Mocha Dick
Moby Dick, the hugest character in American fiction, had his original in a whale which Melville’s biographer does not even mention but which must have been known to Moby Dick’s. The name of the creature, according to the principal authority, was Mocha Dick, and he was first seen and attacked near the island of Mocha about 1810. For years he resisted capture. “Numerous boats are known to have been shattered by his immense flukes,” wrote J. N. Reynolds a dozen years before Moby Dick was published, “or ground to pieces in the crash of his powerful jaws; and on one occasion it is said that he came off victorious from a conflict with the crews of three English whalers, striking fiercely at the last of the retreating boats at the moment it was rising from the water in its hoist up to the ship’s davits.... From the period of Dick’s first appearance his celebrity continued to increase, until his name seemed naturally to mingle with the salutations which whalemen were in the habit of exchanging in their encounters upon the broad Pacific, the customary interrogatories almost always closing with ‘Any news from Mocha Dick?’”
No wonder that “nearly every whaling captain who rounded Cape Horn, if he possessed any professional ambition, or valued himself on his skill in subduing the monarch of the seas, would lay his vessel along the coast, in the hope of having an opportunity to try the muscle of this doughty champion, who was never known to shun opponents.” No wonder, either, that his fame went so far. “From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature,... he was white as wool. Instead of projecting his spout obliquely forward, and puffing with a short, convulsive effort, as usual with his species, he flung the water from his nose in a lofty, perpendicular, expanded volume, at regular and somewhat distant intervals; its expulsion producing a continuous roar, like that of vapour struggling from the safety-valve of a powerful steam engine. Viewed from a distance, the practised eye of the sailor only could decide that the moving mass which constituted this enormous animal was not a white cloud sailing along the horizon.”
In time Mocha Dick’s back came to be serried with irons which had pierced his mighty hide and his wake was tangled with yards of line which he had broken in his rush or which had been cut off by desperate whalers to keep their boats from being dragged under water. Caution, too, entered that head with the barnacles clustered hard and tight upon it; he learned to present his back to the harpooner and to guard his “small” and the softer area under his fins. But with so many allies against him he finally met his fate. Attacked in his last battle, off the coast of Chile, he charged the boat at the first encounter and frightened the harpooner into missing him and then, on being accused of fear, of plunging into the water to drown himself for chagrin. Later Mocha Dick, who had been keeping out of sight though suspected to be still near the ship, was angered at the attack which the whalers made upon a calf and its mother and again charged them. This time the first mate made a surer stroke and, after a furious struggle, got his victim. “Mocha Dick was the longest whale I ever looked upon. He measured more than seventy feet from his noodle to the tips of his flukes; and yielded one hundred barrels of clear oil, with a proportionate quantity of ‘head-matter.’”
This material underwent a great alchemy in Melville’s imagination. He would not let his Moby Dick be mortal, but carried him unscathed through his adventures and at the end sent him off, victorious, shouldering the troubled waves with his ancient head. Nor would Melville allow the war against Moby Dick to be the plain war of the hunter and the hunted, but gave his hunter the excuse to chase the whale that the whale had chased him and had bitten off his leg. Nor would Melville allow the story to be conducted on the simple plane of mere adventure, but lifted it up into the regions of allegory and symbolism, added the fury of hot passions, drenched it with poetry and dark mystery, lighted it with irony and satire and comic vividness and vast laughter. It was his genius which made the story of Moby Dick important. Because it is important, the neglected story of Mocha Dick deserves at least its little moment.