Moby-Dick; or, The Whale may devote a grand swath of its page count to describing the anatomy of sperm whales, but it also spends quite a great deal of time talking about the anatomy of a whaling ship. The mast(s) and masthead(s) of the ship stand out among these anatomical discussions and allusions due to their literal and metaphorical prominence; they are akin to the ship’s very spine, brain, and nervous system. In a clear and distinct way, a mast and its sail control how a ship moves, and a mast and mast-head visually may resemble the upright spinal cord attached to a brainstem. Beyond this, though, the narrative draws great attention to the mast’s prominence in relation to not only Ishmael but every man aboard the Pequod, particularly as the novel progresses and the general sanity of the crew rapidly devolves. Generally speaking, the Pequod becomes not just the setting of the novel but a character herself who is ever-present and always influencing the crew. She and the crew shape each other, but Ahab himself holds dominion over all of them, and his one-track mania becomes what truly binds them all together into one metaphorical body.
The movement of a whaling ship such as the Pequod depends largely on collaborative efforts by the crew but also upon the whims of nature. The mast and sail are thus not the entire nervous system of the ship, but they are integral parts of it. Therefore, the crew themselves become part of the nervous system, as they control the sail and the ship to the best extent that they can. The crew being a part of the body of the ship, similar to both the nervous system and the blood pumping through its veins, presents a further image: that the crew and the ship are one and the same. The novel goes to great lengths to explore how Ahab’s goals are turned into the goals of everyone aboard the ship and are almost infectious, in a sense. A captain, crew, and ship are inextricably linked to one another by their very nature, but none so much as the Pequod and her lifeblood.
The presentation of the Pequod in such a manner thus draws stark attention to Ishmael, the sole survivor of the voyage. Through this metaphor, his lack of conviction or self esteem could be attributed as the means of his survival. Unfortunately, this falls apart when one considers Starbuck, who desperately wants to leave. In truth, Ishmael is not particularly exceptional. He has become just as much of a part of this single mind and body as anyone else. That he describes himself as an “orphan” after the wreck shows how he truly had found somewhere that he belonged. He finds himself severed from his community, and passages such as the end of chapter 102, in which he references how heavily tattooed he has become after his experiences aboard the Pequod, show that he continues to keep these people and experiences close to his heart. In a sense, Ishmael has taken on the soul and mind of the Pequod on his own, keeping it alive.
The first time that Ishmael properly sees the Pequod, he describes her in his typical detailed manner, and he explicitly likens her masts to spines.
Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne.(ch. 16)
Throughout these comparisons, indeed, the ship is anthropomorphized repeatedly. One particular line describes her as “a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies,” which, while gruesome, explicitly draws attention to the Pequod as something of a patchwork (ch. 16). She will later become a great deal more of a patchwork, as Ishmael the narrator is aware, as she becomes one with her captain and crew. This same paragraph describes her in tragically ironic terms as “A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that” (ch. 16). Ishmael’s reverent and kind descriptions of the ship show the love which he has for it, especially in the future, narrating the story with the benefit of hindsight.
Ishmael is a deeply thoughtful and intelligent man whose thoughts frequently wander to his deep sense of loneliness and lack of purpose. The chapter “The Mast-Head” positions this listless drifting squarely as a negative quality, as it distracts the man at the mast-head from doing his duty. The ocean itself can prove to be an issue with its hypnotic beauty, particularly for men like Ishmael who may tend to wax poetic:
Perhaps [whales] were [scarce]; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.(ch. 35)
The mast-head as the human brain, then, becomes an even clearer metaphor than it may first have appeared. The man at the mast-head, in searching the horizon, is carrying out the task that makes the whaling ship a whaling ship. Without these literal eyes in the sky, the ship is naught but a purposeless body drifting about, effectively comatose or entirely dead. Ishmael’s tendencies to drift would, atop the mast-head, cause the ship to lose its focus at best or kill him at worst. The mast-head is not only vital to the survival of the ship, but it is also fatally high and unstable. This fragility mirrors the sensitivity of the wildly complex and sensitive organ which is the human brain. Ironically, the limited scope of the mast-head’s purpose opposes Ishmael’s own active and rather bright mind. He is forced to focus on a single subject: survival, be that his own or the ship’s (through finding and killing whales).
This image of single mindedness directly mirrors Captain Ahab’s goals in his ceaseless hunting. While the mast-head is used to search for whales, its purpose is perverted into the even narrower one of searching for one particular whale. Ahab’s madness pervades the novel just as it does the physical body of the Pequod, which is best illustrated through the desperate introduction of the Ecuadorian doubloon. Contrary to the bacchanalian reverie of the crew in chapter forty, after they had initially learned of their goal, the doubloon brings about mixed reactions. Ahab himself is not fond of the doubloon and describes looking at it as “like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self” (ch. 99). Nailing this unsettling and contentious object to the mast, while it serves as a reward, brings about mixed reactions. Pip, most wisely, likens the doubloon to the ship’s navel (drawing a comparison to the ship as a body and the mast as its torso) and says that “when aught’s nailed to the mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate” (ch. 99). Rightly, he points out that Ahab’s increasingly desperate and mad efforts to find the whale are likely to spell doom for the ship and its crew. The doubloon represents many things to many different people, but it can be read here as Ahab’s madness causing him to damage the very spine of the ship. While the nail may not cause much literal damage, the conjured image of hammering a nail into one’s spine is violent and upsetting. Taking this metaphor further, the scene evokes a sense of paralysis (just as is often caused by spinal fractures). Ahab is physically reshaping the ship such that the crew can truly only accomplish one thing. His maiming of the ship and crew in such a way further shows that all three of these players are extensions of each other. No matter how much the crew members have individual opinions, they are damned as one group, all the same.
During the climactic encounter with the titular whale, Ahab screams to the crew members that “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me” (ch. 135). At this point in the novel, this statement is jarringly accurate. The Pequod and the crew are naught but extensions of Ahab’s body. Where once they were the collective entity that was the Pequod, they were now firmly the collective entity that was Ahab. The monomania which brought them together and fueled their passion for the voyage was now what was bringing them to their watery grave, and they had come much too far to turn back.
The Pequod’s three masts are prominently featured in the final few chapters of the novel, as the three harpooneers stand atop them. The combined mind of the ship, crew, and Ahab is entirely occupied, thus, by the need to kill the whale. This, the culmination of Ahab’s single-mindedness, becomes the very final image of the Pequod as seen by Ishmael.
For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.(ch. 135)
The scene continues with Tashtego frantically attempting to nail down a flag to his mast and catching the wings of a bird in the process. The chaos and madness of the scene are harrowing, yet they paint a fitting end for the mental decline of the ship and its occupants. Even with its body in a hopeless state, the brain of the Pequod remains active for a few extra, desperate, terrible seconds. It fires off its last misguided neurons in a display of how much Ahab’s quest for vengeance has led him to damnation.
The ship as a sort of sentient being is here likened to Satan, perhaps calling to the image of Lucifer’s fall from Heaven.
[T]he bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.(ch. 135)
The use of the word “helmeted,” of course, continues to paint the image of the mast-head as the ship’s brain/head, but the scene’s anthropomorphization of the ship herself in tandem with the prominence of “the flag of Ahab” shows how the lines between the ship and her crew have blurred.
The Pequod would not be as much of a sentient entity as she is without Ahab’s deeply rooted need for vengeance. Ahab himself is all but physically a part of the ship, as she has been made accessible to keep him stable atop his prosthetic leg, so, as the voyage starts, they are already inseparable. Ahab cannot function nearly as well on any other ship, which perhaps fuels his burning rage further. If the Pequod were to die, he, too, would be doomed.
The symbiosis turned synthesis of the Pequod and her crew shows how deeply Ahab’s madness and quest for vengeance run through the veins of the story. Even with the benefit of hindsight, Ishmael cannot help but feel affection for the voyage which gave him purpose in a life which had hitherto been severely lacking. Being a part of something so truly all-consuming was, perhaps, what he needed.
Through this lens, the story is made all the more tragic. Ishmael is, in a sense, reborn or reincarnated as what remains of the Pequod, metamorphosing from a confused and sad man to the very essence of a whaling ship, distilled into one small body. He carries with him everyone lost in the sinking of the Pequod, and he will never forget them.