Moby Dick

As I slaved over my thesis for the past few weeks, I came across some interesting information that made me stop and re-imagine the novel. My thesis is on Matthew Vassar’s brewery, and while looking for some of the ways in which he diversified his investments, I found that he was a founding partner in the “Poughkeepsie Whaling Company,” incorporated on April 20, 1832. In fact, a year later a second, rival whaling company was founded, and during this period whaling ships were based up and down the Hudson River. One of the first ventures for the whaling company was to send a ship on a four year cruise, where, unlike the crew in Moby Dick, they mutinied and executed the captain. The industry did not last particularly long in Poughkeepsie, about a decade, but this got me thinking.

The beginning of the book places so much emphasis on Nantucket, and throughout the rest of the novel it shows up again and again. Melville obviously chose to begin his novel there because of how dependent it is on whaling, but what if he had chosen Poughkeepsie, or another town where whaling wasn’t the center of the universe but just another industry where businessmen were trying to make money? Would the crew be made up of similar people, or would there be mostly non-whalers, locals who were looking for a job and found one aboard a ship. There is no more information about the mutiny mentioned above, but after reading Moby Dick I can’t really imagine anything more than the captain’s insanity driving the crew to action. For our dear Founder, however, it just meant one failed investment among several very, very successful ones.

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