Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, whatever your opinion of it, has given us unforgettable characters: Ishmael, the ever-present narrator; Captain Ahab, the iconic, myopic man-on-a-mission to kill the white whale; Queequeg, the gentle cannibal-harpooner; Starbuck, the dependable first mate; and of course, Moby himself, the white whale with the killer instinct.
Moby Dick, although a great novel and a great whaling story about brotherhood and hubris, and a whole bunch of other English literature terms, often gets mired down in the details. Entire chapters are dedicated to “The Whiteness of the Whale,” “The Sperm Whale’s Head – Contrasted View,” “The Right-Whale’s Head – Contrasted View,” and, I’m not kidding here “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton.”
So, on the one hand we have larger-than-life characters adventuring aboard the whaling ship The Pequod. On the other hand we have full chapters devoted to the mating habits of whales, the craniology and full skeletons of whales, and the processing of whales for materials goods, i.e., the whole point of whaling. No wonder Moby Dick is falling off the must-read list.
And like so many adventure stories, the absence of females is stark. There’s just no room in a whaling adventure for girls. Or is there?
Martha Smith Brewer Brown’s She Went A-Whaling (Oysterponds Historical Society) provides us with a girl’s-eye view aboard a whaling ship. Mrs. Brown accompanied her captain husband aboard the Lucy Ann, which set off from Long Island on August 31, 1847 and returned on July 7, 1849: a twenty-two month voyage.
The book reads like a captain’s log, with dates, longitudes, and latitudes. What it has that Melville’s masterpiece doesn’t have (I’m loathe to use the word “lacks” because different authors have different stories to tell) is a female at the helm. We could go on about the reliability of Ishmael as a narrator, but the truth is: Mrs. Brown is reliable. She was the captain’s wife, calling it like her feminine, temperament soul saw it.
Here’s what Mrs. Brown saw on the Lucy Ann: “Coopering , Carpentering, Blacksmithing, Corking, Pitching and Taring, Spliceing Stearing Oars, making Scotchman, [and] picking Oakum” (p.34). While the men are attending to their duties, Mrs. Brown is usually off by herself, cooking, knitting, sewing, reading, singing, and lamenting the fate of the on-board kittens.
We learn two months into the voyage that she does not share her husband’s passion for whaling as she suppresses a smile that the first whale they caught got away – “then I recollected I had come a whaleing” (p.34).
Mrs. Brown does not possess the literary flourish of Mr. Melville, although she does have her moments. Three months into the journey the Lucy Ann is heading toward the Cape of Good Hope, and Mrs. Brown marvels at the ocean’s calm and fury: “One day it is spread out before us – a sea of molten glass. The next, it is running mountains high and lashed into a perfect foam” (p. 37). Take that, Melville.
A recurring theme of Mrs. Brown’s entries is her deep piety. She notes the crew numbers 31 and not one of them is a Christian. She wishes a missionary were on board. She is constantly reading the Bible. She pities and wants to read the Bible to those poor heathens on board, most of whom cannot read and know nothing of God. She thanks God that he does not send whales to be hunted on the Sabbath Day.
Alas, Mrs. Brown’s whaling days are numbered. After seven and a half months at sea, her husband drops her off at Oahu. Four months later she gives birth to a son. Two and a half months after that, her husband joins her in Hawaii.
They sail home and live happily ever after.
Yeah. A little different than Moby Dick.
Tracey McCormick is Managing Editor at GreatHistory.com.
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I Liked Moby Dick So Much I Read It Over and Over and Over… « SheSpoke. Find out what she said said:
[...] wrote about another whaler’s adventures in the 1840’s: this time a woman by the name of Martha Smith Brewer Brown. [...]
July 27th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Gerald D. Swick said:
You know, when you describe Moby Dick’s chapters that way, it sounds a lot like Cold Mountain. After reading that “Civil War novel” I now know the name of ever #$(@! plant on that mountain, but I still don’t know why I had to wade through the biology lesson. Melville at least may have had an excuse – if I remember correctly, Moby Dick was originally published in serial form in a boy’s adventure magazine. Melville was probably getting paid by the word.
August 6th, 2009 at 1:54 pm