One part of the reading for this week that I took interest with was the end of Cistern and Buckets. This whole chapter was action packed, detailed, a jump from the lull of Melville’s technical and historical chapters. Although Tashtego is saved by Queequeg (in a midwifery way), Melville still fantasizes about an alternate reality where this rebirth did not occur. “Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it has been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can be readily recalled” (p.377). This feels like a romanticization of death, one that contrasts strongly with the death of the whales in subsequent chapters. These deaths are violent, painful, pitiful, and blood baths, covered in red. Tashtego’s death, comparatively, would have been covered in white–the color of purity, honor, fear, existentialism. And maybe that is exactly what being smothered in this white would represent, the honor of dying in the whaling industry, of dying in a masculine way, yet also the fear and existentialism that comes with death, of the unknown of what follows when the biological functions cease. 

The language used in this passage is light for such a heavy topic. “Precious”, “daintiest”, “sweeter”, romanticize this death as if it is something to be desired. This romanticization is only possible because Ishmael (and other crew) would not have witnessed this death, would not have witnessed Tashtego’ fright and slow drowning in the spermaceti. When spared the details of seeing what happens, it is easy to romanticize the results–as Melville often argues about the landsmen who reap the rewards of the whaling industry with none of the suffering. 

This idea of Tashtego’s death is calm, slow, peaceful, unlike the thrashing the whales undergo. We can draw metaphors here to how we think about nature and animals in a hierarchical fashion, underneath us and allowed to suffer in death. Or we can draw a metaphor for slavery, for how the whales are allowed to die as slaves are, while the humans will die these white, painless, precious deaths.