One part of the reading this week I wanted to bring into our discussions was part of the description of the boat in Chapter 16. The narrator ends the description with “A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that” (p.78). I can see why this boat might be described as melancholy, with all the ruins of past trophies decorating her, yet I cannot understand the second line; that all noble things are touched with melancholy. Why is this statement made? Is the implication of this that one must be touched with melancholy to be noble, or that everything noble happens to have this melancholy? Why can something not simply be noble, without this melancholy. And what is melancholy? Simply sadness, or must there also be a level of destruction associated with creation? My mind, of course, drifts back to the letters, and Melville’s outright worship of Hawthorne. Is there a melancholy he feels in the noble Hawthorne? Or what else does Melville find makes something noble, besides melancholy? Does he figure that many greatly built crafts have some sort of ‘tragic’ backstory to be made, as this whaling ship has obviously purged many a whale to make its decor? 

I also found the amount of other cultures and countries being brought into the description of this boat interesting. For someone who has spent so much time viewing most of the world through Christian glasses, Ishmael suddenly mentions France, Egypt, Siberia, Japan, and Ethiopia. Perhaps induced by the sight of this boat, and the possibility of traveling with it, or that he sees this boat as a foreign entity. One important thing to note here is that when talking about Western countries he mentions kings and churches, and when he mentions Ethiopia, he uses the word ‘barbaric’. For how much description of the boat he gives, he seems unconstrained by one way of describing it–even calling the boat a cannibal with the teeth fashioned as decor.