Moby Dick: The Rise of the Undead: Part One

NIGHTS

Part One: Shipping

They call me Anson. Ishmael Anson. Vampire.

Some years ago, with practically no money from the period, and nothing much to interest me on the shore, I set my sights on the watery parts of the world. As a man who likes challenging adventures on the high seas, I make for the nearest ports of call, at those infrequent times when I’m sorrowfully distracted by my past, or I’ve grown weary of my life. My soul is like an orphan, deprived of any father, and thus explains my reluctance to involve myself with anything not directly connected to the water. The secret to my paternity is out there somewhere on the oceans of the world, and finding it is serious business indeed. Seating myself sultanically, among the moons of my privileged life, I concentrate on driving off the weariness in my bones, by boarding the late night train to the south.

When unhappy thoughts encroach upon the life of considerable darkness that I lead, it takes a strong moral principle to keep from deliberately stepping into the early rays of dawn. After an unusually long grapple with cheerlessness, I wish it were true that I could expose myself to a place where people normally tip their hats in greeting. I am indebted to my winter garden, with its lovingly gifted crimson weigela, but beyond the iron bars of the fence and the gate is the intolerable immensity in the sky, and I have no need for a votive candle of immeasurable size that can reduce me to ashes and then continue on burning in my memory.

If not for my instinct to survive, the piercing screams of passersby would echo into the very heart of the morning bustle. In lieu of calling my death an incineration caused inexplicably by the rising sun, the afternoon papers are more likely to call it a case of spontaneous human combustion. The same ball of fire hid not the accursed griefs of Cato the Younger, the noted orator from the court of Julius Caesar who ended his own life by throwing himself on his sword with a philosophical flourish. Rather than taking the drastic step of bringing my life to an untimely end, I’m throwing myself into a voyage at sea. My substitute for the sword and the pistol and the hangman’s noose is the open water, and there’s nothing surprising in this. I’ve been out of sorts, and I know it. But I’ll be back to my old self in no time. Exposure to real change is what I need. If I do that, if I observe the change in the winds, and the sands that are exposed by the low tides, then something good might come of it.

After two long nights of travelling over land by rail, I caught a boat across the Hudson River, and entered into the island city of Manhattan, home to the first port of my calling. Belted around by wharves, as Indian isles are by coral reefs, the city’s southernmost tip is the Battery, named for the accumulation of artillery that was stored there in the 17th century. At the end of the day, on any given day, throngs of men will congregate at the tip among the extensive patchwork of piers. Circumambulating the city, by way of the Bowery, they’ve come to occupy the timbers that jut out from the shore; such is their need to strive for the water. Landsmen, for the most part, they loiter under street lamps, and perch themselves on pierheads and sometimes they can be seen climbing high aloft in the riggings of merchant ships from China.

It may look like they’re waiting for the sun to come up on the eastern horizon, but what they’re really fixating upon is the prospects of a life at sea. We can assume that it’s the magnetic attributes of the Atlantic Ocean that has attracted them. It’s a wondrous spectacle, what with meditation and water eternally wedded, but why do they come to be cruising the docks, when they should be with friends and families at home? Why come at all, other than as a means to rub arms with the heroic and virtuous men of the sea? As for my insights into their inclinations and predispositions, I can only say that nothing will content them but the absolute limits of the land. If midnight swims are what they’ve been longing for, now they can see that others are aligned with that longing. Allied together in one single cause, they’ve come here to answer the call of the waves that have been cast upon their bones.

If you stand a man on his legs and set his feet agoing, he will, in all eventualities, lead you to water. Just as a horse surely will. Even an absentminded man will infallibly come upon the bend in a brook or the edge of a lapping lake. Is this not without some deeper meaning? Does this not lend credence to the actions of the underprivileged man, who, upon receiving a handful of coins, will deliberate whether to buy the coat he so badly needs, or invest his money in a trip to a faraway sandy beach? Are his small achievements not consistent with the greater achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who gave the oceans their own deities? Deeper still is the death of the celebrated beauty Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflected image in a pool of water. Pining away with heartache and self-longing, he spurned every last one of his many admirers until such time as he plunged headfirst into his own likeness and was drowned.

As I’ve said before, I’ve gotten into the habit of heading out onto the water whenever I feel my enjoyment being sapped away. But I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go there as a paying passenger. Passengers grow quarrelsome, generally speaking. And they get seasick, with great regularity. In contrast to the men who fetch for them and pick up after them, I’ve never heard tell of passengers being compensated for their troubles. On the contrary, passengers must pay for their passages, and therein do we find the difference between paying and being paid, the most regrettable infliction ever entailed upon us by the two orchard thieves.

As someone who has smelt the sea previously, on more than one occasion, my preference is to take to the water as a shiphand, rather than as a captain, or a commodore, or a cook, despite there being some glory in that profession. I’m already something of a salt, but I steer away from the more lofty professions and abandon the distinction of such offices to those who prefer them. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of the needs of my immortal self, without having to see to the daily routines of the men, the petty officers, the senior officers, and the like. As for going abroad as a cook, a cook being a sort of officer on board, three square meals daily do not suit my fancy anymore than plates of cooked food. Whether broiled, or roasted, or judiciously baked, I can speak no better than revoltingly of an aromatic meal.

As a subordinate mariner, in the merchant marines, I was made to jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May Day meadow. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from pampered landsman to indentured servant, and it requires a general succumbing to an attitude of stoic detachment. Taking orders from figures in positions of authority can wear thin in time, yet it’s expected that a sailor will see to the biddings of his immediate superiors without so much as a complaint. A firm belief in the right to be governed is the reason why so many men stay on for the entire lengths of their contracts. If duty requires them to fetch a mop and swab down the decks, what does that indignity amount to when weighed against the grave scales of the apocalypse? Would the angels of revelation think poorly of them if they were to comply with their orders in this particular instance, as a slave would? For who isn’t a slave, really? Aren’t we all trapped in a place from which we cannot escape? The commanders of oceangoing vessels are certainly ensnared in their places of confinement. They get the air that they breathe second hand to their crews, who tend to be in the forward, fresher parts of the ship, where headwinds at sea are far more prevalent than winds from astern.

Since a man should not go out of his way to keep doing the same things day after day, I would round the corner this time and embark on a voyage of the whaling kind. Why those wily stage managers, the three fates, cast me in such a humble and ignoble part, when others were cast in more dignified and worthy parts, there is no telling. Perhaps my going on such a journey was formed as part of the grand scheme of providence drawn up a long, long time ago. Chief among my motives for choosing to sail on a whaling vessel was the leviathan himself. The significant mammal roused all my curiosity, tied as it was to all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds. I speak of the sperm whale, but more than my interest in the sperm whale was my interest in the few hardy souls that daily hunted him. The men that returned again and again to places of seclusion and situations of deep peril helped sway me thus. That being said, I’m not an insensible vampire. I commune with my accomplices, when and wherever possible, even if they’re yelling at me in Portuguese, since it’s vital to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place in which one lodges.

From the only perfect specimen among a landed ship of Low Dutch sailors, I absconded with six pairs each of trunks and socks and two complete sets of uniforms. A seaman of moderate size, but by no means of moderate magnitude, how gratified I was to look into a mortal man who hath more joy than sorrow in him. With his back to my prow and my compass, and his boots on my feet, I quit the city of Manhattan, and boarded the vessel that was bound for New Bedford, the most important whaling port in the world.

I duly arrived at New Bedford, Massachusetts, on a cold Saturday night in December. Let it be known that most young candidates for the penalties of a whaling life embark on their voyages from this port of call, but I had no intention of doing so. My mind had been made up. I would sail in none other than a Nantucket ship. Though New Bedford has been increasingly monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, a boisterous kind of excitement connected me to all aspects of the small tract of land in the Atlantic, where the first great American whale was captured. Where else but from her proprietary shores did the first people of the continent sally out in canoes and give chase? First one, and then another, their adventurous little sloops set forth from their homes, and the men learned a lot about fishing.

For a man who takes great pains to wandereth out of his way to avoid sunlight, the night was dark and dismal and bitingly cold. With no circle of friends or associates residing in New Bedford, it was my business alone to make arrangements for suitable lodging. A search of my pockets turned up ten pieces of nickel, such an amount as to be less than ideal. Standing in the middle of a very dubious looking street, I compared the gloom of the north to the equal dullness of the south. At the first rooming house I came upon the rooms were ten before taxes, and way too expensive for my pocket. The rooms at the second house were even more costly than the first, and each house I came upon was successively more expensive than the last. The cheapest if not the cheeriest of rooms would almost certainly be situated nearer the waterfront, a quarter of town that was entombed in grief.

I walked the entire length of almost every notoriously unchristian block, until I came to an outer door propped invitingly open. The place had a welcoming air about it, and yet immediately upon entering I stumbled over a metal box in the porch. The accumulation of coal dust that hung in the air wickedly and clouded my passage bore a resemblance to the ashes from the destroyed kingdom of Gomorrah, and would that the resonant voice coming from within keep me from being consumed by fire for all eternity. Pushing ahead and opening a second interior door, I happened upon a hundred black parishioners bestirring themselves from the longest of uninterrupted sermons to look back at me. Standing before the crowd of believers was a preacher, in shoeless