SPEAKER_02 0:07

If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Quequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford. In thoroughfares neigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest-looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut Street, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays, and at Bombay and the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last mentioned haunts, you see only sailors. But in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners, savages outright, many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Can you tell us about your shirt?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

What my my t-shirt that says some have t-shirts thrust upon them.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

That's got the air of really good merch about it, which always makes me interested.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

It's definitely got the air of merch about it. Um yeah, it's the it's the it's the 12th night t-shirt that we uh we tout at the shows.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Oh, love it.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Were I in England, it would that alone would get me to the stage.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

I'm gonna go ahead and say anybody who isn't, anybody who's in England, yeah, by all means come and see it. Um anybody who isn't, um, don't come specifically for the show. It's that would not be very sustainable. Um it's good, and I hope it's I hope it would be worth it. But um we we're we're in the middle of a climate change-induced drought in England and in so much else of the world. So um I'd say, yeah, it's it's not worth it for the for the for the climatic impact.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Yeah, so no airfare to come see you.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Uh I'd I'd say probably not. I'll try I'll try and and come over your your your stateside for a with a play at some point.

SPEAKER_02 2:26

But no, that'd be great. Um so you said that you've been driving all over England uh so like how is that? Like, so you know, coming from the United States, which is this giant country, um, I I'm pretty sure like England is about the size of North Carolina, more or less. So I I'm in North Carolina. So is it does it feel like a lot to drive the the breadth of England?

SPEAKER_00 2:49

For yeah, I suppose the kind of journeys that we're doing for you guys probably wouldn't really touch the sides, but to give you a to give you a sort of a view into a journey that I did yesterday, for example, I I um I I drove from Kent to Oxfordshire. Um and that was a that was a drive of about sort of three hours. Which I which probably is to you know, you I don't know, some states that would that's just a drive to the shops, I don't know. That's the sense that I get, but it's just that everything is just so disproportionately larger. I mean, I mean I think I'm right in saying that yeah, so like Texas is three times the size of the UK, for example. So you know, I really I really shouldn't be complaining.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

No, I mean you can complain, that's fine. Um yeah, I I I say I shouldn't, but um uh I I will uh because so that that's your encounter with the streets right now, is driving all across them uh in the uh in is it just in England that the the tour is it's not in the other?

SPEAKER_00 3:46

We've been more or less up to the Welsh border, but not quite into Wales, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:51

Okay. So as somebody who's uh you know in in the UK yourself, like there's there's a lot of uh demonyms in in those aisles. Uh there's a lot of uh so like what would you consider yourself if I were to like refer to you by nationality? Would you consider yourself to be like would you call yourself an Englishman or like what would you like say you are?

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Oh really, really interesting. I think any declaration like that cannot come without certain kind of nationalist undertones. Do I consider myself do would I ever introduce myself as an Englishman? No. Okay Um am I am I British? I mean, objectively, yes. Uh there's a little bit of Welsh blood somewhere in our family, I think. Um but no, I mean I used to be very, very positive and and and and passionate about the fact that I that I am European in the but and then and then Brexit happened and then any and then and then that sort of claim became incredibly um kind of tenuous. Uh I was very, very proud of that as a part of uh as a part of my identity, and now uh you know we're the we're the laughing stock of Europe and and and everywhere else. So no, I I I I don't know really, and then in terms of in terms of where I'm from, well, I'm from a little village in Cambridgeshire, um, which is kind of the Midlands, but then if I talk from if I talk with somebody then who's from the the proper Midlands, like sort of Nottingham, I get absolutely I get I get laughed out the door. Um so yeah, and Nor, and this we're we're we're moving beautifully towards uh the the the wonderful tag yourself moment that we get in this chapter of townbred dandy versus country bred dandy. I'm also I I also kind of grew up in in in a quite a kind of outer suburbia, kind of on the verge of the countryside. So, you know, I'm also not a city boy and I'm not really a country boy either. So yeah, it's uh we we we we contain all sorts of liminalities in in in the UK and indeed specifically in England.

SPEAKER_02 5:56

Welcome to Pequod Pod, the podcast on the Wonder World of Herman Melville. My name is Tristan Bavell, Marquise. I'm Meg.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

And call me Johnny.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

And today we're talking about the street. Um in my edition here, a lovely two-page uh chapter. We'll see how long uh we can talk about it for. Uh Meg. Why don't you give us uh yeah, uh why don't you give us a little bit of a synopsis of this one as you uh do so lovely for us each time?

SPEAKER_01 6:22

So the street um coming off of breakfast, Ishmael left the inn, and here he is walking about the street uh directly outside. This is um his says his first daylight stroll in New Bedford. He starts to realize the thing that we posited at the end of the counterpain, which feels like years ago, which is that it's kind of hitting him that in this context, Kuiqueg is not that weird of a person here. Rather, he himself, Ishmael, is like a rookie in this scene, and that he's um unprepared to kind of see such cosmopolitan people, or as he calls them, the queerest-looking nondescripts um as exist here in New Bedford, this um port town, even more so than in Manhattan, uh, which is Broadway, or Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, or Regent Street in London. Um, in summary, we kind of zoom out, and then uh he talks about how the new in towns dress kind of goofy, that the real estate is really expensive because of the whale oil. He gets a lovely passage I particularly like about how the fathers give whales as dowries. And then um, in one of those sort of weird, um, very Melville, almost kind of proto-Victorian things, where it feels like not the narrator, but the author is just kind of leaving us with a hot take about nothing in particular, but he's using like the most lyrical, beautiful language possible. He ends the chapter talking about the ladies of New Bedford and Salem, a point to which we will never really return.

SPEAKER_03 7:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

To uh to our uh the to the to the lesser, I would talk about the beautiful woman of Salem all day. Beautiful woman of Salem, call me. In any case, it's a weird place to end where you look at the place that we started, but that's certainly something that happens in many, many chapters of this book.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

The Salem reference is really interesting, though, because it especially if my edition's notes uh are to be believed, and they're by Herschel Parker, so I assume they can be. Um, because it says it says this tall story about Salem girls is a private joke for Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, who were both Salemites.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

I believe it, yes. One of the things, so we uh we're coming on the heels of just having recorded earlier before this episode a little uh glimpse behind the curtain for our audience of our fantastic Melbourne at the movies uh episode one, which you can find on Patreon. And in that one, notably, the women of New Bedford don't seem to be quite so lovely as we get in this description. Do do we think so?

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Which is not a sin, but is purposeful by our director. You know, he like the opposite was like bring me the 50 most beautiful women you you know, or even the 50 most, you know, just go to like the grocery store and find 50 women. It's like they're dour, they're unsmiling, their way that they're dressed is to just make them look as grim as possible, which is a choice. But literally that is a choice. Yeah, but here they're apparently they're beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Yeah, also it's it's it has to be said that in the film we see them on the day that they go down to the docks to potentially set eyes on their husband's brother's children for the last time.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

So, you know, if I had to go and do that, I don't think I'd look my best either.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Yeah. I look terrible at like the gas station. It's not a, you know, it's not a I'm I'm certainly not condemning the individuals in the story, but you do have to think why these actors, why these extras?

SPEAKER_02 9:55

Counterpoint we get a close-up on the one woman in the crowd who like conspicuously has facial hair.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

And that's her inalienable right as a citizen.

unknown 10:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Good for her. Yeah, yeah. No, Starbucks uh Starbucks wife um in the movie is is quite lovely. So I at least at least we got that. Uh okay, so um get it.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

I only want to see hot women from here on out.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

Hey, look, they're all hot in their own way in that film. That's then you know that's true.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

That's true. Not Houston's strong point, I will say. In any case, everyone looks weird on the street.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

That is true.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

Johnny, what do you think of that?

SPEAKER_00 10:34

What's interesting is that we get this, and again to Meg's point that we are suddenly realizing that Queequeg is not quite as curious and individual as Ishmael initially thought. Suddenly that gets played out on this sort of citywide stage, and we get this enormous kind of panoply and gallery of figures, all of whom exist in complete uh harmony, it seems, with uh well, with with with with the people that Ishmael would think of as looking quote unquote normal. And so it's a nice little uh landbound foretaste of what we're going to get on board the Pequod, which is this extraordinary world stage in miniature. And so, yeah, it's it's a it's a literalization in a certain sense of the expansion of Ishmael's world that we've seen in progress over uh over the previous five chapters.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Yeah, I think that is right. Um, and I think like we really get this like idea of the expansion of Ishmael's like uh conceptual horizons in that first sentence where if I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queekwag circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford. So yeah, I think like you're absolutely like right. Uh very uh critical here is like the growth of Ishmael's uh perceptions as a character or like his understanding of the nautical world. Um what do we think of some of these like uh specific allusions? We do get whopping, which is in your neck of the woods, Johnny. What do you know about whopping? Do you go there frequently?

SPEAKER_00 12:14

I know very little about whopping, which is a great failing on my part. Yeah, I do live in London. Um I I was also we also have a reference to Water Street, uh, which is in Liverpool. I was in Liverpool uh on on tour uh last week. I'm going back there in a couple of weeks. So I'll have to try and I didn't I didn't have the good fortune to go to Water Street when I was there last time. So I'll have to seek it out uh when I'm there next time. I'll try and take a picture of myself on Water Street. Yeah, we'll put it on Instagram. Yeah, that'll be good.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

I think this is a good example of you can sort of see the machinations of Melville trying to get his audience prepared to go on the whaling ship through getting Ishmael ready to go on the whaling ship. You can sort of every once in a while, I think it's useful when you're sort of thinking about writing your own project. Like, why not start 50 pages further in? And his argument is I can't just drop my presumably Anglo reader into a dazzling multicultural crew in the middle of the ocean and have them buy that Ishmael would feel so affectionate towards them or whatever, he thought. Um, that's all speculative of my on my part, but uh of course, but I don't think is wildly off the mark. But rather he is showing us sort of step by step, Ishmael starting out very shocked and and uh surprised by the fact that he is expected to not make a fuss about sharing a bed um with a non-white person. And now he's sort of like, I think this moment is very cinematic. You can sort of imagine him like the doors opening, and he steps out onto and then like the sun is shining, and you can hear the seagulls, and you can see sort of the masts in the background behind the the buildings, and the people on the street are all you know, talking to each other in this uh sort of polyglot you know, fog of language, and then everyone is um not white. And um that that would be a moment of education, cultural sort of education or um re-literacy for Ishmael. It's one for his for Melville's reader as well, which I think is why we're spending the time to do it.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Yeah, and it paves the way beautifully for Midnight Fol'c'sal as well, doesn't it? Where that where what you say you say that we've we see like a wonderfully kind of polyglot community here, although it's a it's actually bereft of dialogue this chapter, but there's all summarized. You can imagine, yeah, you you can imagine the sound of the street. It's it's implied beautifully, and then that actually gets dramatized for us when we're on board the ship. So yeah, I think that's a really lovely read of what we're actually seeing here, and yeah, the sit the the kind of the cinematic quality as well. Maybe it's just because we've just been talking about uh the the Gregory Pope film.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Maybe but I think we've seen the scene in movies a lot, which is when like the Rube goes into the stock market for the first time or her college for the first time, or I've never been in like a thing. There's always a scene where it's like, oh, I'm part of a big machine now, and I'm seeing people in costume I've never seen. They're speaking, even if it's English, it's like a language, uh, you know, a subset of like a pigeon. Yeah, yeah. And so I think I think this is a very familiar scene to readers and watchers of film, TV, books, etc. So I think it's cute to sort of see it here. Um, in this in this proto version of like it's it I think it's winning and sort of affectionate to think of Ishmael with his like jacket looking perhaps like one of these guys who's like, all right, I looked like an idiot, but it's because I didn't have the right pants yet. Give me a couple days to get the pants.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

The only the the closest parallel that's coming to mind, at least the most immediate one, is when Flick the Ant goes to the city in Disney Pixar's A Buzz A Bug's Life. Do you remember that?

SPEAKER_01 15:55

You're so right.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

When he's got his little leaf cap on and the little leaf backpack, and he's looking like a little suburban boy, and then in he goes into the reading. Yeah, exactly. And then what does he find? A lovely ragtag, and I might add queer-coded bunch of insects um who come and and and help him to deal with uh with the with their grasshopper problem.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Am I watching a bug's life later? Two great movies about ants that came out almost concurrently. What a world.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Oh, yes, the then the ants with the Z Calcutta.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

Yeah. And A Bug's Life is uh famously uh a bug retelling of uh Akiro Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which also has a similar kind of scene.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

Oh my goodness. I don't think I I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Oh, yeah, amazing, amazing.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Oh, superb. It's the first film I ever went to see at the cinema. So there we go. A bug slave.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Nice. That's good. Finally, I'm a beautiful butterfly.

SPEAKER_02 17:01

Uh the other thing that we get is sort of like um, well, you know what, you have all these uh crazy things happening in uh London or New York or whatever, but you know, New Bedford's got all that beat because we've got here savages outright, many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

Well, it's becoming quite a recurring Melville tactic that we've seen at work in previous chapters, and we're absolutely gonna see it at work elsewhere, potentially nowhere more so than in The Whiteness of the Whale, where he says, Well, you know about this and you know about this and you know about this thing, but all of this cannot stack up to this thing that I'm describing here. Um, you know, he we even get the phrase, I'm I don't think it comes up in this chapter, but he he even uses phrases like all this and yet, and he he sort of he gives us a whole kind of barrage of stuff that's for us to bring it to mind, and then he says, Okay, but here's what I'm here's how I'm describing is going beyond that.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

Yeah, I think this is kind of a scene that we or a technique that we've seen him use a couple times, which is to list real things and then seem to kind of counterbalance it with something that feels unreal, or is as we we've seen in other places completely made up. So um perhaps it would be more useful to look at the beginning of the third paragraph when he's listing the people from these um like Malaysia or these islands in the South Pacific, um, which are all real except I think the last one.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah, the Brighton are the only ones that are apparently not real.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Not actually something real. I'm if I read this with my mind in August 2026 without looking it up, I don't know what any of these really mean. I can, but just with looking at my eyes, and yet reading a list of examples makes me think that the author knows what they're talking about. Maybe he's made these all up from like Star Wars. That's not true. There's just like, you know, um, they're place names that we wouldn't use now to talk about um people from real islands, and these people are real. But without looking them up, I just go, oh, this author knows what he's talking about. Ishmael knows what he's talking about. This is a cosmopolitan place. I would meet people here that I don't even know the place name of. And that both makes me feel like, oh, I'm kind of uneducated as to the people of the world, which is true. And also Ishmael is contrasting his past and present self as now he knows those names. And back in the day it was just a wash of savages, and he didn't have the language or even the possibly um, you know, desire to pick out, oh, these people are from Malaysia, these people are from Fiji. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

It speaks beautifully to what you were saying earlier, Meg, about Ishmael really strongly serving as a surrogate for us at this point. And yeah, absolutely, we we are, we are, we get this kind of this gatling gun of places kind of fired at us. And yeah, I think the expectation is that we're not going to know where all of these places are, whether it's uh whether it's whopping or you know, whether it's one of the one of the South Sea Islands. I think and I think that's testified to by the fact that uh one of these places is absolutely not real. Like even even the most educated or you know, the most informed person in the world would look at this list and find something unfamiliar. Uh, it's calculated to kind of isolate us in a certain way.

SPEAKER_03 20:31

Yeah, I think that's good.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

Yeah, and I think it speaks to uh uh narrator Ishmael's like later knowledge. So like that list, the the Fijians, uh Tongatabores, uh Aromongoans and uh Panangians and Brigians, like the idea that like Ishmael now can distinguish between these people that like might have uh all kind of blended together maybe in the past. Do you do you get the sense that like uh he's sort of got this mastery of sort of like uh encyclopedic uh raciality, I suppose?

SPEAKER_00 21:02

I think that's probably the case, Tristan. Yeah, and that that resonates quite nicely with something that comes up less uh later in the chapter. We get another classic instance of Ishmael appropriating the status of whaleman for himself, even before the Ishmael to whom the events of the of the narrative are happening has stepped foot on the ship. We get had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. Of course, we have to remember that Ishmael isn't one of those isn't a whaleman at this point. Um so yeah, absolutely, we're getting the the the narrating Ishmael's knowledge is kind of being foregrounded, even as the the continued relative ignorance of the avatar Ishmael who is who's who is being being narrated um is is is being exposed.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

So do you view this as being later narrator ish? Ishmael making the claim of being like talking about us whalemen, or do you think this is uh in the story?

SPEAKER_00 22:06

It's more weighted at least towards the narrating Ishmael, so the the the the sort of the post end of the text Ishmael. Um I think it's interesting that we jump into the the way that even that first sentence is uh is is constructed. If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of Soutlandish and individual as Queequake, he's he's taking us a step back in the narrated Ishmael's experience and saying, well, if I in the past felt that way, imagine my surprise when this thing slightly later happened. Uh and so, even in terms of the the the kind of grammar and syntax of the chapter, I think that it's it's the um it's the retrospective Ishmael that's being given, if not entirely, at least the majority of the um uh of the spotlight here.

SPEAKER_02 23:05

Yeah. I want to dwell for a minute on the so we we've got here, but a new Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners, savages outright, many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. What's our interpretation of uh that? Like, what do you think is meant by yet carry on their bones unholy flesh? I think like the yet there is like like intriguing to me. Um, I I can get okay, like they've got unholy flesh as like a general thing, but like the the yet means that they would lose that quality of having unholy flesh at some point. Like, do we think that's like conversion to Christianity would like r make it so that they're not carrying unholy flesh? Or are they can is it unholy flesh in that they're cannibals and have eaten somebody and on like they've ingested that unholy flesh, and that's the unholy flesh that's being talked about.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think both of those readings can potentially be active at once. I mean, it's it's it's a it could be one of those instances where Melville contrives to have his cake and eat it. I think there's enough ambiguity there to allow both of those to possibly be true. Um something that makes me think that potentially my reading would be more towards the conversion reading, is that this chapter occurs only a few chapters before the Ramadan, which is where we will get very much the narrated Ishmael lecturing Kuiqueg on quote unquote pagan Ramadans and fasting. Um so that would be that's my instinctive thought on that, though I don't know, maybe maybe Meg feels differently.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

I think that sounds right. I think for me it means that they're non-Christian. Um and you can be, I think you might be able to be non-Christian and not a savage in this world, but um pretty much it seems like that's the at least in from what Ishmael is able to articulate in New Bedford, you're it's kind of either or. Um, especially when you're walking around and haven't met anyone yet. Yeah, I think it's uh it also could just be when the was like, you know, it's a cool last line. And it, you know, do we need to look at it? Of course, every line you can look at it as closely as you want, but I think it's uh it's kind of just a cool thing to say, carry on their bones unholy flesh. I think, yeah, if uh for me it's it means that they have not converted to Christianity and are perhaps repeatedly having to resist the advances, as it were, uh, in order to uh get their paychecks, but that they uh resolutely maintain their status of not converting.

SPEAKER_02 25:45

Yeah. So there's a lot of comedies this chapter. I mean, I think it so like we've been talking a lot about the Fijians and the cannibals and the unholy flesh, but what's given to us as uh more curious and certainly more comical are the uh green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all a thirst for gain and glory in the fisheries.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Well, here we return, actually, don't we, to something that we were picking up on when we were talking about breakfast, because we get a return of the image of the Green Mountains, and we were talking about what greenness might mean in the context of this text. And of course, Ishmael character wants to insist that he's not green in the sense that he's not inexperienced, so it's one of those things that oh my goodness, whatever it means, Melville needs us to see it. Uh, you know, we're we're we're looking. I mean, in my edition, the same the the image comes up on one page and then the next. So, you know, it's such a the fact that this image is being reused within the cot within the space of a single page is really, really striking.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

I like how it's using the costume as a way to illustrate incompetence that he comes in this this um the country bred the downright bumpkin dandy, which is a great turn of phrase. Oh, yeah. Comes in and he's like, I'm going to be a whaler. I love that phrase. And gets the costume of whaling. It's sort of picturesque, uh stereotypical, you know. Uh you think the, you know, the the leather is fresh, you know, fresh leather, that's a thing. But he gets like suspenders and like the buttons all done correctly. And then Melville has whoever's narrating this chapter. He's like the button that's gonna, they're gonna break as soon as you're actually in a storm. All this nice stuff that you've got isn't gonna work because for some reason the um trappings of the job are not actually the equipment, and the way that you're gonna dress after you've done the thing is wildly different than the costume that you wore before. So perhaps sort of he's using um coming to town with certain sort of all your like, oh, I'm gonna be a thing, and um sort of the Halloween costume that you get is not the real doctor's coat, not the real fireman's jacket. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 28:09

Yeah, there's the sense that they've got all the gear and no idea.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Um, and that that's yeah, that that's just so comically dangerous, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. And they're actually set in really strong contrast, aren't they, with uh Ishmael's drastic under preparations for the trip with just the two shirts in the carpet bag.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

And Quequeg's weird hodgepodge of like the hat and the jacket and the thing.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Yeah, but Quequeg's done this loads of times before, so he knows what he works.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

So he knows what works.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

Yeah. No, so when I read that section, uh, due to my unfamiliarity with like uh like the the wardrobe, I'm I'm almost uh is does this wardrobe make sense? Like, do we do we know like uh whether this this combination of so like he wears a beaver hat and a swallow-tailed coat girdle with a sailor belt and a sheath knife? The sheath knife and the beaver hat seem to be practical enough. I don't know about the swallow-tailed coat though. Do we know if the swallow-tailed coat makes sense with the the sailor wardrobe or wearing a southwester and a bombazine cloak?

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Gosh. Well, I think well Quequegue that would work. First of all, Quequak has a beaver hat, doesn't he? So so that so far so good. Yes, beaver hats good. Um I'm not completely sure what a bombasine cloak is, I have to say. Does does Parker offer us anything?

SPEAKER_02 29:32

A bombasine cloak is a historical outer garment made from bombasine, a heavy twilled fabric traditionally woven with a silk warp and a wort worsted wool weft, usually dyed a deep matte black. These cloaks were most popular during the Victorian era as a formal morning wear.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

So they're heavy and not at all conducive to taking care of your ship during a storm. Yeah. It's gonna get wet.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

It's gonna get wet. And so a salwester is like a it is a is a uh an impermeable hat, isn't it? So interesting that two different kinds of hat seem to be part of the uniform.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Yeah. Um, so I I think my favorite line from this chapter, and it's like been stuck in my head, it's all my passwords. Oh, good. So please don't hack me. But is downright bumpkin dandy. I mean I love that.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

One thing that I have just written in the margins next to that paragraph is tag yourselves. Yeah, uh town bred dandy, country bred dandy, or downright bumpkin dandy. Everyone is one. Every friendship group has one of these, and if you think that you they don't, then you are that one. I think is probably how it goes. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 30:41

All right, so which one are you? Who's who's our townbred dandy?

SPEAKER_01 30:44

I don't think it's most of us are townbred. Suburbs that would be more like the town. All right, yeah. A town bred dandy with nice gloves.

SPEAKER_02 30:53

Yeah, I'm I'm definitely an eggurbs.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

Well, all right. I'll uh I'll I'll volunteer as tribute as the podcast downright bumpkin dandy.

SPEAKER_01 31:03

I don't think you can have a London zip code and and do that. True, although I wasn't born in London, so maybe you did come all naive and you were wearing last season's shoes. Yeah. No one uses those anyway.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

Um but so yeah, like the downright bumpkin dandy, like we we get this like interesting description, and it kind of plays into like what we were talking about um for a couple chapters now. Is uh so he in the dog days will mow his two acres in a buck in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands, which I think is an interesting. Like we get we get again like this reference to complexion, uh, and this reference as it relates to um nautical know-how or like being like a uh you know, like a real sailor is going to be like tanned. And so the downright bumpkin dandy, who's now coming, is this comical figure who like seems to be worried about tanning, even though he's trying to go on the whale ship.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Yes, and it's interesting that we get this specific reference to wanting to protect their hands, knowing that we get a really significant chapter in quite a few chapters time, a squeeze of the hand, which is one of the mo most, possibly the most queer-coded chapter in the entire text. And we know that everyone has to be involved in that process, and you cannot be wearing gloves for it.

SPEAKER_02 32:32

Yeah, or even like uh um, I'm going to try to use a literary term, and I'll let you correct me when I'm getting this. Is metonymy like the part for the whole? Which one's the part for the whole?

SPEAKER_00 32:45

So you've got met you've got metonymy and you've got synecdochy.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

Okay. So the the hand, like a ship's hand, it refers to the person, right? Uh like so the figure's hand.

SPEAKER_00 32:56

That's uh that is, Meg, correct me if I'm wrong, that's synecdoche, right? Whereas a metonym is uh, for example, um, Washington has yet to comment on this. It doesn't mean that that that's a metonym, whereas uh yes, uh synecdoche is is is referring to a part as the whole.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

Yeah, so the the our downright country uh dan our downright bumpkin dandy, excuse me, um is afraid to tan his hands, the hands being like the synecdochy for the sailor.

SPEAKER_00 33:24

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

Yeah, that would be like or as Johnny would say, is it Downing Street is the it means the government. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

That's right. Precisely, precisely.

SPEAKER_01 33:37

I think this is funny. Think we think it's such a it's almost like a trope now of like when the the youth, the mild youth comes to town and wants to get a job, and there's always the scene of like the overseer who's like, Let me see your hands. And they're always like Lily White, and he's like, These are a woman's hands. They've never seen work, and he's like ashamed, and but all the veterans are like all grizzled. Um, there's a great scene in Kitchen Confidential, which I'm trying to finish so I can go see Tony, um, where he burns his hand on like a skillet or something, and he like very meekly is like, Does anyone have a band-aid? And they're like, You idiot, look at my hands. And they're like heinous and like, you know, wrapped in scars and like unhealed, you know, it's just like it's disgusting. But yeah, to you, we we've talked about skin a lot, but I think it's really interesting here that preserving the hands is singled out um as um a microcosm of the body as the whole, as the thing that learns to do the task by way of like maturing or transfiguring in some way. Um, I don't know if, yeah, I was I don't know if we get hands again quite so intimately until that chapter. Although that chapter is incredibly intimate, but yeah, hand meaning as sort of the stand-in for the body, and then the body being a stand-in also for like the spirit of the whaler. We sort of get smaller and smaller. And I think it makes sense that the hand is going to be the thing that they that he would focus on.

SPEAKER_02 35:07

Yeah. And we had it in our interview uh with Dr. Hester Blum. Uh yeah, we get um with the the universal thump is passed around, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder blades and be content. Um I I did get to see uh a picture of her tattoo. It came out very good with all the hands pointing. Um yeah, I like that um another great reference, like you're talking about, Meg, uh, is in Jaws, where uh uh Quint asks to see uh the marine biologists' hands and calls them, oh, these are money counting hands.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

It's a great in-crowd thing. Like it's a way to sort of, I don't know if gatekeep is the right word here, but like to tell a country rube is someone whose hands are clean, the way that um women would have protected their hands to show that they didn't work. It's like something that would have to be beaten out of this country guy before he was actually not just wearing a costume, but having pants that like didn't disintegrate after a storm. Another metaphor for that is that he's like developing physical calluses.

SPEAKER_02 36:14

Yeah, and specifically like a country dandy, right? Like I think like normally when we think of like a country person, like they have the rustic hands.

SPEAKER_01 36:22

Uh, but like the the country dandy because a dandy is someone fussy with their clothes, like not just oh, I want to have nice clothes. It's like yeah, it's uh it's a more extreme term. So he's saying, again, yeah, we're kind of thinking of a country person, perhaps to also use sort of unfair or unkind stereotypes as someone who has like worked the field and his hands would be already seasoned. But saying a country dandy is someone who might even more than a city dandy want to distance himself from the people who worked in his house, some of whom may not have been paid. You know what I'm saying? So, like that person wearing gloves might even be more um neurotic about not tanning to show how much he doesn't do any field work.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

Yeah, no, I like that. It makes me think of that lovely exchange between Touchstone and Corin in As You Like It, which is the Shakespeare's great court versus country play. And you you know, you get the kind of characters that are often played as kind of court dandies having to kind of take to the take to the um to the forest of Arden. And there is a whole exchange about well, why why you don't kiss hands in the country in that kind of you know that that kind of courtly way. And Corin says, well, they are often tarred over with the surgery of our sheep. And would you have us kiss tar? Like it's it's like that there's a very there's a practical sense to the to to to to what to to like what why we do not why why people who are not of the town or of the court use their hands they have to use their hands in very, very different ways. And so the the kind of the semantics of of of of of of the hand and the kind of the the that all of that kind of thing is completely negated. And a similar thing is going on here with our yeah, with our with our dandy figure trying to protect his hands j uh while going to sea.

SPEAKER_02 38:12

Um so moving on into the description of New Bedford, I think we have like a very interesting description of New Bedford um as this place that is like has this wealth to it, uh, but you wouldn't like know it from like the place itself or like the natural resources like evident in the place itself. Um we get this uh it is a land of oil, true enough, but not like Canaan, a land also of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk, nor in the springtime do they pave them with fresh eggs, which I think is a very interesting image. I'm curious. Do we have any sort of sense that that's like any sort of allusion to anything? Um it seems like an odd thing to do, to pave the streets with fresh eggs. Well, but it's an interesting turn of phrase.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

People have been doing it during the heat wave in the UK, just cracking eggs on the streets and frying them. So I mean that's that's it's remarkably prescient as a as an image. But no, I don't know of any um kind of intertextual reference. There may well be one.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

No, I like it though, it's a fun one.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

What's lovely in in part about it, and it's occurring to me just hearing you read that, Tristan, is once again we have something, or in this case somewhere, described predominantly in terms of what it isn't. It's not like Canaan. The streets do not run with milk, nor in the springtime do they pave them with fresh eggs. And then he goes on to tell us what it is. And this happens time and time again. It's so, so interesting as a recurring technique.

SPEAKER_02 39:37

Yeah. And I think it really like uh uh points to the um principal nature of like whaling to New Bedford that like basically like uh we get after that, yet, in spite of all this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses, parks, and gardens more opulent than in New Bedford. Whence came they? How planted upon this once scraggy scoria? Scraggy Scoria is a great phrase as well of a country. But yeah, like uh the setting it up as a place that can like really only exist in this level of opulence by the exploitation of ocean resources, I think is like interesting.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Yeah, and then he goes on in the following paragraph to answer those questions, if only metaphorically. Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes, all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. And so, and that resonates really interesting, interestingly, with something that came up in the previous chapter. We I think we we even spoke about the fact that in that chapter there was a strong sense of the ship as an artificial land. And here it seems to me that the opposite is happening, right? The inhabited human world here is metaphorically of the water, yeah. Um and potentially it's even a that that there's even a suggestion that we as a global society, and even actually as biological beings, right, are in a very literal sense, we are ontologically of the water. And there's a sense here that this kind of um yeah, this landbound space is in some measure i its existence depends on the water in more ways than one.

SPEAKER_02 41:27

Yeah, it's an interesting passage to to read. So um our listeners may not know this because it'll be a little bit it'll be a little bit before you hear this, but uh uh Johnny recorded a fantastic uh guest interview episode with Dr. Steve Mentz, where a lot of this sort of stuck stuff gets talked about. But I think it's a very interesting one that uh that lends itself to sort of a blue humanities uh uh approach, like this particular passage. We're thinking about like New Bedford as a space.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

Yeah, I think it does. I think you're absolutely right. Um, especially in in terms of the ways that it seems to blur the boundaries between the land and the sea and what life means in between those two spaces, whether whether those two spaces are actually separable things. I think there's there's a suggestion here that in some way they're not.

SPEAKER_02 42:14

Yeah. Um, so right after the part that you quoted, we get this uh can uh Herr Alexander perform a feat like that? Did y'all like uh do any digging onto this character? Uh yeah, he was a magician.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

A German magician.

SPEAKER_02 42:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

So it's like he's saying, Can David Blaine do this? To which I can only say no. I think there's a limit to what he can do. Yeah, I think that's funny. That's really funny.

SPEAKER_02 42:42

Oh do we know of any great tricks that uh Herr Alexander performed?

SPEAKER_00 42:47

No, I I I I'm afraid I don't.

SPEAKER_01 42:50

His name is Alexander Heimger? German listeners. Sorry. What do you do with the U when it's got the umlaut on top of it? What do you do with that vowel in your throat?

SPEAKER_03 43:03

Which letter?

SPEAKER_01 43:05

It's heim and then burger, but the U has the umlaut on it. So I think you do something interesting.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

Burger.

SPEAKER_01 43:13

Heim, there you go. That's a German. Used to be a magician. Yeah, what were mag what were magic tricks in like 1840? What do we want to say? Could we do like stage illusions like that thing with like the mirror, and you could put sort of like the haunted mansion picture on like glass? Could we do that then?

SPEAKER_02 43:33

Okay, so I've got uh I found it on Wikipedia, uh typical uh Herman uh show. Um okay, so the following is a description of a typical Herman show as seen through the eyes of a spectator. After much fanfare from the orchestra, Herman entered. He was decked out in black velvet evening clothes with britches. He wore the typical top hat of the day and white gloves. The audience applauded, he bowed and smiled. He took off his gloves and made them vanish between his hands. Herman presented two metal cones and a beautiful Beautifully decorated brass vase. He opened the lid on the vase and showed a bag of rice. All items were examined by spectators. Upon return of the items, Herman poured the rice into the vase and placed lid on it. He went to the audience, walked over to a bearded gentleman, and borrowed his hat. He reached over to the gentleman's beer to produce an orange from it. Thank you. Just what I needed for the trick.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

I mean, I can't do any of these things either. But yeah, sort of sounds like maybe what we would come up with with like, it's in this hand and it's on that side of the table, and then I'm making a rose appear. Cool. So no, I don't think he would be able to bring houses up from the bottom of the seat.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

No. Steal his look, though. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 44:38

It sounds very kind of tuxedo mask-esque.

SPEAKER_00 44:41

Yeah. A top hat of the period and a velvet cape. Yes, please.

SPEAKER_01 44:45

Let's go. Ooh. Yeah, that's distinctive. That's distinctive. Yeah, that is a funny shout out to a topical personality.

SPEAKER_00 44:54

Yeah, and uh yeah, but I I think you're right, Meg. Slight of hand tricks do not New Bedford pull from the ocean.

SPEAKER_03 45:01

No, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 45:03

No, no. Um, so I I do like also, so moving on from there, uh, I I love the the detail about fathers giving whales for dowers and uh especially like portion off their nieces with a few porpoises apiece. There's a lovely alliteration to that.

SPEAKER_00 45:17

That's wonderful. Yeah, it's so beautifully constructed that sentence.

SPEAKER_02 45:21

And then another thing that I like, you know, uh uh living in the day of uh being able to have lights on in your house without like burning something, uh at least like not immediately, like in your house in order to have that light. Um, the idea of like opulent wealth being a product of being able to like continually have light into the evening, uh like in kind of like uh uh uh wastefully so or like uh exuberantly so. Like when we get this, you must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding, for they say they have reservoirs of oil in every house that every night recklessly burn their lengths and spermaceti candles.

SPEAKER_00 45:59

Yeah, of course. And what we're getting there, yeah, you're right. It is it is conspicuous and needless opulence at the expense of the whale.

SPEAKER_02 46:07

Uh yeah, at the expense of the whale. Um, and then like, yeah, just like thinking about like access to more lighted time as like being like a uh something that like really like requires a large amount of wealth to do. It's like kind of I don't know, something I don't think about much in my day-to-day life, but like kind of the the the rationale behind like the whole industry is extending the day basically into the night.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

Yeah, and and it's it's another way in which light permeates the text as well. It becomes quite a significant motif. And of course, in part that's motivated by the fact that the sperm whale that is hunted so predominantly in the text is a source of light when when the oil is burned. But then we think think ahead to, for example, to to the triworks, uh, where we where we get this in this huge kind of pyrotechnic kind of display. This is it's it's an early instance of the way in which kind of yeah, burning and kind of flame is going to be used to great effect later on in the text as well. And again, also very, very explicitly linked to the destruction of the body of Wales.

SPEAKER_01 47:15

I think that yeah, that I think it seems like a momentum in this in these final paragraphs is the sort of unnatural beauty of the that the town is able to use through the swell, that they can extend light past the darkness. And that I think if I'm understanding this paragraph, um that New Bedford uh has created this flowery landscape where there was not one before, the scraggy scoria of of sort of the New England landscape, they have transformed it because the wealthy people there would prefer it to look like this. So it the language is kind to the people. You know, he's not saying that these are um wasteful, but Johnny, as you've just said, that is our that's our I think the correct interpretation is we're supposed to sort of take a step back and then say, should we be? You know, it it I mean it's I think it could be yes, yeah. I think the sort of the unnaturality that the people in the town are able to create is a way to um appreciate how crazy rich they are, that they can change, um, that they can bring these towns out from the ocean.

SPEAKER_00 48:31

And it's and it's interesting actually, with in in the light of what you've just said, that that's actually that some of this process of establishing and developing and and beautifying the space, it it's framed in terms of artistic creation. So omnipotent is art, which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's final day. There's almost a sense there's like a mini renaissance that's happened here that they've channelled some of this money generated by really, really destructive means in order to create uh uh uh art. It's really, really fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 49:12

Yeah, another interpretation there too is like the artificiality of the place where like so uh this place so there's the these barren refused rocks that like God cast aside at uh creation's final day. And like this feels like a very uh like the the whole last few paragraphs is like kind of how naturally like bereft of like wealth or like means of sustaining oneself, this place is um that's sort of like almost caught like uh against like what might have been the will of God for this place is like transformed nonetheless in a way that seems like unstable.

SPEAKER_00 49:46

Yeah, and and therefore connecting the the business of wailing to transgression in quite an explicit way, right?

SPEAKER_02 49:54

Yeah, and I think we get in a later chapter, uh Starbuck talk about it's like so like we'll meet Starbuck later, and he talks about um like the like kind of Christian nature of wailing, where like you're uh slaying these Leviathans of the deep to create light. And like I think there's an interesting like religious angle to it where um, and we'll we're we'll we'll get to this a lot when we have our upcoming uh inscrutable malice interview, uh, but like one of the means by which like both God the God of the Old Testament, but like especially like the related myths of the ancient Near East like creates the world is through conflict with a uh a chaos monster of the sea. But the other way that God creates the world in the uh Bible is like starts by saying let there be light. And so like we have in slaying the whale in order to create light, like we have this like kind of like these dual levels of like mythological creation, it like infused in one thing. That's great.

SPEAKER_00 50:53

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

SPEAKER_02 50:58

Um and maybe like to wrap this up, uh one of the things that like to me is like a a fascinating aspect of attraction that we get in this last paragraph is uh when uh he talks about the the young, like the the musk, this like the sweet musk that the young girls of Salem breathe. And like that as being this alluring thing, which I don't know if in our our 21st century society, like we have the same sort of like connotations of attraction as it relates to the breath and the smell of the breath. I'm curious what y'all's interpretation of this is.

SPEAKER_00 51:38

So is the sense there in that phrase? So elsewhere match that bloom of theirs you cannot save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles offshore. Is there the sense that that that they are breathe they are exhaling and the sweetness of that breath is i i i i i is is being picked up miles and miles offshore? Well, that's really interesting then to tie back to the previous chapter where Ishmael is going off on the musk of the sailors that he smells at breakfast in the spower in. So I think any um any attribute that we allow the these these Salem girls to have here, we also actually have to allow to though that group of men as well. That that uh well formerly eruption eruption of bears and then the then the bashful bears.

SPEAKER_01 52:28

It's uh yeah, I agree it would be a a word that would take a little more um zhuzing to sound sexy. Uh I mean, musk is like an animal, and it's certainly something that we we still want in our the fragrances that we buy. But I think maybe in the time between now and then it has gotten connotations that make it kind of odd to read that sentence. I agree, it's sort of upon reading them like the musk. Shouldn't it be? I don't know, that's that seems like heavier and it's got like sweat and kind of the sort of like animal fur smell. Um than um I would necessarily have instinctively said, were I to describe the breath of like a beautiful, sort of like young virgin waiting for her betrothed to come back would necessarily describe that word? Maybe not, but it might just be Melville being Melville. This kind of just like putting a strange um or a seemingly inorganic comparison just to make us think about connections or like how the metaphor is working or the natural world or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 53:34

Yeah, I do know uh so a near contemporary of Melville, uh Napoleon, uh, in one of his letters to Josephine, uh, in being like uh kind of erotically excited to see her again, like instructs her not to wash up because like there's something about like the the like kind of the natural smell of her that like is so exciting to be.

SPEAKER_01 53:53

I think Freud did that too. But he was a certified freak seven days a week. So like could we be using, I don't know, is that what Melville wanted to say? Maybe he wasn't being that sexy, but maybe he was. Yeah, it's because he was talking about the Hawthorns in this paragraph.

SPEAKER_00 54:09

I think that's possibly part of it. That's true, too.

SPEAKER_01 54:11

He was just in a friskier frame of mind.

SPEAKER_02 54:14

Could be, and also Salem indelibly has the connection to like for better or for worse, to witches. So yeah, they could be they could be bewitching these sailors.

SPEAKER_03 54:23

We're always interesting, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:25

Anyway, well, this has been a fun chapter. Um, and we'll I think it's a good place to end it as well. But next time, our next chapter, we start with the chapel, and then we're going to be going we're going to be.

SPEAKER_01 54:39

We will be there for about a month. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 54:41

It's gonna be a lot of fun. Uh I will have a great time, I assure you. Jesus had the entire time.

SPEAKER_00 54:49

I will worship like a dog at the shrine of Father Mapple. You've been listening to the Pequod Pod with Tristan Bavel Marquise, Meg Fanscher, and Johnny Wiles. Our music is by Lost in the Loop with sound engineering by Lauren Aiton. The show's artwork is by Delaney Garrett, and Tristan is on The Synths. We want to say a big thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. You can join them over at patreon.com forward slash pequodpod for bonus content and for opportunities to help us keep the show running in ship-shaped condition. Ratings and reviews also really help us out, so if you enjoy the show, please do express your thoughts and metaphysical yearnings in the review section wherever you're listening to the show. Tell your friends, tell your foes, tell the white whale on whom you're monomaniacally urged to be revenged. It all helps.