open with marlingspikes if that were what
it would take.
That night, tossing and turning in anticipation, I had a vision of a tattooed cannibal crashing into the room—he bore a
shrunken head and appeared to have his
own keycard, a scrimshawed thing as slim
and shiny as a Javanese baleen shoehorn!
“Your roommate,” said the front desk
when I called down. The intruder’s name,
as it turned out, was Queequeg, and he
joined me in bed, no care that my sleep
number might be di=erent from his,
threw his leg over mine, and faces close,
we talked the glistering stars away.
word whale traced down through the cen-
turies and across the languages —declaim-
ing unnoticed and unheard from the very
high balcony, a grand oval running around
the room at about crow’s nest height (make
that half-size crow’s nest height), over the
great, echoing chatter below. After the
etymology, the scholars turn to Melville’s
“Extracts,” page after page of quotations
about whales and whaling, which he claims
were collected by a “sub-sub-librarian.” The
scholars do their best to make it loud. The
crowd begins to notice, starts to turn pages,
to find the quotations at hand in their books,
but few stop talking: the extracts aren’t the
opening we’ve all been waiting on, and it
isn’t noon yet, the advertised starting time.
AT ABOUT ONE-THIRTY — we’re only
fifty pages in—the entire gathering
THE ELEGANT Bourne Building at the
New Bedford Whaling Museum houses a
single tall room dominated by a half-size
replica of the whaling vessel Lagoda, built
by a daughter in honor of her captain father — half-size yet enormous — the biggest
ship model in existence: fifty-nine feet from
figurehead to stern, fifteen sails fully rigged
and reefed, mainmast fifty feet high, very
nearly touching the high, vaulted ceiling.
The crowd gathers as Saturday noon
approaches, first a few, then a score, then
a hundred, and still they come, record
numbers — not enough seats — so they’re
sitting on the floor, on the window benches,
on the stairs, and finally in the Lagoda itself, odd perches on half-size barrels and
half-size buckles and hatches and capstans,
everyone bearing a copy of The Book, four
hundred people or more, part of the twenty-six hundred that will come through the museum this auspicious weekend.
Management is glowing. You can pick
out board members by their grins.
The sound guy tests the mike: “Call
me, um. Call me . . . what is it?”
And no one laughs. In fact, no one
pays attention. He’s not funny. He’s cer-
tainly not Ishmael, and we’re waiting for
Ishmael. At about eleven-thirty, one of the
Melville scholars on hand begins reading
the etymology that starts the book—the
