Since everyone saw the world through the prism of their own culture, Melville believed, no society could claim moral superiority over another
on their rope-roughened palms, the burly whalers who chase Moby Dick seem unlikely avatars for modernity. But in an important, even prophetic way, that is what they are. The crew of theare a wondrous deputation “from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth”. Sailors of at least 13 nationalities are “federated along one keel” with Captain Ahab: Chinese and Tahitian, Icelandic and Portuguese.
He took his education on the ground—and on the water—having been withdrawn from formal schooling at 12 on the death of his bankrupt father. In January 1841 he shipped from New Bedford as a whaler; over the next four years he was briefly imprisoned in Tahiti for taking part in a mutiny and hitched across the Pacific. He worked as a farmhand and as a pin-setter in a Hawaiian bowling alley. This journey, too, became material for his stories.
. In “White-Jacket” , a Polynesian aboard an American frigate bound for New England has never before ventured beyond his home. “His tastes were our abominations: ours his,” the narrator observes. “Our creed he rejected: his we.” The upshot is that “neither was wrong, but both right.” In lectures the author gave about his experiences, he advocated travel as a way to dispel bigotry.
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