Moby Dick

In Chapter 90, “Heads or Tails,” the issue of labor and just rewards comes up in a conversation between “a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman” and some mariners who have successfully hunted down a whale. The mariners, naturally, believe the whale to be theirs, as they did all the work in catching and killing it. However, the aforementioned “charitable gentleman” claims that the whale belongs to the Lord Warden, or the Duke, as the whale was caught in his territory. In the conversation that ensues, to every question that the mariners ask about such an apparently unjust seizure, the charitable gentleman replies simply, “It is his” (“his” referring to the Lord Warden). The mariners cannot possibly argue with this repeated response. There is no room for logical discussion where such talk is employed.
The charitable gentleman’s “logic” does, however, line up with the kind used to justify slavery. Why must a man toil in the fields all day and reap not the benefits of his labors? Because he belongs to another man. Why must this man, if he escapes his unrewarded toil, be brought back to his owner under the penalty of the law? Because he is his. To most Americans at the time of Melville’s composing of Moby Dick, this so-called logic did not seem so ridiculous and unfair. Melville exposes the absurdity of slavery through the mariners who work so hard to secure a whale and have to give it up to someone much better off right after, as if they had simply plucked the fish out of the water on a whim. After reaching Chapter 90 in Moby Dick, readers are well acquainted with just how difficult it is to trap a whale. Melville has prepared them to receive this story with indignation and disgust.
Melville’s choice of “bad guy” in this anecdote appears counterintuitive. Why would a “very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman” behave so ignorantly, un-Christianly, and uncharitably? Clearly Melville employs some sarcasm, here, as he does often throughout the novel, but at the same time he could have easily believed such a gentleman to behave so poorly. Like I said, most Americans did not question slavery in the time of Moby Dick. In his portrait of the “bad guy,” Melville illustrates that even the most sensible, well-intentioned people are susceptible to cruel institutions. It does not take an obvious villain to enact a crime. Melville also reveals his skepticism of religion, here, showing that “Christian” can be an empty label, as most slave owners of his time were, indeed, “good Christians.”
This passage in the novel further exposes Melville’s idea of bad government/laws in that the mariners do not even know who the Lord Warden is, at first. This guy has the power to take their whale, yet he remains a stranger to them. This removal, like the charitable gentleman’s repeated insistence that the whale is the Lord Warden’s, does not allow for political debate. Melville has got a recurring them going in which problems arise from the lack of communication and cooperation between the “people” and the “government,” which I think I mentioned in my last post. As the Bible tells us and Melville repeats, all Kings do bad things.

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