Jan 31 2010
Nantucket and It’s reliance on the Sea
As I was reading the beginning parts of Moby Dick, one of the things that occurred to me was the utter reliance that these sailing towns seem to have on the sea. These ports and islands rely on the ocean for their economy, food, light and most everything else they need. This then slips into everything that they do. While in New Bedford we can see this through the decorations at the inn and even the sermon given at the church. Most of the people who visit this church are also effected by the sea. They are all sailors or family members of sailors. As much as we see this connection to the sea in New Bedford, I believe that the chapter that describes Nantucket is the best example of how Melville sets up a relationship between Whaling towns and their reliance on the environment that the ocean presents them with.
The first thing that we learn about Nantucket is that it is completely covered in sand. This poses a problem for people who live here in terms of making a living. If you live in a place where grass and trees are so scarce that people “plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time,” you can not expect to farm as a way of life. According to the Native American tale that Ishmeal tells us, the people who first lived on this island began by digging for clams and then soon started fishing. They worked their way up until they finally began hunting whales.
This kind of adaptation to your surroundings is something that gets talked about a lot in American history. The way that people from another country adapted to the new conditions around them is one way of studying regional differences within the United States. This can be seen especially in the ways that we study the West and the adaption of living in an arid climate. This adaptation and rugged determination to live in places that may not be easy to live has been pointed at as a source of the “American character” in the West. Some say that this kind of adaption however could be going too far in some cases. In the West we can see problems arising now in water supplies. As we now know in the case of whaling, people had created an industry that was eventually extremely distructive to the living environment in the ocean. By creating a way for the human population to live, there was an Environmental cost.
I am curious to see as the book goes on how Melville adresses this problem. You can clearly see that he is aware that this connection to the environment exists very strongly between sailing towns and the sea. However, I do not think that I have see a strong opinion emerge just yet.
One Response to “Nantucket and It’s reliance on the Sea”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Erin, I like your close reading of the part of the novel where Melville talks about Nantucket, and how nature and profession (in this case, whaling), seem interdependent there. It seems as though there is a kind of predestined fate at work in Nantucket: an island covered with sand must create whalers! I think you’re right, too, to connect Melvilles fascination with a place like Nantucket (or New Bedford) to his general fascination with environment and its impact on people. In future posts, though, try not to make too many generalizations — talking about how adaptation to one’s surroundings is a recurrent theme of American history is to set yourself up for a big job! You can’t possibly, in a blog post, explore these big themes, so stick to the text as closely as you can.