Try Pots

Try Pots is the Nantucket inn at which Ishmael and Queequeg spend their first night after arriving in the port, and it serves as more than a place to eat and sleep. In this intensely maritime setting, chowder, fishing gear, fish refuse, household decoration, and whaling danger are woven together. The inn’s comic abundance briefly shelters the two future shipmates, while its gallows-like sign, its association with a coffin-minded innkeeper, and its prohibition of harpoons at night foreshadow the lethal world into which they are about to enter.

Setting and Arrival

Try Pots is recommended by the landlord of the Spouter-Inn, who identifies his cousin Hosea Hussey as its proprietor and praises the establishment for its chowder. Ishmael and Queequeg reach Nantucket late in the evening aboard the little Moss and therefore cannot conduct their intended business that day; they must find supper and a bed. The directions prove needlessly intricate: they are told to keep a yellow warehouse on one side, then a white church on the other, and finally to ask the first passerby for guidance. Confusion over which side of the street the warehouse belongs on sends them beating about in the dark and waking peaceful inhabitants for help before they finally recognize the inn’s unmistakable sign.

That sign consists of two enormous black wooden pots suspended from the cross-trees of an old topmast planted before an old doorway. The cross-trees have been sawed off on one side, leaving the remaining horns and upright mast with the appearance of a gallows. Ishmael responds to this architecture with a vague misgiving. The image seems to gather several earlier portents into one frame: Peter Coffin’s name, the tombstones at the Whalemen’s Chapel, and now a gallows with two black pots, apparently one for Ishmael and one for Queequeg. The inn is therefore introduced through a mingling of hospitality and death imagery, making an ordinary lodging house feel like a threshold into the perilous vocation of whaling.

Proprietors and Hospitality

Hosea Hussey is away, but Mrs. Hussey is left entirely competent to manage the inn’s affairs. Ishmael first sees her beneath a dull red swinging lamp, wearing yellow hair and a yellow gown while briskly scolding a man in a purple woollen shirt. Her energetic command of the entryway establishes the inn as a place governed by practical, unsentimental maritime disorder rather than quiet domestic refinement. After hearing that Ishmael and Queequeg want supper and a bed, she postpones her scolding long enough to usher them into a small room and offer the terse choice of clam or cod.

The exchange initially produces comic uncertainty. Ishmael, unsure whether Mrs. Hussey means to provide one clam for both men, asks Queequeg whether they can make a supper from such a portion. The warm savory steam rising from the kitchen soon corrects that misunderstanding. The first chowder contains small juicy clams, pounded ship biscuit, salted pork cut into flakes, butter, pepper, and salt. It is so satisfying after their frosty voyage that they dispatch it rapidly. Ishmael then tests the inn’s culinary system by calling for cod, and a second, differently flavored chowder arrives. The apparently narrow menu thus becomes a sign of abundance: a single shouted word summons another substantial meal.

Mrs. Hussey’s hospitality remains practical even when it is generous. She supplies a lamp and directions to the bedroom, but before Queequeg can climb the stairs she demands his harpoon. She refuses to let any harpoon enter her chambers because of the precedent of young Stiggs, who returned from a four-and-a-half-year voyage with only three barrels of oil and was later found dead in a downstairs room with his harpoon in his side. Her rule converts a whaleman’s ordinary sleeping companion into a domestic hazard. The next morning’s breakfast is already being negotiated before the travelers retire: Ishmael requests both clam and cod, along with smoked herring for variety.

The Fish-Saturated Interior

Try Pots deserves its name because chowders are continually boiling there. The establishment offers chowder for breakfast, dinner, and supper until fish seems to permeate the bodies and clothing of its inhabitants. The area before the house is paved with clam shells; Mrs. Hussey wears a polished necklace made from codfish vertebrae; and Hosea Hussey’s account books are bound in shark-skin. These details make the inn’s material culture an extension of the sea rather than a human space merely located beside it.

Even the apparently ordinary milk has a fishy flavor. Ishmael cannot explain it until he sees Hosea’s brindled cow feeding on fish remnants along the beach. The animal walks through the sand with each foot planted in a decapitated cod’s head, a grotesque and comic image that carries the inn’s marine economy into the surrounding landscape. At Try Pots, fish are not simply food served to guests: they become paving material, jewelry, bookbinding, animal feed, and the basis of the household’s visual identity.

The inn’s culinary and architectural elements also create a tonal contrast. The black pots and gallows-like mast suggest Tophet and execution, while the chowder itself is warm, rich, and restorative. The same place that evokes death feeds the travelers exceptionally well; the same harpoon that represents Queequeg’s profession must be removed as a danger to sleep. Try Pots consequently holds together the two conditions that will govern Ishmael’s voyage: fellowship and violence, appetite and mortality, comic routine and sudden fatality.

Narrative Function and Transition to Whaling

Try Pots occupies a brief but decisive position in Ishmael and Queequeg’s movement from shore life into whaling. After supper and lodging, the two men make plans for the next day. Queequeg consults Yojo, his black little god, and reports that the choice of ship should rest wholly with Ishmael. Yojo has supposedly selected a vessel for them and intends that Ishmael should choose it as though by chance, initially irrespective of Queequeg. The inn therefore becomes the last domestic pause before the decision that will bind the companions to the Pequod.

Its atmosphere also prepares the reader for the larger world the narrative is about to defend. Ishmael soon argues that whaling, though regarded by landsmen as an unpoetic and disreputable occupation, deserves honor. He presents the whale-ship as a powerful peaceful influence that has explored uncharted seas, opened unfamiliar harbors to later naval and commercial traffic, helped connect Europe and the Pacific coast, contributed to the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from Spanish rule, assisted the development of Australia, carried missionaries through Polynesia, and approached Japan before that country became hospitable to foreign ships. Try Pots gives this global vocation its most intimate material prelude: before whaling appears as an economic, exploratory, and imperial force, it appears as a supper of clams, biscuit, pork, butter, and cod.

The contrast between the inn and the whale-ship is instructive. Try Pots is fixed on Nantucket soil but built out of maritime remnants; the Pequod will carry its crew across the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean, the waters near the Javan Sea, the Philippine Islands, Japan, and finally the Pacific Line in pursuit of Moby Dick. The inn’s crowded fishiness is thus a miniature of the larger whaling world, whose ships carry their own provisions, weapons, and necessities while often sighting no land. The travelers leave the inn not merely rested but symbolically initiated into a culture in which the sea enters every object, meal, warning, and decision.

Significance

Try Pots is a comic threshold space whose details condense the novel’s maritime imagination. Its signs and furnishings make death visible before the voyage begins, yet its food produces immediate companionship and bodily comfort. Mrs. Hussey’s command, the forbidden harpoon, and the story of Stiggs establish that whaling danger cannot be excluded from ordinary life; it can only be regulated temporarily and returned in the morning. Meanwhile, the inn’s relentless fish imagery dissolves the boundary between sea and shore, showing Nantucket as a community whose domestic world has been thoroughly shaped by the ocean.

As narrated by Ishmael, Try Pots also demonstrates the book’s characteristic movement between scene, comic misunderstanding, grotesque observation, and expansive reflection. A question about clam or cod grows into a meditation on appetite; a roadside sign becomes a premonition of death; a local lodging house opens onto the historical reach of the whale-ship. Try Pots matters because it is both a concrete inn and a compact emblem of the transition from land to sea: a place where Ishmael and Queequeg eat together, surrender the harpoon for one night, and stand at the edge of the voyage that will make the ocean their governing world.