A Shadow of the Far East: Fedallah; or, a Japanese Sea Drifter

A Shadow of the Far East: Fedallah; or, a Japanese Sea Drifter IKUNO SAIKI Shimane University Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish dark at that. Moby-Dick, Ch. 40 T he multicolored deck of the Pequod is a microcosm of the multiracial world. At Ahab’s despotic command the three Caucasian mates— Starbuck, a Nantucketer; Stubb, a native of Cape Cod, and Flask from Martha’s Vineyard—provoke a battle in partnership with their harpooners— Queequeg, a Pacific Islander; Tashtego, a Gay-Head Indian, and Daggoo, an African—against the overwhelming whiteness of the ubiquitous and immortal whale, which at the same time represents and nullifies the preemeinence of the white men. Without mentioning the loving transracial friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg, the democratic narration of Moby-Dick incessantly puts ethnic hierarchy into question: In the comical depiction of dinner, for example, the harpooners, “those inferior fellows,” fully gratify their appetite while the mates have to endure “the hardly tolerable constraint” at the captain’s table.1 Melville does not fail to pay homage to the “red-men” of Nantucket who waged war against the “Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon” and “overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders” before he applauds American whalers, the successor to the native Nantucketers, for their being the “pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the earth” (NN MD 64, 110). Thus the nonwhite races are described as vividly as the white characters, and stereotypical descriptions of the races are avoided. There is, however, a curious exception: Ahab’s secret crew. Melville not only hesitates to describe Fedallah and his companions precisely, but also engraves “degraded racial characteristics” in them.2 Although they are C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 152; hereafter cited as NN MD. 2 Elizabeth Schultz, “Visualizing Race: Images of Moby-Dick,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 3.1 (March 2001): 32. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 33 I K U N O S A I K I seemingly represented as Asian, their birthplaces and ethnic identities remain mysteriously obscure to the end. By naming them “devils,” “subordinate phantoms,” or “yellow boys,” Melville portrays them as inferior as well as unearthly creatures, and they function as an apparatus more to intensify the uncanny nature of Ahab than to describe individual characters. Unlike the other characters of color, they are not given their own voice. This essay is an attempt to envisage those enigmatic Asian boatmen, “five dusky phantoms,” in the cultural and political context of the mid-nineteenth century. Although readers take the five Asians to be from the Near East, I would like to contemplate the possibility of their being Japanese. By the time Melville changed his career from sailor to writer, Western European countries and the United States had almost completed their world exploration. The Pacific became the location of a struggle for both commercial and imperialistic power, and Japan was the least known archipelago in the Pacific because of its policy of seclusion from the outside world. It can be reasonably presumed that the images of the only unidentified race among all the nonwhite personae in Moby-Dick reflect the American people’s wonder and curiosity about this mysterious country of the Far East. I contend that Fedallah and his comrades, by face and voice, could have been the kind of Japanese sea drifters who, having been shipwrecked, were often rescued by American whaling vessels. Melville could have read about such Japanese fishermen, the most famous of whom was Nakahama Manjiro, or possibly seen them in Honolulu, an international society of mixed races and one of the most important anchorages for American whalers. Let’s start with the wavering identity of the five dusky phantoms. The difficulty of visualizing Fedallah...