The American customs official, novelist, and sporting goods store founder Herman Melville is best known today as the author of the weighty Moby Dick, a book that intimidates many readers by its length, its dense allegory, and its highly stylized language. It is, as a critic wrote in The Old Yorker in 1855, “oft begun, rare finished.”
This is unfortunate. A close reading reveals that Melville has a mischievous and irrepressible sense of fun which bubbles up from the depths throughout Moby Dick. Here, for example, is an extended passage concerning the penis of the sperm whale, the “grandissimus” (as it was called for obvious reasons.) It concludes with a charming tableau of maritime merriment and, if you look carefully, a delightful anti-Papist play-on-words.
From Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
“Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemising of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone, — longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, king Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the first book of Kings.
“Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as to almost double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
“That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on Bible leaves; what a candidate for an arch-bishoprick, what a lad for a pope were this mincer!”
The Old Yorker 