In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex – Nathaniel Philbrick teaches the Reluctant Psychoanalyst about the Unconscious Mind

Melville’s Moby Dick is a book I have not read.  It was one that used to be on the curriculum of my undergraduate college, but it was replaced by Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener – a much more modest book.  Moby Dick is about the furious pursuit of a White Whale who has turned the Whaling world on its head by attacking one of the whaling ships.  It is one of those Big Books – meaning not just that it is a great book, but that it is really long.  I have never taken the time to plow through it.  This more modest book by Nathaniel Philbrick tells the story that Melville used as the basis for his tale of Captain Ahab’s revenge- but the captain of the Essex, George Pollard, sought not revenge, but survival, both in the immediate aftermath of his boat being sunk by the whale – in a harrowing journey with his crew across the open sea – and then after his next commission also sunk, this time on a reef, when he was able to return home much more quickly, but could only get work as a night watchman.

This is a tale that is told on many levels.  I will enumerate some of them.  This book is about to be released as a film and I am curious about which themes will emerge in the movie.  I think the first theme is a morality play.  The Essex was an old boat at the time of the final voyage in 1820.  It was also part of a fleet of boats sailing out of Nantucket that had decimated the sperm whale population in the Atlantic.  Though, as the author points out, the number of whales taken in any given year was not nearly as high as at the height of the factory ship whaling era in the 1960s, these whales that produced oil for lubrication and lighting in the US and Europe before petroleum was used were harvested at a rate that led the whalers to sail further and further from home.  In 1820, the prime hunting grounds were about 3,000 miles off the west coast of South America in an area the authors refers to as the heart of the ocean because it is as far from land as you can get anywhere in the world.

To get to this spot, the Essex made a stop at the Galapagos Islands – the islands made famous by Darwin’s stopping there to observe species not seen elsewhere – and by the tortoises named after the islands.  The crew rounded up tortoises to throw onto the ship where they would live on deck – unfed – slowly dying of dehydration and starvation until the crew decided to kill and eat them.  As if this weren’t cruel enough, before reboarding the ship, one of the crew, as a stunt, set fire to some of the vegetation – the fire spread and wiped out all of the flora on the island and the turtles that didn’t die on shipboard starved to death on land.

So a modern audience was, I think, at least partly cheering when a large whale – one who was not in the group being pursued by the Essex’s whaleboats – found the Essex manned by a skeleton crew – took a look at it and rammed it – not once but twice – the second time apparently with the premeditated intent of harming it.  The hunted became the hunter and the old, worm eaten keel was stoved in and the ship sank – so that when the crew returned in three whale boats from hunting, they were suddenly in survival mode, gathering up the tortoises to keep in the three whaleboats (open rowboats to which they lashed make shift masts) as they rowed and sailed almost ninety days and 2,500 miles to be rescued only after they had been subjected to the starvation and dehydration they had inflicted on the tortoises.  Further, they had been reduced to eating their shipmates who died of natural causes or drew lots to be killed so that some could survive and, in one of the two boats that made it, the men were rescued huddled in the bottom of their boat, out of their minds, clinging to the bones of their shipmates sucking the last marrow out of the bones.

Brutal.  And, at least to me, this tale is a transparent attempt to clarify what the consequences will be to us of not respecting Mother Nature, even though that is never stated directly.  Instead,the tone of the book is dry and dispassionate – clinical.  We are not preached at.  Instead we are told in excruciating detail what we know scientifically about the process of dehydration and the process of starvation; edifying in a macabre sort of way.  And it is left to us to realize that this is a cautionary tale about us – overfishing, thinking that we can do what we want and there will be no consequences - but there will be, including the possibility that we will become as primitive as these men did.

This is also a story about the miserable lives the whalers led shipboard.  While there were great riches to be had – in the 1820s when the rest of the world was in a deep depression, Nantucketeers were quite wealthy, providing a universally needed supply - it was really tough work to get this supply.  The killing of whales and then the rendering of their bodies for oil was physically demanding – it stank in a slimy penetrating way that got under the skin and ruined the men’s clothes.  The food was marginal and the dangers of the sea were constant.  They used the skin of the whales to burn an open fire on the ship deck to boil the oil out of the blubber and store it in barrels.  Even without the toil, the men were away from their families for years at a time – to return to find children they had never known now two years old and stay with them for a few months before leaving again.  

Owen Chase

This is also a story about leadership.  I can't find a picture of Captain George Pollard.  His style – a conciliatory one – one in which he takes other’s opinions into account – turns out to be problematic.  He takes the his first mate’s advice, Owen Chase (pictured above) about heading to South America instead of using the trade winds to go to Tahiti.  A mistake, as it turned out, that cost the lives of most of the crew.  The first mate’s leadership style (he ended up captain of the second whaling boat) is one the author preferred.  This man was a “fishy” leader – a complement in the whaling industry – and one intended to articulate that he was demanding and autocratic.  And this style of leadership was a better one when the boats needed to be conserving resources.  The first mate did not stick with his fishy character, but was more flexible; he became more compassionate when the provisions had nearly run out and the men needed not discipline but a sense of hope and support.

The captain’s professional afterlife turned out to be a mess after his second shipwreck.  The first mate went on to become a successful whaling captain; though, from the end of the voyage to the end of his life he was hoarding food and he ended up being driven mad by intense headaches.  The captain’s life – as unsuccessful as it may have been materially and professionally – was apparently a happy one.  One reason he survived was the he was short and rotund, so he had more body fat going into the ordeal, which helped him survive it.  As an old man, he was a jovial, portly man who looked after the town in his job as night watchman.  Is this another morality tale?  If so, it is a bit harder to figure out who the good guy and who the bad guy is – who should we emulate?

This is also a story about classism and racism.  The men who died first were African American.  All the men who survived came from Nantucket and were white.  The author acknowledges that there are multiple factors that led to this outcome, but he emphasizes the biological – the ways in which the diets of the lower class and black sailors were poorer and thus they had less body fat going into the ordeal.  He also acknowledges that this was a difficult part of the story for the Quaker community of Nantucket to grapple with.  Their abolitionist stance was, at heart, an anti- discriminatory one, yet the pecking order of the whaling ships rigidly supported a class system.  Again, is this a cautionary tale?  Certainly we are anti-discriminatory and we sustain a classist society that is in conflict with that position.

But I think that, at its center, this is a story of the sea.  Or, I should say, another story of the sea.  I have reviewed many of them in the short time I have been blogging.  It bears a resemblance to The Life of Pi – both involve shipwrecks and cannibalism – and to the book A Pearl in the Storm about the first woman to row across the Atlantic – and there is a certain heroism in both.  I also reviewed a book written by an African American about a weird science fiction type remnant of the whaling ships written about by Edgar Allen Poe in the story Pym.  I am surprised by how many others there are.  One could, in the style of the author of this book, note that more than half of the world’s population lives within 100 miles or so of an ocean – that we have spread by sailing the seas – and that our inland cities – like the one I live in – are mostly situated on waterways.  And we could leave it at that – water was the dominant mode of transportation.  It is still a very important one – think of container ships – and much of our food comes from the sea.  And we have to live on the sea in order to transport our stuff and to reap its bounty.

But, as a psychoanalyst, I think the pull of the ocean - the thing that pulls us into its heart - is much more primal than that.  I have to admit to a deep and powerful fear of water.  Not because I’m incompetent on the water – I lived near the ocean as a child and learned to sail, canoe and row.  I swam competitively for years – and it was there that I first noticed the fear.  In practices we would swim to the point of exhaustion and then swim some more.  I would find myself swimming in water that I could easily stop and stand in but I feared that I could not make it to the end of the pool – that I would drown before I got there.  More recently, I was swimming across a lake at some friends’ cottage when we were visiting them on vacation and I realized that if I had a heart attack I would drown before I could swim to either side.  Ironically I was not as fearful as when I had been in the pool where I could stand up, this was more of an intellectual realization than a gut fear, but it was very real and hard to shake.

While Freud maintained that there were no universal symbols in dreams – we need to follow the associations of each individual to find out what this particular thing means to this particular person – there are some that are nearly universal. So he thought that a house so frequently symbolized the self that it makes sense to consider that as a very likely meaning in any given dream.  Similarly, I think that water is often used by the dream machinery to symbolize the unconscious.  If we think about the threads of this tale from that perspective, we can begin to see how the various themes might be related.  We don’t all go to sea – nor, fortunately, do we become shipwrecked.  We don’t all engage in cannibalism, nor do we become so dehydrated that there is a very real likelihood of death despite being surrounded by water.  But we all do traverse a life that in some way seems very ordered and productive – we live in the conscious parts of our mind that, like the whaling ship, has compartments and crew that take care of various tasks.  We also sail this ship across a surface – a part of one’s self that has depth, but a depth that we can barely see into.  And we profit from some of the spoils that emerge from it – though fear becoming lost in it, drowning in our own fantasies about how the world is constructed.

Moby Dick, that book that I have not read, becomes a tale, both of revenge against an external agent, but against that part of ourselves that would destroy us.  It is the tale of a fishy man who fights against nature, as if that were possible – either on the actual sea or in the theater of the mind – where our baser selves – our primitive, needy and demanding selves threaten to sink us at any time – not least because we are convinced that the conscious self is at war with us and will plunder what we have – will reap it and in the process tear something valuable from us.  We need to keep our boats afloat – we need to stay above the waters else we will perish – so we struggle against the sea – in the outer world, maintaining a class system, even though the lower classes, whether animal or human may revolt against us, and, in the inner world against nightmare visions of ourselves – distorted, awful visions from which we wake, sweating, in the night – relieved that it was just a dream, but fearful that the dream portrays something true about us.

So it is ironic, I think, that this dry book will become a movie.  I’m remembering a book that I read recently but did not post about, Beautiful Ruins, and a central plot component was that a character was recruited to pitch a movie to the Hollywood producers about the Donner party – the settlers that got caught in a mountain pass in winter and had to resort to cannibalism to survive.  The pitching of this movie, despite the earnestness of the man pitching it, was guaranteed to fail.  It was about cannibalism and no one would go to see a movie about that!  This is a book with layer after layer of grime and filth and fetid stuff, and then, at its center, cannibals: eat or be eaten: seemingly the law of nature.

My last post, on August: Osage County, looked at the way that something that played well in the theater did not translate to the screen.  The Harry Potter Books made perhaps the best paper to screen transition – it was almost like a transliteration.  This book, because of the clinical remove, allows us to look closely at things that are difficult to see – and smell and touch.  We don’t recoil from them because we have created them.  The author gives us words, but our images are only as gruesome as we can tolerate.  On the screen, we may be forced to look away (in a dream, we wake up).  Or we may become numbed to what is portrayed before us (we remember chaotic dreams only vaguely on awakening).  It is also the case that the themes pulled out here are pulled out – we are not hit over the head with them.  Will they come through on the screen?  Will the director read this text in the same ways that we do?  

The book resolves, more or less, by looking at the reception these men received when they went home.  The author’s research has led him to conclude that the townspeople were generally accepting of the returners.  The returners, for their part, seemed to maintain a healthy reverence for the intensity of what they had experienced.  The captain seemed to, more or less, be able to come to grips with being the person who had survived a harrowing journey.  The first mate was not as competent at doing that.  When we come in contact with others, if they have an understanding of just how primitive life can be – especially when our unconscious rears up and attacks us, and we learn how lost we can become in the wake of such an attack, others who have lived at sea are not too quick to judge.  It is hard to be a seafarer – or a warrior – or even to survive in the comfort of a middle class lifestyle that is supported by labor (physical and psychological) that, if we allow ourselves to be aware of it in its raw form, can sicken us.  

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...