ABSTRACT
Although much has been written about Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) as a major work of nineteenth-century US transnationalism, little consideration has been devoted to how Captain Ahab manages to control the “Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth” assembled on board the Pequod. I contend that Ishmael is the key fgure regulating the global diversity on board the Pequod, working in effect as an agent of Ahab’s tyrannical rule. The relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg has so often been sentimentalized by scholars as to obscure its function to regulate racial, sexual, and ethnic diversity. Melville creates in Queequeg a hybrid fgure of the “noble savage,” composed of African, African-American, Middle Eastern, Native American, Papuan New Guinean, Hawaiian, Marquesan, Samoan, Maori, and Fijian qualities. I consider these different characteristics of Queequeg in order to judge Melville’s understanding of the relationship of US democracy to peoples and communities outside, but increasingly threatened by, its geopolitical control. The chapter makes a specifc contribution to the importance of the transpacifc region in our consideration of US transnationalism.
They were all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too. I call such not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever came back.
(Melville, Moby-Dick 101)