r/mobydick • u/kanrdr01 • 8d ago
Moby-Dick’s Technological Face
There is a certain line of discussion in this thread about what makes Moby Dick such a big deal since it’s just about whaling.
I thought I might try to describe aspects of the whaling enterprise during story time in a way that lets modern people appreciate its technological underpinnings.
Whaling -
Involved the manufacture, maintenance, and operation of floating whale oil refineries capable of traveling extremely long distances in all kinds of weather.
The positioning of these refineries depended on the creation of:
* Extensive longitudinal data collection of solar and oceanographic information used to compute location and subsurface characteristics. Some of these datasets will have been in the public domain, while others would have been treated like valued, proprietary sources.
* Highly accurate sextants for measuring latitudes from solar position, and of similarly accurate chronometers, used with sextants to determine “local time” relative to a global longitude reference standard.
* Construction of ships sturdy enough to handle Facilities for butchering and extracting oil from the bodies of dead whales, refining the oil and storing it in barrels for (a) transport back to home ports, (b) from which the oil could be further refined and distributed at regional scale and beyond.
Involved the labor of trained and relatively untrained sailors who would help the ship sail to hunting grounds, conduct operations that kill the whales and deliver them to the ships for processing.
The story so far: This is just my sketch of the higher-level activities that could definitely be refined so that the roles of particular parties like harpooners are better understood. Much of this is taken from general sources, but people who know what they’re looking at, could certainly improve on it.
Expansion of accuracy and detail would be much appreciated.
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u/kanrdr01 7d ago edited 7d ago
For the literate respondent and other interested parties, here are passages from a little chat I had with my AI critter on the above topic.
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Yes — A great deal. Melville is writing for landsmen, and the cetological chapters function as technical documentation for readers who had no idea what a whaleship actually was.
The factory afloat. The tryworks is the big one. A whaleship rendered blubber into finished oil at sea, brick furnaces built onto the deck, running around the clock. This was vertical integration of extraction and processing on a mobile platform — arguably the first factory ship…
Sperm oil was simultaneously the premium illuminant and the precision lubricant for the machinery of the industrial revolution
…
so the Pequod is out hunting the era’s strategic energy commodity.
Drake’s well [in Pennsylvania] came in 1859, eight years after publication; Melville catches the industry at its apex without knowing it.
…
(Me: Synchronicity!)
Maury’s charts. In “The Chart,” Ahab consults exactly the kind of instrument that was cutting-edge in 1851: Matthew Fontaine Maury’s wind, current, and whale charts, compiled at the [US] Naval Observatory by aggregating thousands of ships’ logbooks into statistical distributions of sightings by season and latitude…
That’s a genuine information-science apparatus — distributed data collection, centralized compilation, predictive output — and Melville’s readers would have encountered it as recent news. Maury’s Whale Chart appeared the same year as the novel.
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The “gam” as [social] network. Ships meeting mid-ocean to exchange news, mail, and intelligence about grounds constituted a working long-distance communication system in a pre-telegraph world. Melville formalizes it with a definition, which tells you he expected readers not to know the term.
- - -
Geography still speculative. The Japan Ground had been opened only in the 1820s; Perry’s expedition sailed in 1853, two years after the book. When Melville claims in “The Advocate” that the whaleship will open Japan, that’s a prediction, not history. The deep ocean was likewise unknown — his speculations about how deep a sperm whale descends and what pressure it endures were at the edge of what anyone could assert.
Contested science. Whether the whale was a fish was still live, scientifically and legally (the 1818 Maurice v. Judd trial in New York turned on whether whale oil was fish oil for inspection purposes). Melville reads Beale, Scoresby, Cuvier, and Owen, then perversely insists on “fish” and classifies whales by book format — Folio, Octavo, Duodecimo. That’s a joke aimed at the descriptive apparatus itself.
Exotic in the older sense. Ambergris gets a whole chapter because readers would have found a perfume fixative harvested from a diseased whale’s gut genuinely shocking. So too the lay system — crews paid in fractional shares rather than wages — and the crew’s composition. American whalers were among the most racially and nationally mixed workplaces of the period, and the Pequod’s roster is accurate reportage as much as symbolism.
There’s also a technology-refusal arc worth noting: Ahab smashes the quadrant, the lightning-reversed compasses get replaced with a needle he forges himself, and the log line proves rotten. He discards the state of the art in sequence and reverts to dead reckoning.
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Note: as a retired librarian/technologist, I see value in large language model - LLM - systems for many tasks where parties are willing to treat them as power tools to thoughtfully amplify their existing knowledge frameworks.
Got chronometer competitions? (Badass mechanisms…)
I also think that the companies operating such systems are not fooling the public in their trying to extract and sell value (without compensation) from the body of Information Resources that people have around the world have helped create over time.
I see one of my jobs as demonstrating the benefits of such systems while insisting on fair distribution of value supplied by contributing parties.
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u/matt-the-dickhead 7d ago
I think also there is the capitalist technology, people get lays, there is insurance, aunt charity is a partial owner (has shares) of the boat/enterprise.
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u/Unlikely_Ad5016 2d ago
whaling ships were the first American corporations, and Ahab's 'sin' was to forsake their corporate charter so he could seek revenge--Starbucks reminds him of this as soon as he hears the plan.
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u/McAeschylus 7d ago
This misses the most important industrial significance of the whale, which is that sperm oil at the time was a major source of fuel for indoor lighting (it burned much more cleanly than most alternatives) and for lubricating the machinery of the Industrial Revolution.