Herman Melville’s multicultural crew of the Pequod is often read as an allegory for the culturally diverse melting pot that is the United States of America. If anything is to be deemed an accurate representation of our nation, it’s bound to include the same types of inequalities that have plagued our entire historical record; Moby Dick excels in this portrayal. In presenting the crew of the Pequod through a medieval caste in “Knights and Squires”, Melville highlights the hierarchical system of whale ships to expose the inequity of systems rooted in America.
The shared title of Chapter 26 and Chapter 27, “Knights and Squires”, already plants this idea of separation between the knight and their attending squire. The mates Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, white men from Nantucket, Cape Cod, and Tisbury, assume the position of knight. Each of these knights has under them a squire, the “savages” Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo, all more physically capable and reliable as the main support to their commanding officers. Despite the camaraderie needed to properly function in this violent and vital industry, this distinction between the leading white men and their subordinates denies them equal status.
This dynamic extends to the rest of the unnamed crew and many other American industries as well:
“As for the residue of the Pequod’s company, be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles” (Melville 131).
This is a very important aspect for Melville to give emphasis to, reminding us who it was that labored the most in the founding of our country. Though “not one in two of the many thousand men” in the whaling industry were born in America, in other words immigrants, most of them never received the title of officer nor the benefits aligned with someone who put in the most effort. In the specific case of the Pequod, we are never given the names of a majority of the crew who keep the ship operating; they don’t receive the focus that is given to their king Ahab, his knights Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, and even their squires Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo. At the bottom of the ladder, most of them do not receive proper recognition despite their importance in maintaining the ship, akin to the enslaved of 1850s America, unrecognized as humans to the highest degree, stripped of their rights, yet expected to provide the labor needed to maintain the growth of the nation.
It isn’t enough for Melville to just point out this disparity in the whaling industry, as he directly cites the same structure in the “American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads”. These foundational industries that served to protect and expand the American nation ran off of the same design that let the mass contributors go unnoticed and unappreciated while the ones in charge received all of the attention and glory. Despite the majority of employees in these industries being immigrants, they were used in service of further increasing the white man’s position with the conquering of Mexican land and expansion towards the West. They were the ones that made it possible, but the end goal was never in favor of them.
If the power dynamic wasn’t clear enough, Melville then uses language very effectively to show who is respected and who is not: “in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles”. In deliberately leaving native uncapitalized, Melville directly shows us the replacement of the Native American by the white man, claiming the term for themselves. Liberally is another interesting choice of word here because, though it could be read as the “native American” providing the brains out of generosity, the more likely application is that it is a loose assumption that they should be the ones to provide the brains. This is due to the immediate use of generously in reference to the supply of muscles that is the “rest of the world”. Read in this way, Melville brings to question the legitimacy of the white man as the brains and everyone else as the muscle to challenge the structures of the American whaling industry, army, navy, and the Canal and Railroad construction companies.
All of this culminates in the fact that the industries imperative to the growth of our nation were established with hierarchical systems that placed one group, the white man, above the rest who were not even deemed worthy of recognition. In the context of 1850s America, specifically in the increased national attention towards slavery and the continued westward expansion, Melville draws attention to the structures behind the categorization of humans as more or less and breaks down the reasoning of these systems to show how unreliable they are. Why should the native American receive the title of knight and officer while the Native American who does most of the work is just the squire? Is the rest of the world, who so generously supply the muscles, denied recognition simply because they’re not American born, despite that being the groundwork of our nation?
While a chain of command is a necessity to keep a ship running properly, the discriminatory design prevents the equal treatment of everyone on the ship. From our country’s inception to the present, this established hierarchy has been used by those in power to ignore and vilify the ones before the mast, the ones that keep our nation afloat.