Moby Dick

In Chapter 48, The First Lowering, Flask stands on Daggoo’s shoulders. A momentous, earth-shattering occasion. Well, almost. It depends on how deeply we read into the event. Interpretations could run the gamut, anywhere from “Melville is showing that blacks can be used anywhere for anything!” to  “this is a metaphor for black superiority.” In between these extremes, we stumble upon the idea that this episode is a metaphor for American slavery. Several quotes from the chapter evidence this viewpoint, the first of which is an exchange between Daggoo and Flask:

“Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”

“That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet taller.”, [Herman Melville, Moby Dick]

How greedy! Little flask here gets a combined height of well over eleven feet, and yet he wants fifty more. One need not delve too deeply to see how this compares to American slavery. Here, an empowered yet diversely inferior white authority figure is using a black for his own ends, and then simply asks for more. Just as blacks were driven harder and harder in the South, more and more is asked of Daggoo without reward (though he is thanked at least). One could argue that Flask is only joking, but is it not so that there is a little truth behind every joke?

Melville points out this “poetic injustice” a few pages later when he writes that

…for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. [Herman Melville, Moby Dick]

Daggoo is a paragon of physical prowess. His muscles work in perfect conjunction, enabling him to remain stable as he supports a white man in a rocking boat. Unless my high school education has misguided me, I recall that a rocking boat was a metaphor for prewar America. Their differences irreconcilable, abolitionists and slave-owners at every moment risked capsizing the boat, or driving the country to war. In the middle stands the innocent negro, who, despite turbulent waters, remains steady and, ironically, it is this strength that made slavery so profitable and thus worth fighting for. Here Melville is praising blacks for their strength and fortitude, a trend he continues onto the next page:

So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that. [Herman Melville, Moby Dick]

This passage reminds me of the negro gospels African slaves sang in the American South. The tone is one of resilience. It seems to say “You can try to destroy us, but we’re here to stay.” Interestingly, whites are the vain ones while blacks are the earth—immortal, beautiful, and giving. In the end, Melville implies, cream rises to the top and, someday, they will be our equals.

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