Moby Dick

…at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles (130).

This excerpt clearly relates to the idea of American slavery, as Melville presents the idea of the well-oiled American machine as one operated by “native” Americans (a term that did not refer to Melville’s conception of the “Indian”) and fueled by the physically stronger outsiders. Towards the end of the passage, he almost directly refers to slavery in his mention of “the engineering forces employed in the construction of American Canals and Railroads,” many of whom were, in one sense of the word, not employed at all.
I instantly picked this passage out as a case of Melville using sarcasm to get across his anti-slavery message. Though he presents (what I assume to be) a truth about many American industries, he follows it up with a tongue-in-cheek explanation, relying on qualifiers such as “liberally” and “generously” to describe collective human behavior. He presents the idea as if civilized, American born white men all have such excessive stores of brainpower to spread over the workings of the savage brutes of foreign lands, as if the Americans are doing everyone else a big favor by bestowing their vast knowledge upon the others. Melville mocks the imperialist attitude that states, The men of our country know best. Then, in using “generously” to describe the “supplying” of the non-Americans’ brawn, Melville pokes fun at the idea that those forced to work for the white men do it out of their own beneficent spirits. The whole sentence creates this artificial atmosphere of the master and the worker combining all of their efforts for the benefit of the other. It’s as if a master says of his slave, “So-and-so was kind enough to pick all this cotton for me on the plantation today, weren’t you, So-and-so,” as the slave stands by with a big grin and a thumbs up. “Only because you told me where to pick, Master.”
Perhaps, though, I am wrong. Maybe Melville is being heartfelt in this passage, as a mere product of his times. In fact, the picture that Melville depicts seems to be that of the Pequod, where the brutish and foreign harpooners seem to get on quite will with the ship’s American born crew.

And since this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooner, who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy and friendliness… (129)

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