone de Beauvoir, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Daphne Du Maurier, William Faulkner, Maxim Gorki, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Vladimir Nabokov, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Sinclair Lewis, W. Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, Betty Smith, Bertrand Russell, John Steinbeck, H. G. Wells, and Richard Wright, just to name a few.

Writers who ended up on the list were stigmatized and anyone objecting to the censorship regime “risked both public and private persecution.” Libraries and bookstore soon carried little else but religious literature and books about Irish culture. Banned books returned to shelves only after several amendments softening the system, including the addition of an appeal board in 1946 and a provision in 1967 limiting bans to 12 years—though they were then subject to rebanning.

The work of the censorship board ended only in… just kidding! The Censorship of Publications Board is actually still an active part of Ireland’s government, though they only very rarely ban books anymore. The targets now, numbering less than 10 since the turn of the century, are primarily those with explicit and extreme pornographic content.

Offensive Ahab

But what about Moby-Dick, which to my recollection has no chapters advocating for abortion and only a few mildly pornographic scenes? (There is, of course, the uncomfortable line about people with albinism being “more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion,” but that’s neither here nor there.)

Learning about the general history of censorship in Ireland was one thing, however, and learning exactly what was banned was another. As it turns out, there is no digital list or database of every book the board ever banned, and the official register can only be viewed in person in Dublin. The best I could do was scrape together examples and short lists of examples from a dozen or so books, journal articles, and websites on the topic. None of them mentioned Moby-Dick among the banned—nor any other novel by Melville, for that matter—and the more I searched the more suspicious I got.

But before I hopped on a flight to Dublin to inspect the register myself, I reached out to Donal Ó Drisceoil, an historian at University College Cork who has written extensively on the subject. I sent him the passage from the Bradbury biography to see if he’d ever heard such a thing, but instead Donal confirmed my hunch that the story was bogus. He replied:

I have checked all my sources and am pretty sure Moby Dick was not banned in Ireland. Customs officials had much power beyond the terms of the act and often acted on their own initiative, so it was probably an over-zealous customs official who made the wrong call - all books were basically suspect!

In another exchange we agreed that the most likely explanation was also the most juvenile: perhaps a certain four-letter word in the title raised the inspector’s eyebrow for a moment before establishing the book wasn’t on the list. Even by Bradbury’s recollection, the customs agent gave the book back and sent him on his way.

The nail in the coffin, though, was something I found in an article from August 1954 reporting on the stir created in Youghal when the film crew and celebrities started to roll in (emphasis mine).

Tim Murray, the local contractor, was given the task of making the Youghal Quay look like New Bedford. Paddy Linehan’s combined pub, butcher shop and slaughter house became headquarters for the actors and crew.

The British Legion Hall was repainted and turned into offices for the production. Large barrels of Guinness were rolled on to the dock to represent whale-oil barrels. Sailing ships were brought in and anchored in the harbor. […]

Mrs. Rohan, who runs the stationery shop, sold out every autograph book she had, and had to send to Dublin for more. She also sold 100 copies of “Moby Dick.”

I think it’s safe to say that Mrs. Rohan, a stationery vendor in a seaside Irish village was likely not selling contraband novels smuggled in from Belfast or London. Or, if she was, she probably wouldn’t be blabbing about it to the press. So it’s all but certain Bradbury’s claim that Moby-Dick was banned in Ireland was more science fiction than fact.

All-American Bans

But why single out lovely Ireland when there’s so much censorship and pearl-clutching right here in the U.S.? With its scandalous homoerotic overtones, satirization of Christianity, moral relativism, and just plain good faith toward all, it’d hardly be surprising to find it on a list of banned books. Melville even referred to the book as his “evil art.” It seemed almost certain that someone, somewhere had at least stricken the book from a school library or looked at it with a sideways glance.

I cast a line into the waters of digital newspaper archives and immediately got a bite: a report about an art installation from September 2005 which projected the names of banned books over the doors of the Donnell Library Center in Manhattan. The installation was calling attention to the American Library Association’s 24th annual “Banned Books Week” by alerting passers-by to books banned somewhere in the country including the likes of The Great Gatsby, Twelfth Night, and Moby-Dick.

Following up on this lead, I found that the American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Resource Guide provided details on an instance in which the book was banned in Lindale, Texas in 1996.

I kept digging and found a few other leads about a few other bans, to boot. But we can be thankful that in each case these stories fell apart with a minimal amount of scrutiny. As with Bradbury’s claim about Ireland, you can’t believe everything you read—but at least you are free to read it.

Lindale, Texas

The most ‘substantial’ of the leads turned out to be the incident in Lindale, Texas, a city about 90 miles east of Dallas. As the ALA book summarized, in July 1996 the district’s school board rejected a reading list proposed by the head of its English department for its Advanced Placement English program. To the horror of many parents and concerned citizens, the proposed list had included classics like Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hamlet, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

In the words of the school board president, certain books on the list were not “based in the moral values of this community.” Others agreed, worried about things like the “demoralization of today’s youth” and “turning our young men into ticking time bombs.” With, y’know, books. So, the original list was thrown out and the task was reassigned to a new book committee made up of parents and teachers. (It’s no spoiler to reveal that depictions of violence and even murder was absolutely not the problem anyone had with books on the list.)

The next day the story was picked up by the Associated Press and syndicated across Texas newspapers beneath outraged headlines like “School District Bans 32 Books, Many Classics” and “Lindale ISD Board Votes to Ban Books.” According to the report, “Some of the books offended many school board members and parents because they contained profanity and described explicit sex acts, according to board president John Offutt, a Baptist minister.”

But allergic as I am to defend anything even resembling a book ban, I’m obligated to explain that this story quickly got away from the facts. Again, none of the books on the list—classics or not—were “banned” or even removed from the school district’s libraries. Rather, some of the books were simply removed from the list of required reading for a small percentage of students.

More to the point, though, neither Moby-Dick nor Hamlet nor Huck Finn (the books most often cited in news reports about the “ban”) had the board worried. Students were free to read these and become monomaniacal whale hunters, uncle killers, and river-rafting runaways to their heart’s content. Nevertheless, the list was rejected wholesale and the board asked the parent/teacher committee to come up with a new list. All of the classics, Moby-Dick included, were on that list.

Instead, the books which most worried the board included Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya; The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros; Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe; The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka; Maus by Art Spiegelman; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; and Henderson, the Rain King by Saul Bellow. I’m sure it won’t be lost on readers that what nearly all of these books have in common is that their authors are from non-white, non-Christian, and/or non-American backgrounds. But that’s a matter for a different blog.

It’s unclear which of the above books were ultimately rejected or approved by the book committee, but the fact is that Moby-Dick was never “banned” in Lindale or even taken off the AP reading list. Despite what the ALA suggests, there was no opposition to sharing a bed with pagans, chasing whales on the Lord’s day, rubbing the shoulders of one’s fellow man and being content, or even squeezing spermaceti through ones fingers until a strange sort of insanity comes over you.

Florida Man Walks Into a Ban…

The other two examples I found hinting that Moby-Dick had been banned were on even flimsier foundation. In June 2023, for example, headlines announced that advocates with the Palm Beach County Black Caucus and the Coalition for Black Student Achievement were calling for the removal of classic novels from school libraries, including Moby-Dick.

“In protest of the hypocrisy and bias of the law, we are calling for any book that we believe causes harm to African Americans and marginalized groups,” Richard Ryles, president of the Palm Beach County Black Caucus, said. […]

Some of the titles the advocacy groups want to be banned include Moby Dick, Pride and the Prejudice, Les Misérables and The Odyssey.

Of course, the entire thing was a tongue-in-cheek protest against book bans and Florida’s “Stop Woke Act” which restricts how concepts related to race, gender, and social privilege can be taught or even talked about in schools. Advocates were in fact using the text of the law to demonstrate how inane, far-reaching, and inherently racist it is, pointing especially to as a clause prohibiting works that cause any individual student to feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”

Richard Ryles, president of the Palm Beach County Black Caucus, shrewdly turned this on its head. How many classics are likely to make non-white students feel discomfort or psychological distress? Practically all of them? As one member of the Coalition for Black Student Achievement argued, “when Black characters are referenced; it is negative.” Even when the books don’t even mention race, “the lack of any racial characters in those works shows there is a neglect to Black children."

In case the intent of the tongue-in-cheek suggestion was lost on anyone, Ryles made the group’s views clear after the shock value of the statement was felt. “Our children should not be a political football. We don’t think it’s right for our children and we don’t think it’s right for any children.” The whale wins again.

Spouting Red Blood

Finally, and most hilariously, I came across yet another attempted ban of Moby-Dick in Texas, this time way back in the 1950s. Well, a ban of one particular edition, anyway.

Per Banned Books, 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D. by Anne Lyon Haight, in 1953 the Texas State Textbook commission deliberated on a request asking it to specifically ban the Garden City Publishing edition of Moby-Dick along with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The offense taken wasn’t with the content of either book but rather that they both contained illustrations by Rockwell Kent, a suspected communist. (In reality, Kent was a card-carrying member of the Socialist party, though this distinction might have been lost on the accuser).

It’s unclear whether the board honored the request, but either way there were dozens of other editions in print from which the textbook commission could choose. We might also be thankful in that it left that many more copies of the beautiful Garden City edition out in the world so that people (myself included) could afford to buy one years later. You can even own the t-shirt to show your support for Moby-Dick and/or socialism.

So, for whatever it’s worth, I could found no legitimate example of Moby-Dick actually being banned anywhere in the U.S., either. In the late 20th century librarians and free speech activists shrewdly began to turn the idea of reading banned books on its head and wearing it like a badge. Moby-Dick has many laurels—and frankly a good deal of content which self-appointed moralists might take issue with—but I could find no evidence it’s ever legitimately earned its place among such esteemed company.

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Thanks & References

Thanks again to Donal Ó Drisceoil for his help! Sláinte!

• American Library Association, “Banned Books 1999 Resource Guide: Free People Read Freely” (1999)

• Margaret Bald, Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds (2006)

• “Censorship,” Irish Studies at the Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame

• Andrew F. Comyn, “Censorship in Ireland,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Spring 1969

• Anne Lyon Haight, Chandler B. Grannis, Banned books, 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D. (1978)

• Zeke Jarvis, Silenced in the Library: Banned Books in America (2017)

• Nicholas J. Karolides, Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds (1998)

• Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova, 120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories and World Literature (2005)

• Andrew Karpan, Banned Books (2023)

• Peter Martin, “Irish Censorship in Context,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Autumn 2006

• Donal Ó Drisceoil, “‘Moral Neutrality’: Censorship in Emergency Ireland, History Ireland, Summer 1996

• Donal Ó Drisceoil, “‘The best banned in the land’: Censorship and Irish Writing since 1950,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 2005

• Lis Phil, “‘A Muzzle Made in Ireland’: Irish Censorship and Signe Toksvig,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review (Winter 1999)

• Dawn B. Sova, Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds (1998)

Today, our focus is on another tangent from that research. It’s admittedly a few paces farther away from Melville, Moby-Dick, and the nebulous framework of this blog, but by the time I’d found answers to what I thought were basic questions, I had accidentally rewritten a small piece of history in the town of Stonington, CT.

As I mentioned, there’s no proper biography of Coale so the background on his life and career I put together came from profiles found in newspapers and magazines, all of which recited the standard bullet points: camouflaged ships, painted murals, and established the Navy Combat Art program. Oh, and one other thing: Coale apparently lived in the house of an 18th century whaling ship captain.

Actually, not only did he live there, it’s where he died in 1950, earning a spot in the first sentence of his New York Times obituary:

First, I had a few questions. Then, I had a lot of questions.

Obviously, the first thing to do was to figure out exactly where Coale lived in Stonington and then which whaling captain lived there—easy enough. The 1940 U.S. Census listed Coale and his family at their address in Manhattan, but both the 1930 and 1950 censuses found them at home in Stonington at 73 Water Street.

It didn’t take a research mastermind to look up the address on Google Street View and notice the answer staring back from a plaque on the house:

AMOS SHEFFIELD, Whaleship Captain, 1765.

Just for kicks, I wanted to know a little more about the house and how it intersected with Coale’s interest in Moby-Dick, so I idly began to follow some leads.

Coale, I learned, bought 73 Water Street in 1927 as a summer home, with his main residence back in Manhattan. Stonington had been a popular coastal retreat for affluent New Yorkers as far back as the 1800s, though Coale had no intention of being a mere vacationer. Shortly after buying the property he built an addition to house a 1,000 square foot art studio with 18-foot ceilings to accommodate his murals. Meanwhile, he worked diligently at becoming a true Stoningtonian, taking part in the town’s annual community fairs; painting portraits of notable residents and exhibited them in local art exhibitions; and becoming a director of Mystic Seaport and president of the Stonington Village Improvement Society. In 1947, Coale was elected president of the Stonington Historical Society, the very organization which awards historic status to homes like his.

Despite the history of Coale’s historic home, for a time it seems he even became the most notable resident of the house, evidenced by this postcard printed in the 1940s of “Griffith B. Coale’s Home” — and not Sheffield’s as it had been before and again after his death in 1950.

Coale was clearly enamored with the nautical history of the house and really leaned into it with the decor. Another postcard from the era captured his dining room with an impressive if slightly disturbing display of harpoons, irons, and whaling artifacts lining the walls of his dining room.

Codfish Aristocracy

It was only about 12 years prior to Coale moving in that the house underwent some major renovations, uncovering even more of its past. Underneath the basement, for example, was a sub-cellar used to hide ammunition during the War of 1812, and possibly for storing rum. Beneath the old red sandstone steps in the front were spaces to store sand for sale; black sand used for drying ink and white sand for scouring wooden floors.

In fact, 73 Water St. is one of the oldest houses in Stonington, having survived two dramatic episodes which did away with many of its peers, one a natural disaster and the other British.

The first existential threat, the Battle of Stonington, was parried somewhat easily though is nevertheless worth retelling. In August 1814, toward the end of the War of 1812, three fully-armed British ships appeared off of Stonington Point, a stone’s throw from the Sheffield/Coale house. Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy demanded the town’s surrender, but after a short conference with residents the town’s leader replied: “We shall defend the place to the last extremity; should it be destroyed, we shall perish in its ruins.” It was an appropriate though still pretty hardcore response.

The Brits proceeded to bombard the town with “every kind of missile in use at that day—round-shot, grape-shot, canister, bomb-shells. carcasses, rockets, and stink-pots,” but apparently could only hit the broad side of a barn. The whole affair became something of a joke after the town fought back with its own cannons, killing three British soldiers and running the ships off with their tackle between their legs. Early American poet Philip Freneau captured the battle in some bitingly funny lines:

In truth, the bombardment battered a few dozen buildings but the gist is essentially true. Total damages amounted to about $3,500 plus the life of a horse and some farm animals.

The far greater threat to the Sheffield house was the Great Fire of Stonington of April 1837 which destroyed 19 buildings in the vicinity of Water Street. Henry Robinson Palmer’s 1913 book Stonington By the Sea described the chaos of the fire—the largest in the town’s history—and how 73 Water Street was saved by a slew of wet blankets.

This disastrous blaze started in a cooper shop on the “Union Store” wharf, and spread with irresistible speed and fury eastward to Peleg Hancox’s store, which occupied the site of the present store of James H. Stivers, Captain Charles P. Williams’s house just opposite, and a row of stores to the south, on the site of the present Arcade. None of the buildings named could be saved. […]

When the fire broke out there was no fire engine with which to combat it; the men of the place formed a long line with their leather buckets and wooden pails, and hurried water from the harbor to the burning buildings. The old Colonial house on the southeast corner of Water and Wall streets with its high steps and iron railing was saved, after a desperate and gallant effort, by the spreading of wet blankets on the roof and the constant dampening of these. Steam fire engines were unheard of at the time; hydrants also were unknown.

With these dangers behind it, the Sheffield house has survived virtually unchanged since the 18th century—with one major exception. Sometime after 1814 the house was raised up from the ground to add a new floor at street level. Thus, the front door is now up a set of stairs with hand-wrought railings giving it “a sort of codfish-aristocratic appearance,” per the New London Day. For many years, these ground floor spaces were used as storefronts by the family and descendants of Captain Sheffield, who died in 1799.

To this day, the house has its original wide-board floors, a brick oven and hearth in the dining room, and 18th century doors and hardware. The floor of the dining room (originally the kitchen) even has a ship-like “crown,” curved slightly upward in the center to help water drain out. At the town’s tricentennial celebration in 1949, an event which Coale helped organize as president of the historical society, the house was declared “less changed probably than any other in the Borough.”

So it’s safe to say that Coale was quite proud of his pre-Revolution home once owned by a whaling captain. Only it turns out the house is neither of those things.

The Good Captain Amos

There’s a journalist’s maxim which has always stuck with me: “Always get the name of the dog.” It’s about thoroughness and staying alert for details that can bring a story to life, and may even lead to new clues to help solve a mystery. Consider, for example, the literal example from a few weeks ago of Jackson Pollock’s dog named Ahab.

In this case, my next question was also fairly literal: now that I had Captain Sheffield’s name, I also wanted to know the name of his whaling ship. Maybe it’d be a nice kicker for the story, or lead me to a connection back to Melville, but regardless I had to ask the question and begin to get my sea bearings.

Sheffield, I learned, was born in May 1766, the son of Captain Isaac Sheffield Jr. and his curiously-named wife Freelove Pendleton. While noting that Amos followed in his father’s footsteps, this also immediately threw into question a basic “fact” about the house, supposedly built a year before his birth. In other words, either Amos Sheffield did not build this house, or it wasn’t built in 1765. Already the story was falling apart.

The earliest references I could find to the exact age of the house began with Grace Denison Wheeler’s book The Homes of Our Ancestors in Stonington, Conn., published in 1903. The house, shown in a photo from the time, looks almost identical more than 120 years later.

Deviating from the plaque, Wheeler writes that the house was built “before 1788,” an approximation I saw used throughout the first half of the 20th century. Others seemed less sure, such as an article in the New London Day which played it safe and went with “mid-1700s.” Somewhere along the line, though, the date was set back a few decades to become entrenched as precisely 1765.

For what it’s worth, at no point did I ever figure out where either date came from, though it may be that “before 1788” was derived from the year Amos married his wife Sarah Goddard, assuming they would have needed somewhere to live and raise their family. But however it was determined, this was the date cited on the first historical marker attached to the house, placed there in 1914 by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Setting this aside for the moment, I changed tack and turned to Sheffield himself. The first place I checked was WhalingHistory.org for any reference to his ship or logbooks mentioning his name. The website, a collaboration between Mystic Seaport, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the Nantucket Historical Association, has compiled information from “every known [whaling] voyage from the 1700s through the 1920s.” Sheffield was nowhere to be found.

I had better luck with a different resource hosted by Mystic Seaport, the “Connecticut Ship Database, 1789-1939,” where I found several records for Sheffield. Here he was listed as master of the Pearl, a schooner built in Stonington, CT in 1793.

However, the double-masted Pearl wasn’t a whaler. If you scroll to the right in the table, it’s actually listed as being in the “codfishery” business.

Another ship with which Sheffield was associated was the Swallow, a schooner built in Stonington in 1788. This ship, of which Amos was part owner—though not captain—is listed as being in the “coasting trade,” meaning it transported goods and passengers along the Eastern seaboard. Things were looking… fishy.

Meanwhile, I enlisted the help of Matt Novosad, the Franklin, CT town historian and expert in all things Revolutionary era New England. Matt, who has access to vast databases of digitized colonial newspapers, confirmed that Sheffield was no whaler.

The earliest hit he found was from December 3, 1793 in Philadelphia’s Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser in which Sheffield announced that the schooner Pearl, an “entirely new vessel,” was ready to take freight to New York. Until he set sail, you could find him at the Crooked Billet wharf in Philadelphia where he had for sale 150 quintals (15,000 pounds) of codfish, some “Connecticut cheese,” and a few barrels of Blubber oil — about the closest it seems he ever got to whaling.

Four months later he bought space in the Charleston, South Carolina City Gazette announcing that he would be taking passengers to New York and that he had a “few bushels of oats” for sale at a nearby store.

From there, the trail goes cold for about four years until the captain is back home in Stonington selling 12 hogsheads (756 gallons) of rum, dry and pickled codfish, and a massive amount of “scale fish” — offcuts, scrap fish, or other low-grade species.

A few months later still, Sheffield posted an efficient little notice in the New London Bee to say that (a) he found a stranded fishing boat the previous month and was looking for its owner; and (b) he still had plenty of rum and fish for sale “suitable for the Surinam and Demarara markets.” (Demerara, namesake of the coarse baking sugar, was then a Dutch colony and later part of Guyana).

Codfish and rum were still Sheffield’s bread and butter in August 1799 when he wrote an ad in the Stonington Journal of the Times that he was selling 4 hogsheads (over 400 gallons) of rum “of an excellent flavor” and about 4,000 pounds of codfish.

And then, Sheffield was dead.

His days of hauling cod and rum up and down the coast came to an end in December 1799 in that same port of Demerara “after an illness of 6 days.” A short obituary in Stonington’s Impartial Journal remarked that the village had lost a “useful and respectable inhabitant and his family a “kind and an affectionate parent.”

Is it possible that he was a whaler before he got into cod and rum? Possibly, but it seems unlikely. Sheffield was captain of a codfish ship by the age of 27 and presumably had at least a few years of experience. Meanwhile, only a small number of whalers would have achieved the rank of captain before their mid- to late-20s.

Another clue that Sheffield likely had nothing to do with whaling, even as a greenhand, was the timing of his adolescence. Born in 1766, he was nine when the Revolutionary War started but 17 by the time it ended. Whaling in this period, the New Bedford Whaling Museum writes, “came to a disastrous halt… as British naval vessels blockaded American ports and harassed American shipping on the high seas, capturing or destroying many vessels and impressing many American sailors into His Majesty’s Naval service.” Not a great time to get experience under one’s belt.

For me, the final nail in the coffin was learning that his father, Captain Isaac Sheffield, was also in the codfish and coasting business, as master or owner of the Venus, the Union, and the Delight (another trivial connection to Moby-Dick). Given what we know about his short-lived career, it seems far more likely that Sheffield spent his youth not on whaling voyages but learning the trade directly from his father.

Just to be absolutely sure, I also checked out the career of his son Amos Jr. born in 1789. Maybe he was the whaling captain? Intriguingly, Mystic Seaport’s database of Connecticut ships lists Amos Sheffield II as master of a ship named the Lydia, but this ship and another in which he was part owner, the Three Sisters, were both in—you guessed it—the codfish business. When Amos Jr. died in March 1868 his obituary stated that he was “For about fifty years the leading merchant and most prominent business man in town.” Not a word about whales.

A House of Cods

But it got worse for that historical marker on the front of 73 Water Street.

With all this information in hand, I called Stonington’s Woolworth Library which keeps files on each of the town’s historic homes. Despite everything Matt and I had found, the town must have had some reason to believe that Sheffield was a whaling captain, even if it was inaccurate. The director of the library, Chelsea Mitchell, quickly came back with some very interesting information.

To start, the library’s file on the house also had no information on Sheffield being a whaling captain, which appears to have been a rumor which didn’t start until well into the 20th century. In fact, the library had “never done a house history on this property” at all, adding that the plaque “was not verified by us before it went up. Which is probably what is contributing to all of this confusion.”

I had also asked Chelsea for any information about the date the house was built, mentioning that I’d seen “before 1788,” 1756, and so on. Using the chain of title for the property, she determined that none of these dates were correct. The house couldn’t have been built until after 1795 when Sheffield purchased the empty lot.

Looking through the chain of title for the property, it actually appears that the house was built by Amos around 1795. The land was originally sold by Elihu Chesebrough to Edward Denison. After Edward died in 1758, the land was distributed to his sister Anna Denison, wife of Nathaniel Minor. Anna died in 1759, and her daughter Abigail received the property in the distribution of her mother’s estate. Abigail Minor was married to John Denison, and this is the couple who sold two lots to Amos and Isaac Sheffield Jr. in 1795 and 1784 respectively. From the land records, it would appear the house was built around 1795 by Amos Sheffield. […]

In my opinion, it is wise to trust the land deeds since they very clearly state if a house is standing on a property or not. It could be possible that a previous home stood on the lot, but was gone by the time the land was sold to Amos Sheffield in 1795.

In other words, the sign which reads “CAPTAIN AMOS SHEFFIELD / WHALING CAPTAIN / 1765,” only the name is accurate. My apologies to the current owner of the house, who was otherwise a good sport about providing what information she had when I emailed her out of the blue.

In the Cave of Elephanta

Next time you’re in Stonington, you can visit the Robinson Burying Ground where you’ll find Sheffield’s grave — though not Sheffield himself, whose body was apparently not returned home from Demerara. His tombstone reads: “This Stone is erected in memory of Capt. Amos Sheffield, who died at Demerara Dec. 25 1799 in the 34th year of his age.”

At the bottom of the stone are the lines:

According to anthropologist David James Stewart, Sheffield’s is perhaps one of the world’s earliest extant empty graves which, like the “cenotaphs” in Chapter 7, provided a physical memorial to those who died at sea.

What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.

The plaque on 73 Water Street is a different kind of cenotaph marking an important relic of Stonington’s early history, and one which clearly inspired Griffith Baily Coale and his Moby-Dick murals. And while the inscription might not quite line up with the truth or even have a stamp of approval from the town’s historical society, the plaque reminds us of its significance in Stonington history and helps preserve it for generations to come. Though few of us will still be around for its actual 400th birthday in 2095, in honor of Captain Amos and Griffith Baily coale I hope they serve Mrs. Hussey’s famous cod chowder.

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Thanks & References

Thank you again to Matt Novosad, Chelsea Mitchell, and Anne Haag for all their help in putting this post together!

• Richard Anson Wheeler, History of the Town of Stonington, County of New London, Connecticut, From its First Settlement in 1649 to 1900 (1900)

• Henry Robinson Palmer, Stonington By the Sea (1913)

• Grace Denison Wheeler, The Homes of Our Ancestors in Stonington, Conn. (1903)

Such was the case for a February 1941 article stub in The New Yorker about artist Griffith B. Coale and the 325-foot Moby-Dick mural which he’d recently installed at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company headquarters in Manhattan. I had no memory of how I initially came across the article (actually a preview of a longer article in that issue) and I wavered on whether there was any there there. For one, art history has become an unintentional focus of this blog, whereas I’d rather be writing about things like pea coffee and the Zodiac killer. But I also figured that Melville scholars like Elizabeth Schultz or Robert K. Wallace had probably said everything there was to be said about the mural.

Still, 325 feet is a lot. There are few other works of Melville-inspired art of such magnitude, such as Jos Sances recent “Or, the Whale” scratchboard mural measuring a colossal 714 square feet. So imagine my surprise when I wasn’t able to find a single image of Coale’s mural, or any information at all. I turned to my copy of Schultz’s Unpainted to the Last and again, nothing. My curiosity was piqued.

To be sure, Griffith Baily Coale has a Wikipedia page, from which we learn he helped establish the U.S. Navy Combat Art program and even mentions that his work “may be seen at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower” without any mention of the subject. How these mysteries keep falling to me to solve I’ll never understand, but there I went again tunneling down a hundred new rabbit holes, chatting up archivists at obscure collections, and forking over hard-earned money to reconstruct the weirdest employee break room you’ll ever see.

Biographical

First, some background. Griffith Baily Coale was born in Baltimore in 1890 and had a calling as an artist from a young age. He attended the Maryland Institute of Art, from which he graduated in 1911, and then spent several years studying painting across Europe with the likes of Richard E. Miller and William Laparra. He returned to Baltimore in 1914, beginning his professional career as a painter.

Coale avoided military service in the first World War, but in 1917 he found a practical use for his background in large-scale painting as a “marine camoufleur.” This corps of volunteers painted ships in black and white dazzle camouflage, an aesthetic somewhere between cubism and a zebra which made it difficult for enemies to estimate a ship’s range, speed, and heading.

At the end of the war, Coale established himself in New York City and made a name for himself painting murals for municipal and corporate offices around the eastern seaboard including the NYC Criminal Courts Building, the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company, the City Bank Farmers Trust Building, Columbia University, and the Baltimore Trust Company Building. He even painted a mural for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, featured on the front of the Crosley radio broadcasting building.

It was at this peak of his career as a muralist that Coale’s resume earned him a commission to take on Moby-Dick. But before we turn our focus to mystery solving we might as well look at what Coale is best remembered for: helping establish the Navy Combat Art program. In early 1941 the U.S. hadn’t formally entered World War II, but something gave Coale the idea that its participation was inevitable. As the story goes, he approached high-ranking Navy admirals and suggested that the U.S. follow the example of the British who had deployed a successful war art program to document battles, not for recruitment or propaganda but for its innate historical value.

Coale urged Commander Harry R. Thurber to establish a corps of battlefront artists, adding that he “would willingly give my life and the knowledge of a lifetime to have a chance to make such records for our people.”

Dear Comdr. Thurber:

As I am an artist who has made a lifetime study of maritime lore, as well as historical research which I have used in my many big murals, apparently with telling effect; and as I am a small boat sailor and a thorough lover of the sea and ships, I would like to offer my services to my country by applying for a commission as a reserve officer in the United States Navy. This would enable me to do a thing which I trust would be of value to the government in the future as well as the present.

I propose to make paintings from sketches and drawings ashore and afloat of ships, yards, docks and all the many intricacies incorporated in the running of a mighty navy. For example, the turning over of our destroyers to Great Britain was an extraordinary event in the history of this country, and as far as I know, no painted record was made. That would be an interesting document to exhibit throughout the country within a few months, had a convincing record been made, and I am sure that it would be even more interesting fifty years from now. Already this type of destroyer is passing. […]

I would willingly give my life and the knowledge of a lifetime to have a chance to make such records for our people… My idea I feel, dove-tails with but does not overlap this more commercial branch of publicity. Theirs is a selling job, mine a recording one, for an historical record must be made by a man who thoroughly understands ships and knows how they perform in a seaway.

Navy leadership accepted Coale’s proposal and in August 1941 he received a commission as a Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserve. Hardly two months later he was present when a German submarine torpedoed and sank the U.S.S. Reuben James off the coast of Iceland, targeted for escorting British ammunition convoys .

Over the next six years, Coale completed more than 50 striking paintings of naval battle scenes including the wreckage at Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Midway, now part of the Navy Art Collection.

Coale left the Navy in 1947 with the rank of commander, splitting his time between New York City and Stonington, CT. Just three years later, though, he died of a heart attack at the age of 60, best remembered for his mural ‘Pageant of Sea Commerce’ on the walls of the banking room of the New York Trust Company.

The First Lowering

While there’s a fair amount of information about Coale’s place in naval history and some of his murals from the 1920s and ‘30s, details about the Moby-Dick mural from 1941 were few and far between. The first step was to get a scan of that New Yorker article, which I quickly obtained through my local library.

The project, the article tells us, was all-consuming, entailing 16-hour days for him and a staff of seven assistants. The team worked for eight months straight in Coale’s cavernous 75 by 30 foot studio where Coale “painted the figures and important parts himself” and let his assistants fill in the rest.

This week the final sections of a three-hundred-and-twenty-five-foot-long mural depicting the story of Moby Dick were installed in a lounge and corridor of the new Metropolitan Life Insurance Building at Madison Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street. This company’s fifteen thousand employees are now in a position to familiarize themselves with the adventures of Captain Ahab, and Mr. Grifith B. Coale, the artist, is now in a position to catch up on his social life. Mr. Coale, who made drawings for the mural last summer, started painting in December, with a staff of seven assistants, and for the past two months has been interpreting Melville in oil nearly every day from eight-thirty in the morning until one o’clock the following morning, taking time off for lunch, dinner, and a small snack at 11 p.m. […]

“I haven’t been out of the house for eighteen days,” he told us. “I’m a horse.” Mr. Coale doesn’t look like a horse, being ruddy-faced, mustached, and standing only thirteen hands at the shoulder, but his wife, who was present, nodded. […]

As one who has done big murals for the New York Trust, the City Bank Farmers Trust, and other banks, Mr. Coale regards his long hours on Moby Dick as no particular hardship. “I was on the scaffold seventy-five hours doing ‘Four Centuries of the History of New York’ for the New York Trust,” he observed. “I lay down on the floor a few minutes every five or six hours and kept going.”

But that background, alas, was about all the New Yorker to offer, failing to include any photos of the murals underway.

Just as promising was a lead I found in a short retrospective of his career published in the Westerly, Rhode Island Sun, a town not far from his home in Stonington, CT. Here I learned that in 1961 “his widow donated 6,000 items including his record books and photographs to the Smithsonian.” And indeed, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art has a large collection of Coale’s records and correspondence — but they were only available on microfiche. This wasn’t much use unless someone was crazy enough to pay to have them scanned, which of course I was. Nothing in the museum’s description of the collection alluded to the Moby-Dick murals, but I waited eagerly for several months to see what they had.

In the meantime, I also discovered that the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s holdings include 14 of Coale’s sketches in preparation for the mural, with titles like:

• “Nantucket Sleigh Ride – A Stove Boat or a Dead Whale,”

• “A Sharp Eye for the White Whale, A Sharp Lance for Moby Dick,”

• “Lancing Wood to Blackskin/​The Pequod Cutting In,”

• “The Sermon: Beloved Shipmates… and God Prepares a Great Fish to Swallow up Jonah,” and

• “And I Only Am Escaped to Tell Thee.”

These, too, were not digitized, and though I reached out to the Smithsonian several times to see if they could help, I never received a response. (I wasn’t even given a chance to offer them money this time, which is maybe for the best.)

But not all hope was lost. One of the few search results for Coale and “Moby Dick” is for auction house Leland Little, which sold five of his sketches in 2018 for just $160, four of them in preparation for Moby-Dick. How these sketches became separated from the 11 at the Smithsonian I can’t say, but thanks to the auction page I was finally able to get a sense of what Coale’s approach and style. Included in the set was:

1. Loomings

2. The Spouter Inn

3. The First Lowering, and

4. Outfitting the Pequod

Further late-night internet trawling brought up one more image of the mural, Ahab’squarter-deck speech, included (of all places) in a 1948 book titled A Complete Guide To Drawing Illustration Cartooning And Painting.

In the book’s brief remark about the murals, Byrnes touches only on how Coale dealt with the oddities of having doors, windows, and furniture in the way of his canvas, writing that the artist “accepted his share of the openings as necessary evils and acknowledged them, even glorifying them in certain instances.”

Otherwise, zeroing in on finding images of the murals had hit a brick wall, so it was time to take a step back and figure out how this project came to be in the first place.

City of the Manhattoes

What I was hoping to find was a succinct history and explainer of the MetLife building, and ideally something to help explain why they would hire a muralist to decorate their lunch room with scenes from Moby-Dick. You have to admit just from the titles of the panels alone, it doesn’t sound very appetizing to eat your BLT next to a painting called “Lancing Wood to Blackskin/​The Pequod Cutting In” or “Fresh Meat from the Dolphin Striker.”

Miraculously, I found something eerily close to what I had envisioned: MetLife’s application for its building to be added to the National Register of Historic Places, filed in June 1995. The 45-page report includes a complete history of the MetLife building, its architects and design plans, and background about its murals which went way beyond just Coale’s.

While I’ve so far been casually referring to it as the “MetLife building,” the company’s headquarters were actually comprised of two buildings together known as the Home Office Complex. The more prominent of the two is the MetLife Tower, a 50-story skyscraper completed in 1909 and bordering Madison Square Park. Just a few decades after moving in, however, the company needed even more space for its rapidly-expanding staff and began construction in 1929 on what’s now known as the North Building, just across 24th Street. Originally planned to be a stunning 100 stories, at the time it would have been the tallest building in the world. But the Great Depression had other plans, halting construction at just 30, leaving the construction noticeably stout.

Looking at them side-by-side, you can see how the North building as it stands today is merely the base of what was intended.

Construction of the North building began with the east side adjacent to Park Ave, rising 28 stories above street level with four more below.

For our purposes, the relevant part of MetLife’s application to the National Register of Historic Places is the discussion of the two employee below-ground dining rooms and how they were beautified for the staff’s enjoyment:

The dining rooms were decorated throughout with seven-foot high murals painted by artists Edward Trumbull, D. Putnam Brinley and Nicholas L. Pavloff. The subjects of the murals were taken variously from Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Huckleberry Finn, scenes from the early history of New Amsterdam and New York, and the wild animals and birds of North America. The effect of the murals was said (in a MetLife publication) to “... bring to the employees a feeling of cessation from their work through the contemplation of artistic and amusing masterpieces.”

It’s almost impossible to imagine a mega-corporation today commissioning muralists of the caliber of Trumbull, Brinley, et al. simply to please their employees, and even harder to imagine the decision to have those murals feature scenes from literature and zoology. Regardless, there was no sign of Moby-Dick in the eastern wing of the building, so I kept scrolling.

It would take another decade before the western half of the building facing the park was completed in 1940. It was this section which would feature Coale’s murals alongside those of Carl Roters and N.C. Wyeth, who painted scenes “depicting life in colonial America.”

Construction of the second unit of the North Building on the corner site at Madison Avenue and 25th Street was begun in 1937 and completed in late 1940. With 28 stories above and 4 stories below street-level like the first unit, the second unit added some 487,000 square feet more office space to the complex. […]

In keeping with the design of the first unit dining rooms, murals decorated the walls of the employee dining and lounge spaces housed in the four stories below street level. Murals included scenes depicting life in colonial America by N. C. Wyeth; scenes from Moby Dick by Griffith Bailey Coale; a series of panels by D. Putnam Brinley showing the recreation customs of 19th-century America; scenes taken from folk songs by Carl Roters; and scenes depicting early transportation methods by Nicholas Pavloff.

Wyeth, of course, is one of the foremost American illustrators of the 20th century (not to mention the father of Andrew Wyeth), and this lead was a connection to a whole new direction of research.

For one, if this blog was obsessed with Wyeth instead of Melville, this would be a very short post. Wyeth’s legacy only grew after his death in 1945 and thanks to the keen eye of an architectural designer in the early 1980s their value in the art market made them worth peeling off the walls and restoring. Let’s all pull out our copies of the Tulsa World from September 22, 1987 and read along, shall we?

A collection of large wall murals on display at Gilcrease Museum was visited this week by the woman who helped save them from obscurity and eventual deterioration.

She is Judy Solomon, architect and design consultant with the New York office of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Ms. Solomon spent the past four days in Tulsa giving special showings/lectures of N.C Wyeth’s murals to Gilcrease docents and other interested groups. […]

“I knew they were wonderful paintings,” Ms. Solomon said. “Now more people will get a chance to see them.”

Wyeth, a famous illustrator/artist, began painting the murals in 1940, and finished 14 of a series of 18 for Metropolitan Life before he was killed in an automobile accident in October 1945. […]

But there they hung, largely forgotten and seen only by employees, for the next 40 years. Until about four years ago. “In fact, Metropolitan officers thought the employee lounge’s were simply decorated with ‘cheap art,’” Ms. Solomon said. “They didn’t know what they had.”

At about the same time, Metropolitan decided to redecorate the employee lounge. There was talk about painting over the murals. But Ms. Solomon and some others realized the paintings were not cheap art. […]

Part of the problem of the murals’ under-appreciation, Ms. Solomon said, was that they had been “loved to death” by the maintenance staff—who had been spreading a fresh coat of varnish over them faithfully for 40 years. The paintings subsequently got duller and dingier. A snow scene became tan. Dishes painted on a shelf became invisible. […]

Ms. Solomon decided to begin a year-long project: to propose to the president of her company that the paintings should be saved and restored.

The restoration project, overseen by art conservator Margaret Watherston, took 18 months and cost half a million dollars in the end. It goes without saying, however, that the undertaking was only worth the effort for what they would fetch in the art market.

It wasn’t a great omen for the Coale murals. In fact, the unfortunate distinction reminds me of something Melville once wrote in a letter as he struggled to get Moby-Dick down on paper in December 1850:

But I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf — at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel -- you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety -- & even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.

After an initial exhibition at the MetLife tower, Wyeth’s restored murals began a cross-country museum tour and most of them eventually ended up at the Brandywine Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The museum has also gratefully made high-resolution photos available for all of the murals and many of the preparatory sketches, such as “The Wedding Procession,” completed in 1941 and measuring 9 by 25 feet.

They even have this photo of the MetLife employee lounge where “The Wedding Procession” hung on the wall.

I held out hope that I might find photos exactly like these for Coale’s murals. Strangely, it wasn’t so long before the Wyeth murals were “rediscovered” that MetLife was still proudly showing off the art on its walls. An article in the New York Daily News from March 1970 noted that both his and Coale’s murals were part of a “permanent art exhibit” free and open to the public during business hours.

Surely someone pulled out their camera over the decades?

Archives, Archives, Archives!

At last, I received a digital scan of the Smithsonian’s collection of Coale’s papers, totaling a whopping 1,340 pages. Only a small fraction, though—125 pages to be exact—had any relevance to the Moby-Dick murals, and the vast majority of these were letters between Coale and MetLife architect Arthur O. Angilly.

For example, we see that when Coale submitted his resume to vie for the commission, he included not just his work history but his many nautical qualifications. He was not only a WWI marine camofleur, but an honorary life member of the Naval Order of the United States, Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Marine Museum of the City of New York, and a member of both the Ship Model Society of New York and the Society for Nautical Research in Greenwich, England.

Coale also laid out his vision for the project, promising that he “could, with humor, gaiety and knowledge, make a pageantry of this great American saga on the walls of your building.”

After the contract was signed in June, Coale submitted a list of titles for the 24 total panels Coale, intending to depict scenes from “Loomings” all the way to three days of the final chase.

After Coale got the job, he reached out to his colleague N.C. Wyeth to express his admiration and honor to be painting alongside him. “I am honored, thrilled and excited to be working next to you,” he wrote, “and I trust that this incentive will bring my work up nearer yours.” The outreach was also strategic. Over the next eight months as they each rushed to complete their projects, he and Wyeth exchanged several letters conspiring to push back against pushy inquiries from MetLife about their progress.

Coale’s frustration with these check-ins reached a boiling point in a letter to Angilly a few months in, reminding him of the depths of his historical research and asking that he tell MetLife bigwigs to kindly buzz off.

I am spending days at a drawing board with a rare 28 foot steering our from a whaleboat dangling over my head like the sword of Damocles, surrounded by real whaling gear and all manner of pertinent data for Moby Dick. And I have planned to be in New Bedford to revisit the Whale Ship “Charles W. Morgan” the end of this month.

So I ask humbly that the owners will not cut off my steerage-way.

But by mid-April 1941, the murals were “finished, hung, and varnished,” and Coale wrote to MetLife Vice President John Madden expressing his thanks for the commission. “I don’t think I have ever enjoyed any commission as much,” he wrote, “and I feel that the result is my best effort.”

The Smithsonian packet had a few other gems as well, including an article about Coale for its in-house magazine The Home Office from November 1941. Right up front we get another look at one of the panels: “The First Lowering.”

The bulk of the article retells the story of Moby-Dick, perhaps so that confused and possibly disgusted employees could understand what they were looking at. We also get a bit more detail about his process, which involved the use of a magic lantern, a precursor to the slide projector, to enlarge sketches onto the enormous canvases. His assistants, we learn, were assigned to extremely specialized tasks; one man painted nothing but ship riggings; another only mixed paint. Interesting, but still not what I was looking for.

The final two pages of the scan gives us yet another limited glance at sketches made for the mural, one an unidentified sailor and the other presumably Tashtego.

Ultimately, I’d say I got my money’s worth, but my hope that there’d be page after page of full-color 8x10 photos sadly did not come to pass. So the search continued.

Margaret Watherston: Conservator, Savior

About 500 paragraphs ago, I briefly mentioned Margaret Watherston, the art conservator who painstakingly restored the N.C. Wyeth murals to their original splendor. All the while, I was desperate to find any hint as to what happened to Coale. Were they also lovingly detached from the walls and cared for to the tune of half a million dollars ($1.5 million in 2025)? I wasn’t holding my breath.

But this line of inquiry did lead me to a very interesting finding aid for the “Margaret Watherston conservation papers” at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Watherston, I learned, specialized in the rare conservation techniques particular to murals, so it’s unsurprising that she was called upon in the 1980s when the potential value of scraping Wyeth’s work off the walls was recognized.

More importantly (to me), among boxes after boxes of Watherston’s life’s work, the finding aid listed a single folder of material that I hoped might hold all the answers.

Series III, Box 17, Folder 6: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company: photos: Moby Dick murals.

Fast-forward a month and I had yet another PDF in my inbox. The contents weren’t perfect, but they might be as good as we’re going find.

Page one was another sketch, presumably “Knights and Squires” featuring a rather grumpy-looking Ahab (note: right leg missing) and his three mates. That unidentified sailor from above we can now identify as Starbuck.

The remaining 15 pages were— praise be to Yojo—polaroids of the actual murals. Just as Judy Solomon described, 40 years of varnish and neglect had turned them a dingy brown, and the camera’s flash unfortunately obscures the middle of almost every photo. But they came on pages looking like this:

Meanwhile, the camera wasn’t always the same distance from the wall so sequential photos of entire walls don’t always line up perfectly. But if you’ve read this far you might as well stick around, because with a little bit of photo editing I did what I could to reconstruct this bizarre lunchroom.

First up we have, of course, “Loomings,” in which Ishmael (?) stands on the docks admiring a ship’s figurehead. In a second angle showing the other corner of the wall, we can see some seagulls though I can’t make out the rest of the scene.

Next we have Ishmael at the door of the Spouter Inn, looking just as he did in the sketch above.

Following along with Ishmael’s early journey we have two photos from the same wall of panels “Sermon & Tackle” on the left and “New Bedford” to its right.

Here’s another (flash-obscured) shot of “New Bedford.”

Faithful to the plot almost to a fault, we then have “The Schooner Moss Sails for Nantucket.”

Here, the “Knights and Squires” sketch from earlier comes to life in full color.

… as do their counterparts, Tashtego, Fedallah, Daggoo, and Queequeg.

To the right of Queequeg was “The Pequod Trying Out,” one of the many panels which are, I have to reiterate, insane to think of as lunchroom decor.

To represent Chapter 32: Cetology, Coale included a panel titled “Whale Chart” showing some of the most frequent targets, and two views of a whaling ship.

“The First Lowering” gives us our first full view of the Pequod which, given Coale’s nautical background, I’m going to assume is a fairly accurate depiction. (Props to the ‘riggings only’ guy.)

The “First Lowering” continues with more scenes from the hunt.

As workers sat down to enjoy a nice piece of fruit, perhaps they looked at this panel thought of that indelible image from Moby-Dick about stripping off the whale’s blubber “precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it.”

Cutting to the chase (pun intended), Coale’s murals then zip to the end of the book with an entire wall dedicated to the first and second day of battle with the white whale. (I’ve stitched the photos together here as best I could).

The third day of the chase continues on another wall, showing Fedallah strapped to the whale’s back as it barrels down on the Pequod.

In the penultimate panel, “Finis,” Tashtego nails the sky-hawk to the top of the mainmast as Moby Dick dives down.

In the end, of course, Ishmael grabs onto Queequeg’s coffin as the Pequod slowly sinks into the vortex, surrounded by “unharming” sharks. The caption at the bottom is the epilogue’s quote from Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

Where are they now?

I realize this post is practically book-length, so I’ll keep this wrap-up short. You may be wondering: ‘what happened to the murals?’ So am i!

I’ve yet to mention that through all of this research, I was also in a plodding back-and-forth with the MetLife company archivist who ultimately couldn’t tell me anything about the murals, where they ended up, or even confirm if they were destroyed. MetLife relocated in 2001, for what it’s worth, though the current owners and property managers have also ignored my emails.

That said, I think we all know the answer. It’s virtually impossible to believe that anyone would have spent millions of dollars to preserve these murals by an artist who was sadly forgotten over the course of the 20th century. I’m not even clear if there’s a single work by Coale in a museum you could go see right now.

But if you are itching to see an original, you can head to the Queensbury Hotel in Glen Falls, NY. There, in the lobby, you’ll find a painting commissioned from Coale in 1926 of a scene from The Last of the Mohicans, proudly displayed above the fireplace.

But as far as I can tell, Griffith Baily Coale’s Moby-Dick murals live only on this blog.

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Among the many rabbit holes I fell into while researching the story was something from Smalley’s Reader’s Digest piece about how wasn’t aware of Herman Melville’s white whale until 35 years after his own encounter.

But I didn't know there was a story about it until 35 years later when Marcus Jernegan, a professor of history and himself the son of a whaling captain, came up to my house at Gay Head and asked me about "Moby Dick." From him I heard the story that whalers used to tell some 50 years before my time of a white sperm whale that raged around the Pacific and was more ferocious than anything ever met on land or sea.

Always on the lookout for strange and interesting tangents, I thought it worthwhile to look into Marcus and the Jernegan family of Martha’s Vineyard to see if anything caught my eye. Little did I know I was knocking at the door of an esteemed family in whaling history, one with both an fascinating connection to Herman Melville and which also produced arguably the most unlikely whaler of the 19th century.

Here are quick glimpses at both of these stories.

Pt. 1: Captain William and the Stone Fleet

I admit that the surname Jernegan should have already been on my radar, appearing in a number of history books and articles as one of the first European families to settle on Martha’s Vineyard—rather like the Coffins, Starbucks, and Macys of Nantucket. A quick search of my digital Melville/whaling library returned more than a few hits, but foremost among them was an entry in Jay Leyda’s Melville Log dated May 6, 1954.

Though not directly part of Melville’s life, Leyda includes an excerpt from the Honolulu newspaper The Friend which follows up on the whaler Ann Alexander, rammed and sunk by a sperm whale just weeks before Moby-Dick was published. The wreck bore remarkable similarities to the book, with the exception that this crew survived when they were rescued two days later floating in their whaleboats.

Evert Duyckinck rushed to notify Melville of the Ann Alexander, to which he replied: “What a Commentator is this Ann Alexander whale,” imagining the leviathan as one of his literary critics. “I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.”

Dear Duyckinck — Your letter received last night had a sort of stunning effect on me. For some days past being engaged in the woods with axe, wedge, & beetle, the Whale had almost completely slipped me for the time (& I was the merrier for it) when Crash! comes Moby Dick himself (as you justly say) & reminds me of what ! have been about for part of the last year or two. It is really & truly a surprising coincidence - to say the least. I make no doubt it is Moby Dick himself, for there is no account of his capture after the sad fate of the Pequod about fourteen years ago. — 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.

The follow-up item in the Honolulu Friend, published three years later, explains that six months after the Ann Alexander was sunk that same whale was killed by the Rebecca Sims. The whale was identified by the harpoons still stuck its side along with “pieces of the ship’s timbers.” The master of that ship was one Capt. William Jernegan.

(You can read the article in its entirety thanks to the Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Collections.)

Jernegan even saved one of the whale’s teeth as a keepsake for the Ann Alexander’s Captain DeBlois, inscribing it succinctly: “TOOTH OF WHALE WHICH STOVE CAPT DEBLOIS SHIP.”

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that the logbook for the 1851-1852 voyage of the Rebecca Sims survived which might have documented the slaying and the amazing discovery of the harpoons. On the other hand, as we saw with the Platina and its white whale, maybe it wouldn’t even have warranted a passing remark beside the weather report.

It’s also unknown whether Melville was made aware that the destroyer of the Ann Alexander was later caught and killed, but there is one last fascinating connection I couldn’t help but mention here. The Rebecca Sims, built in 1801, was originally used for general transatlantic trading and was only refitted as a whaler around 1850. But as it neared the end of its useful life in October 1861, the ship was acquired by the Union Navy, one of dozens of other aging whaling ships used as part of a strategy to thwart Confederate supply routes. They would be part of the so-called Stone Fleet, deliberately sunk in major ports and shipping channels with the aim of making them impassable.

Two months after its purchase, the Rebecca Sims and 15 other ships were sailed to Charleston harbor and sunk after being loaded with stone. A correspondent from the New York Herald who saw the aftermath wrote with obvious glee at the vengeful tactic:

[W]ith a fleet of ships sunk across and blockading an important channel, leading to what was once a thrifty city, but what is now the seat of rebellion, and an object of just revenge, the dismasting of the hulks, within sight of the rebel flag, and rebel guns, is really an unalloyed pleasure. One feels that at least one cursed rat-hole has been closed, and one avenue of supplies cut off by the hulks.

The plan, alas, was ultimately a failure. For one, it didn’t take long for the hulls to disappear fully into the water and/or break apart. The ships were also sunk far enough apart that the Confederate Navy were able to simply steer around them. Worst though, and obvious in hindsight, was that the Confederate Army concluded from the blockade that the Union must not be planning to attack Charleston, and quickly shifted valuable resources to prepare for assaults elsewhere.

But what of this Melville connection? Well, who else would mourn the needless destruction of old whaling ships but a nostalgic former whaler? In the days after the Rebecca Sims and the others were sunk, Melville sat down to write the poem “The Stone Fleet. An Old Sailor’s Lament,” later published as part Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Here it is in full:

Melville wasn’t content to leave it there, even. Among several pages of notes at the end of Battle Pieces he excerpts an article about the Stone Fleet from the New York Tribune, copying over a list of the sixteen ships sunk at Charleston as if mourning fallen soldiers. Whether or not he knew it was the Rebecca Sims which had slain “Moby Dick himself”, he duly recorded its name so that all posterity would remember the “glorious” craft.

Pt. 2: Whalers Say the Darndest Things

The same year that the Rebecca Sims was sunk in Charleston, another Edgartown whaling captain named Captain Jared Jernegan was returning home after a three-year whaling voyage. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to figure out exactly how he was related to William Jernegan, though their lives, communities, and careers overlapped to a great extent. Let’s just call it ‘not-so-distant cousins’ but do let me know if anyone figures it out.

In any case, Captain Jared came home and although he was already 36 and had three children with a wife who died in childbirth, over the next decade he and his second wife Helen had three more children in between voyages: Laura in 1862, Prescott in 1866, and Marcus in 1872.

Marcus Jernegan, as we know, was the man who sought out Amos Smalley to talk about his white whale. But while he spent much of his life studying and teaching history at the University of Chicago, it wasn’t such a long journey to find the former harpooner on Martha’s Vineyard. He’d retired in 1937 and moved back to Edgartown, turning his attention to the history of the whaling industry. Over the next few years, he compiled extensive data on Vineyard whaling from logbooks and lectured on the subject until his death in 1949.

Prescott Jernegan, who had little interest in the family trade, instead became an ordained Baptist preacher who and made a name for himself by claiming he knew how to extract gold from seawater, a process which he said had been “revealed to him in a heavenly vision.” In the end, he and a partner bilked hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors and fled the country, never to be seen again.

The most noteworthy of Jared and Helen’s children, however, was their eldest, Laura. Shortly after her birth in 1862, Captain Jernegan left his family behind to command the whaler Oriole and was away for the next three years. When it was time to return to sea in 1868, this time as captain of the whaler Roman, he decided he couldn’t leave Helen, Laura, and toddler Prescott behind.

Jernegan had the crew build a small room with a desk on the ship’s deck where Helen went over lessons with Laura, but for the next three years the fearless six-year-old became an astute observer of day-to-day life aboard a whaler, writing it all down in her diary. It is, to say the least, the most adorable whaling logbook you’re likely to come across.

Captured in the diary are accounts of what she saw, watching the men processing whales, interactions with animals, fights with her brother, schooling, and just about anything else a child might think about aboard a ship, each ending with the polite “GOOD BYE FOR TODAY.” Take, for example, these early entries from December 1868 (age 6), completely unfazed by the butchery of whaling:

MONDAY 7th

THEY HAVE TAKEN FOUR SPERM WHALES. IT IS NICE FUN TO SEE THEM.

GOOD BYE FOR TO DAY

WEDNESDAY 9th

THE MEN ARE BOILING THE BLUBBER THAT MAKES THE OIL.

GOOD BYE FOR TO DAY

Laura wasn’t particularly sentimental about the other animals on board, either, including the ducks she saw on Tuesday and ate for dinner on Friday.

TUESDAY 15

THERE IS NO WIND TO DAY. THE MEN ARE STOWING THE OIL DOWN WE HAVE 4 DUCKS ON BOARD OF OUR SHIP. GOOD BY FOR TO DAY

FRIDAY 18

THE WIND BLOWS VERY HARD. WE HAD DUCKS FOR DINNER.

In January 1869, Laura (age 7) was rather nonchalant about seeing Cape Horn.

MONDAY 4th

WE PAST BY CAPE HORN TO DAY. IT IS A LARGE BLACK ROCK. SOME OF THE ROCKS LOOK LIKE A STEEPLE OF A CHURCH. GOOD BY FOR TODAY.

Perhaps no other entry portrays the chaotic mind of a child than the one from February 10, 1871, bouncing back and forth between whales, birds, dogs, death, family, and school within a few lines.

FRIDAY 10th

IT IS QUIT ROUGH TODAY. BUT Is A FAIR WIND. WE HAVE 135 BARRELS OF OIL, 60 OF HUMPBACK. AND 75 OF SPERM. WE HAD TOO BIRDS. THERE IS ONE NOW, ONE DIED. THERE NAMES WERE DICK AND LULU. DICK DIED. LULU IS GOING TO. PRESCOTT HAS A LITTLE DOG. ITS NAME IS TONY. WE HAVE NOT SEEN A SHIP SINCE WE HAVE LEFT HONOLULU. PRESCOTT IS PLAYING WITH PAPA. I AM IN THE FORTH REDER, AND THE FITH RIGHTING BOOK. GOOD BY FOR TO DAY.

While Ishmael might have taken several paragraphs to describe the idle, indolent days between hunts, Laura gets the point across in just a few words in what is easily my favorite of the entries:

TUESDAY 19

PAPA OPENED ONE OF THE COCONUTS IT IS SOFT INSIDE. PRESCOTT LOVES THEM. THARE IS A FLY ON MY FINGER. HE HAS FLEW OF NOW. Good By For to day.

Amazingly, at no point does she evince any fear, shock, or disgust at the work going on around her which, even in description, is a non-starter for many modern readers of Moby-Dick. Nor did her parents show any particular concern about shielding their children from what was going on around them. Helen later recalled watching her kids “climb up on the transom and amuse themselves by watching the sharks follow the ships… They were very large man eating sharks.”

The closest the family came to real danger was in March 1871 when the Roman anchored at one of the Marquesas Islands to pick up firewood and fresh water. When the captain denied the crew’s request to go ashore, more than a dozen drunken sailors mutinied and trapped the him and his family in the stateroom. The incident ended with 17 mutineers taking three whaleboats to shore, threatening to come back and burn the ship if they tried to leave. Jernegan fled anyway, making his way north to Honolulu. When they arrived, he sent his family back home to Edgartown before heading back to the Arctic with a new crew to catch more whales.

Surprisingly, Laura’s diary captured none of the excitement of the mutiny or even the trip back home, accomplished via steamship and a cross-country train trip. Her last entry was written in early March 1871, shortly before the mutiny, simply recording some bad weather in seasick cursive.

Wednesday 4th

it is quite rough today. I am going up on deck

Nearly sixty years later, Laura’s story was finally brought to light by her younger brother Marcus, published as a small volume in 1929. Since then, her story has been told and retold in various books, typically written for children. A complete scan of the book was made available by the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in 2010 on their “Girl on a Whaleship” website, along with a detailed history of the family and voyage assembled from Laura’s diary, her mother’s memoirs, and other documents. Across 43 pages you can almost watch Laura grow up simply in her handwriting from the first entry in December 1868, age 6:

To the last, in February 1871, soon turning 9:

That’s all I’ve got for you on the Jernegans. GOOD BY FOR TODAY!

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References

• Wilson Heflin, Herman Melville's Whaling Years (2004)

• Jimmy Packham, “The Maritime Self on the American Whaleship,” in Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and Performing at Sea (2021)

You just don’t meet these sorts of people at parties anymore, so I filed away the name for another time and continued writing about the parades, beard contest, and clambake where whale meat was served to Hollywood A-listers. But today, at last, is Amos Smalley’s day. Of course, I couldn’t help but be a little suspicious of the story—or let’s say highly motivated to find evidence to help me believe. After all, the digitization of newspapers, books, and even whaling logbooks should make this far easier to check up on now than it was in 1956. Could I substantiate Smalley’s claims, I wondered, or had everyone been taken in by a big fish story?

Reader’s Digest Digest

First, I was going to need some specifics. A year after the film premiere, Smalley published his story in Reader’s Digest — or rather dictated it to a writer. The byline credited Smalley “as told to Max Eastman,” an author, activist, and poet who began his career and an ardent socialist but is now remembered for his midlife political shift toward libertarianism and anti-Communist screeds in the 1940s. That about-face, aligning himself with the likes of William F. Buckley and even Joseph McCarthy, made him a perfect fit for the conservative, nationalist magazine.

Closer to home for Amos Smalley was that Eastman spent his summers on Martha’s Vineyard and the two elderly men somehow became friends, one an 80-year-old scallop fisherman who had rarely ventured outside his Wampanoag community since his whaling days; the other a 74-year-old world traveling public intellectual and author of nearly two dozen books. After the hubbub of the film release, writes Eastman’s biographer, the Melville-admiring Eastman wanted to help Smalley submit his story to Reader’s Digest where he’d been an editor since the early 1940s. To Eastman, Smalley had practically leaped out of the pages of Moby-Dick.

He tried to evoke some of the glorious Vineyard past by writing down a story told by his Wampanoag friend Amos Peters Smalley… To Max, Amos Smalley was a modern embodiment of Melville’s Tashtego, the “unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard,” a symbol of Islander perseverance. The notion that someone from Gay Head had such a direct link to Melville’s great novel pleased Max immensely.

The resulting seven-page story was Moby-Dick in miniature with chases as vivid as those headed by Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. Reader’s Digest even awarded Smalley its First Person Award, given in recognition for “true, hitherto unpublished narratives of an unusual personal experience” and worth $2,500 (nearly $30,000 in 2025). There was certainly no doubting what an unusual personal experience it was.

Yet, I couldn’t find a full-text copy of Smalley’s story anywhere online. The New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park website has a scan of the first two pages only, and the website cited on Smalley’s Wikipedia page is, I learned, a highly-abridged version for English language learners.

Naturally, I leaned yet again on the vast resources of my county library system and, voilá, I now have a complete scan to quote from liberally. It begins with a short foreword from Eastman:

Of all the legends that have come down to us from the great days of whaling, none is better known than that of Moby Dick, the monstrous white whale that was believed by those "iron men in wooden ships" of the last century to be the embodiment of evil and malice. Yet until now there has been no written "proof" that this dread creature, or any whale like him, ever really existed. He owes his fame almost entirely to more than a century's talk among mariners and to Herman Melville's classic novel, "Moby Dick," published in 1851 and recently made into a motion picture.

There is one man, however, who faced such an all-white whale at little more than arm's length. He is Amos Smalley, an ex-harpooner living today at Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard Island, Mass. The experience of this unassuming 80-year-old Indian has long been known and vouched for by whaling authorities.

Smalley, it seems, was almost fated to become a whaler. His father had served as a steward on whaling ships for years and had passed that wanderlust onto his sons. “Since as early as I can remember my heart was set on going whaling,” Smalley begins. Born in 1877, Amos may have come of age at the tail end of the industry but the culture of whaling hadn’t faded from the island. “We boys used to play at harpooning almost as soon as we could walk,” he recalled. “We would cut a long pole, throw a hat on the ground and say, 'Let's see who can stick him first.'" (You can see why Melville wrote that Martha’s Vineyard had “long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers.”)

When his older brother Frankie returned from a whaling voyage to the Arctic, brimming with tales of danger and adventure, Amos could wait no longer. He shipped out at fifteen, signing on as a steward. But like Melville’s young Redburn, he discovered that the reality of life at sea was not only grueling and filthy but paid so little that he barely broke even after three years.

I persuaded my father to let me sign on with the Pearl Nelson, a two-masted whaling schooner out of New Bedford. I felt pretty grown-up—until the first night out. I spent that whole night awake in my bunk crying, I was so homesick and seasick.

Life aboard was pretty rough. There were 24 of us in the fo’cle, stowed in little bunks one above the other. Cockroaches were everywhere. You had to hold your teeth tight when you drank a cup of water in the dark so as not to swallow a mouthful of them. […]

I came home from that first voyage—it last three years—with $14 and the rank of steward. My “lay”… was 1/75 of the profits of the voyage. Out of that I had paid about $200 for my clothes and bought tobacco and other items from the ship’s slop chest.

In spite of this experience, Amos was ready to ship out again as soon as possible and in June 1898 signed onto the Platina, also out of New Bedford.

Amos was once again assigned to steward but made it known to Captain Thomas McKenzie that his aim was to be a boat-steerer, i.e. a harpooner. (It says a lot about the role that harpooning the whale was considered secondary to the more critical skill of steering the boat directly after the whale was struck—recall Melville’s discussion of the mad dash to switch positions in Chapter 62). McKenzie told him that he could have the job if and when the current boat-steerer botched a single hunt — along with what we might call a motivational speech.

When we werhe down in the River Plate area off the southern end of South America, one of the steerers missed a right whale. The captain was in the masthead and saw it. He said to me: "Steward, the next time we raise a whale, you get in the bow of that boat."

It was a week before another whale was raised. "Now, young fellow," Captain McKenzie boomed at me as we were about to lower the boats, "you harpoon that whale or I'm going to kick you all over this deck!" I don't know if I was more scared of the whale or the captain's boots.

In a scene worthy of Ch. 48: The First Lowering, Smalley describes his first hunt and and the necessary tactics involved in approaching two sperm whales from behind.

That day there turned out to be two large sperm whales, abreast. This worried me. Lots of times you can slip up on a whale without him seeing you. His eyes are so far back and low down and small that he can't see much past his enormous forehead or the bulge of his body behind. You can go on him from the front at an angle up to ten degrees and he won't spot you; from the rear you have as much as 40 or 50 degrees. Either way was difficult with two whales so close together, for the slightest motion toward one might be seen by the other. To give me the best chance for a right-hand dart, the mate steered the boat between the whales from the rear. I was to attack the one on the left.

As we drew close I stood up, braced myself with my left knee in a notch of the bow-box, and readied the harpoon to dart the instant I got the order, "Give it to him!" The whale was about ten feet from the boat —a good distance-and a little below the surface, his black body glistening greenish through the water. When the mate gave me the word, I went down into the whale with all I had.

With that first strike, Smalley earned his place as one of the ship’s boat-steerers, and when the Platina returned to New Bedford in May 1901 he was still ready for more. Just two months later the now-24 year-old Smalley returned to the Platina, though this time around he wouldn’t be spending any time in the galley. In fact, he’d made such an impression on the officers that he was made boat-steerer for first mate Andrew West, who he describes as “a small, humpbacked, excitable man, with a nose as red as a new brick.” West, in turn, called Smalley “Old Tommyhawk.”

The White Whale

It was on this third whaling voyage that Smalley had his encounter with the white whale sometime in the summer of 1902. As he recalled for Reader’s Digest, the ship was cruising in the Western Grounds south of the Azores when the masthead cried out:

"There she's blowing-blo-ow-blow—blow!"

Captain McKenzie was up from his supper immediately. "Where away?" he shouted.

"On the port bow," came the reply.

"How fur off?"

"Bout a mile."

The captain climbed to the masthead.

"It's a sperm," he said with his first glance… "Get your boats ready," he hollered down.

Andrew West and I got in our boat and waited for the order to lower. You never lower while the whale is up spouting; the least slap on the water will reach him like a telephone call. He stayed up about an hour, then sounded. That gave us time to lower and get to where we thought he was likely to come up for air. We were not more than half a mile from the ship when its mainmast waif [flag] went clear to the top, telling us the whale was up.

In a few minutes we could see his hump, still a good way ahead. "Paddle— paddle like hell!" West urged the crew. He was worried lest the whale sound again before we got to him. It would likely be dark when he came up.

Suddenly, as we drew near the whale, Andrew West spoke in a voice I'll never forget: "That fish is white! He's white all over! He's a son-of-a-bitch!"

Though Smalley was unfamiliar with Melville’s white whale at the time, West’s shout that the whale was white all over sent him into a panick. Growing up he’d always been told that a white whale was “the sign of a real killer” or even a curse. On the other hand, Smalley remembered Captain McKenzie’s threat to ‘kick him all over this deck’ if he failed to strike the whale, so potential curses went out the window.

To be fair, he did have quite an advantage over Tashtego: namely, an exploding harpoon to help them get fast to the whale. This time, though, the dart was itself fatal, landing right over the whale’s heart. West, moving to the front of the boat with a bomb lance, lowered his gun and congratulated Amos on the kill.

I remembered the stories I had heard as a boy. Only this wasn't just a whale with white spots. He was an all-white whale! I also remembered Captain McKenzie and his big boots and the things he said when you failed to do your job. It was my job to harpoon that whale, white or black, and I braced myself to do it.

Now came what was almost a stammer from Andrew West: "Give it to him, Old Tommyhawk!" I got my iron into him all right, or thought I did. But seconds passed.

I leaned forward listening for the sound of the bomb exploding. I had never missed before when I had a good dart. Finally I heard the muffled "pung, pung" far down inside.

There was a quick flurry on the surface, and the water shot up like a fountain as the whale went down, straight down, taking the line fast.

Everybody in the boat was tense, thinking he was going to drag us down with him. I reached for the knife in case we had to cut loose, but in the gray dusk I could hardly see the rope. Down, down he went, taking out 20 fathoms. Then he stopped, and we waited—breathless. […]

We hauled in the line, keyed up for the battle ahead. But the whale came up slowly and quietly. He came up nib-end first, and just hung there, like a gigantic bobber. If he had done any thrashing around at that moment, like enough we'd all have been in the ocean with him.

But he just bobbed. Then suddenly his whole head broke water, the line jerked so it took all of us to hold it, and the air was filled with a heavy roar as thick red blood gushed from his spout-hole. This could be the beginning of the final death struggle—but it wasn't. In a few minutes he was lying flat out.

West came forward, shoulder gun ready, and I stepped back to the stern. He gave one long look and lowered his gun. "Smalley," he said, "you done well. You put your iron right over his heart. You killed him." […]

Captain McKenzie stood at the rail, watching carefully. When I came aboard, he looked me straight in the eye and said nothing. That was the highest compliment I could have had. He would have said plenty if he hadn't been pleased.

Captain McKenzie put off cutting-in until morning and in the meantime rewarded the crew with some rum. “When it came my turn,” writes Smalley, “he paused, gave the pitcher an extra tilt, then handed me my mug with a little nod.” The whiteness of the whale aside, it was just another day on the Platina, which continued cruising for another year before safely returning to New Bedford.