Daily Bread for 11.14.15

Good morning, Whitewater.

Saturday will be sunny with a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise today is 06:46 and sunset is 4:32, for 9h 46m 07s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1851, Moby-Dick is published in America:

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is a novel by Herman Melville considered an outstanding work of Romanticism and the American Renaissance. A sailor calledIshmael narrates the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, a whitewhale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab’s ship and severed his leg at the knee. Although the novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author’s death in 1891, its reputation as a Great American Novel grew during the 20th century. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself,^[1] and D. H. Lawrence called it “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world”, and “the greatest book of the sea ever written”.^[2] “Call me Ishmael” is one of world literature’s most famous opening sentences.

The product of a year and a half of writing, the book is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “in token of my admiration for his genius”, and draws on Melville’s experience at sea, on his reading in whaling literature, and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare and the Bible. The detailed and realistic descriptions ofwhale hunting and of extracting whale oil, as well as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of God. In addition to narrative prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry and catalogs toShakespeareanstage directions, soliloquies and asides.

Melville drew upon multiple accounts for his story:

In addition to his own experience on the whaling ship Acushnet, two actual events served as the genesis for Melville’s tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820, after it was rammed by an enraged sperm whale 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the western coast of South America. First mate Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.^[50]

The other event was the alleged killing in the late 1830s of the albino sperm whale Mocha Dick, in the waters off the Chilean island of Mocha. Mocha Dick was rumored to have twenty or so harpoons in his back from other whalers, and appeared to attack ships with premeditated ferocity. One of his battles with a whaler served as subject for an article by explorerJeremiah N. Reynolds in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine.^[51]

Of the sinking of the Essex, there is a major motion picture to be released this December, In the Heart of the Sea:

On this day in 1861, a great historian is born:

1861 – Frederick Jackson Turner Born

On this date Frederick Jackson Turner was born in Portage. Turner spent most of his academic career at the University of Wisconsin. He published his first article in 1883, received his B.A. in 1884, then his M.A. in History in 1888. After a year of study at Johns Hopkins (Ph.D., 1890), he returned to join the History faculty at Wisconsin, where he taught for the next 21 years. He later taught at Harvard from 1910 to 1924 before retiring. In 1893, Turner presented his famous address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the Chicago World’s Fair. Turner died in 1932.