Link http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/270 ... m#2HCH0024



A butcher has lower social status than a doctor, but Melville points out that soldiers are butchers with higher status than whalers, and also there is money in it.

Melville's advocacy of whale hunting as a force for world peace, discovery and democracy is at least based on historical fact.

And I cannot fail to include this intriguing comment.



In Melville's day it was still hoped that the Australian desert would prove a new Eden, despite his mention of our "shores as pestiferously barbarous". Dampier landed in the west in 1699 and was partly responsible for the pestiferous image.

In declaring himself "ready to shiver fifty lances" with any who question the nobility of whaling, Melville pays homage to another great chronicler, Cervantes.

Recalling all the literary mentions of the dignity and grandeur of whaling, Melville concludes that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard."

I agree Melville lectures rather too much sometimes. But did he ever go whaling? I get confused between Melville and Ismaela. He consistently talks of ‘we whalemen’ but Ismaela has never been whaling before. ‘…for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard’.