Middle Ages

Middle Ages is not a setting in the narrative but a historical period summoned by Ishmael as a standard of comparison. The period appears most directly when he argues that people once believed they could identify a Jew by smell, a comparison used to reject the notion that whalemen can be recognized by an allegedly characteristic odor. In this retrospective argument, the Middle Ages represents an inherited culture of suspicion, bodily stigma, and careless generalization rather than a precisely described chronology.

Historical Reference and the Question of Odor

Ishmael traces the bad reputation of whales and whalemen partly to the arrival of Greenland whaling ships in London more than two centuries earlier. Those ships carried fresh blubber home in large casks instead of trying out the oil at sea, because the short season and violent storms of the Arctic made other methods impractical. When their holds were opened in port, the accumulated decay produced an exceptionally offensive smell. Ishmael presents this circumstance as the material source of a reputation later extended indiscriminately to all whales and all whalemen.

The reference to the Middle Ages sharpens that distinction. Ishmael says that, just as people of the Middle Ages claimed to detect a Jew by the nose, the public treats the supposed smell of whale fishing as a bodily sign of an entire group. His point is not that the historical situations are identical, but that both judgments convert a contingent association into a supposedly natural identity. He counters the stigma by insisting that a South Sea Sperm Whaler, when its products are decently handled, is not inherently filthy and that its oil is nearly scentless after being casked.

From Medieval Suspicion to Global Whaling

The period's implied insularity also contrasts with the geographic scale of the whale fishery described elsewhere by Ishmael. He presents whaling as a peaceful force that has explored remote seas and archipelagoes, opened routes into previously inaccessible harbors, and preceded both warships and missionaries. Whale-ships are said to have helped establish contact with Pacific societies, carried missionaries toward their first destinations, and stood on the threshold of Japan. The comparison therefore places an older Europe of inherited prejudice beside a maritime enterprise that connects the Atlantic, the Pacific, Australia, and Asian waters.

Ishmael further attributes major political consequences to this maritime network. After the fishery rounded Cape Horn, whalemen helped break the restrictive colonial policy of the Spanish crown, and he links their activity to the later liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia. He also calls the whale-ship the true mother of Australia as a mighty colony, noting that whale-ships sometimes supplied early settlers with biscuits when they faced starvation. Against this history of movement, exchange, and practical assistance, the medieval-style odor prejudice appears not merely inaccurate but provincial.

Institutions, Labor, and Historical Continuity

The Middle Ages is also useful as an implicit counterpoint to the elaborate institutions of the nineteenth-century whale fishery. On the Pequod, capital is divided among Captain Bildad, Captain Peleg, and numerous small investors, including annuitants, widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards. The crew, including the captain, receives profit shares called lays rather than ordinary wages, and Ishmael calculates the likely value of his own share as a fraction of the voyage's clear proceeds. Whaling thus appears as a system joining dispersed ownership, specialized labor, and long-distance commercial risk.

The fishery preserves older forms while adapting them to new conditions. The Specksnyder, literally the Fat-Cutter and historically the chief harpooneer, originated in the old Dutch Fishery, where command was divided between navigation and whale-hunting. In the American fishery, the harpooneer remains professionally distinguished because the success of a voyage depends heavily on his skill, even though he is socially treated as the equal of the men before the mast. This institutional history makes whaling neither primitive nor simply modern: it is a layered maritime order in which inherited offices, practical expertise, and commercial organization coexist.

Law, Sovereignty, and the Wider Historical Frame

Whaling also generates its own customary law. When one ship strikes a whale and another later kills or captures it, disputes over possession require a generally recognized rule. Ishmael calls the resulting distinction between Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish a compact body of maritime regulation developed by American fishermen themselves, alongside the formal Dutch code decreed in 1695. The fishery therefore carries legal systems across oceans rather than operating outside history or government.

A still older sovereign principle appears in the rule of Royal fish. A legal maxim attributed to the laws of England assigns the head of a captured whale to the King and the tail to the Queen. Ishmael treats this division as an anomaly within the general law of Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, but its inclusion shows how whale bodies become objects through which royal authority, property, and jurisdiction are expressed. The reference to the Middle Ages consequently helps frame a long historical movement from inherited hierarchy and bodily prejudice toward competing systems of maritime custom, commercial ownership, and imperial power.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Ishmael's use of the Middle Ages is polemical rather than antiquarian. He invokes the period to expose the persistence of social stereotypes, then sets those stereotypes against whaling's scale, discipline, economic importance, and global consequences. His defense of the vocation repeatedly refuses the land-based assumption that whaling is merely dirty butchery: he compares its dangers and violence with those of celebrated military commanders and insists that its broader effects have been powerful and often peaceful.

The historical reference also participates in the book's larger method of moving between immediate shipboard details and immense temporal or geographic horizons. A smell in a whale-ship's hold becomes a question of collective prejudice; an ancient legal maxim becomes a problem of ownership; a Nantucket investment becomes part of a worldwide network. In that movement, the Middle Ages functions as a remembered past against which the whale fishery's modern, ocean-spanning world can be measured. It marks the persistence of old categories even as ships, commodities, knowledge, and political influence circulate far beyond the social horizons that produced them.