“There she blows! – there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”
The white whale, Captain Ahab’s cetacean foe, makes a late arrival in the antepenultimate chapter of Herman Melville’s 19th century classic. One hundred and thirty-two chapters pass by and put the reader’s patience to the test before the epic encounter between the one-legged captain and whale. The plot up to that point is a waiting game.
“Moby-Dick” is a rewarding read, but also a trying one. If you survive (many don’t) the long and winding gantlet of chapters about sea knots, discourses on sperm oil and in-depth examinations of the fixated captain’s psychology, you’ll be left with the solitary vision, played out in your mind’s eye, of Ahab, his ship the Pequod, and its entire crew (save the narrator, Ishmael) swallowed up into the nothingness of the sea after unsuccessful battle with the white whale.
What was it all for?
The question was on my mind when I signed up for a whale watch, courtesy of Boston Harbor City Cruises, departing from Central Wharf on a crispy Sunday in fall. I didn’t expect the trip to provide an answer. But I hoped the experience of heading out to sea on my own search of whales would put me in a better position to empathize with the characters in the novel, and maybe a deeper appreciation of Melville’s work would follow.
When I arrived dockside in the morning, the skies were blue and the sea unthreatening. The ship, one of more than a half dozen ships in the City Cruise fleet, looked like a stout, white-and-blue modified ferry with three decks of seating, extending from the cabin interior to weather-exposed decks.
We launched at a brisk 9 a.m., setting off on a one-hour course to Stellwagen Bank, a protected marine sanctuary about 25 miles off the coast of Boston, known as a reliable area for observing cetacean life. Like Melville’s novel, there’s a considerable prelude in a whale watch as you motor out from shore. The ship crested a sea of moderate swells, described by a crew member on the PA as “a four-hour carnival ride that you can’t get off.”
Tip to tourists and locals alike: Dress in layers. The sea wind blows cold in the fall. If you’re not wearing the layers, you can use them to participate in the miserable New England tradition of staking “dibs” on a seat with a sundry article of clothing. When the eager whale watchers on the exposed third deck descended below to get warm, they found the cabin interior barely half-full yet every seat claimed, guarded by at least one member of a party who insisted for the next four hours, with unflinching resoluteness and utter shamelessness, that the rest of their party would return at any second.
A second tip: Keep your eyes on a fixed point along the horizon to stave off seasickness. Closing your eyes, a natural tendency, will accelerate the sense of disorientation. The crew circulated periodically through the cabin, ostensibly to share bits of marine wisdom, but their real purpose, I suspected, was keeping an eye on the sickest passengers and dispensing barf bags and ginger sucking candies as needed.
About an hour into the voyage, the engines lulled to a putter and we knew the ship had arrived at Stellwagen Bank. We weren’t alone. The horizon was dotted with other pleasure cruises hunting for a glimpse of these mysterious sea mammoths. We didn’t wait long.
A pair of humpback whales surfaced off the port side. If the design of the ferry’s hull was any less squat, the ship might have tumbled over from the sudden crush of passengers that crowded along the railing of all three decks to catch a glimpse. I followed suit too late, pulling my camera from its sheath only to struggle to find a line of sight on the humpback whales between the heads and shoulders of my whale watching companions.
A third tip: Pick a spot and let the whales come to you. On a crowded cruise, you can spend fruitless energy jockeying for the best view as the whales drift around the vessel. When the pair of humpbacks drifted to the starboard bow, I found a comfortable position along the railing of the third deck port astern. Soon enough, a pair of humpback whales drifted in my direction.
I spied the pair through the telescoping lens of my camera. Their backs glistened, arched out of the water, with their dorsal fins pointing skyward. The crew member on the PA described the pair beside us. As big as a school bus. Lovers of krill and small fish. Air-breathing mammals whose respiration includes routine exhalations of warm air from their blowholes. Given to “logging” behavior, another name for whale napping, which we observed in some of the whales as they lolled in the sea and let the current claim their massive dreaming bodies.
What struck me most about these creatures was their gentleness. They were just about as ferocious as a milking cow grazing in a Vermont pasture. Humpbacks were never as prized by whalers as the sperm whales of “Moby-Dick,” for lack of the highest quality whale oil. They were nevertheless driven to the edge of extinction before a global agreement banned hunting them in the 20th century. The ban, along with marine sanctuaries such as Stellwagen Bank, has helped protect whales, their habitat and allowed humpback population to return to healthy numbers. It’s frequently cited as a conservation success story.
Can I imagine raising a harpoon above my head and launching it into the broadside of these peaceful creatures? I can imagine a lot of things. But there’s some quality I lack that prevents me from actually doing it. It’s the same quality that leads Hemingway-zooted dentists and the sons of Donald Trump into the African savannah to take selfies with slaughtered elephants and rhinos. It just isn’t me. Which raises the question: Would Captain Ahab have been Maga?
I felt no closer in sympathy to Ahab after my four-hour journey. The riddling nexus at the center of “Moby-Dick,” with his supernatural fury and thirst for vengeance, remains inscrutable to me. He’s a seafaring character with Biblical scope, an archetype of doom risen from the depths of human history. Who am I? A groundling with a bus pass. But I had seen a half dozen whales, enjoyed the brisk fall air and not vomited a single time. That, along with joining the “I read it” club for Melville’s classic, was good enough for me.
