American Minute with Bill Federer
Herman Melville's classic novel
Moby Dick,
1851, and how a Hawaiian Missionary saved an American sailor from cannibals
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"There she blows!" cried the lookout, sighting the great white whale,
Moby Dick.
The classic book,
Moby Dick,
was written by New England author
Herman Melville,
published in 1851.
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In the novel,
Captain Ahab,
driven by revenge, sailed the seas to capture this
great white whale
who had bitten off his leg in a previous encounter.
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The crew of
Captain Ahab's
ship, the
Pequod,
included:
- Ishmael, the teller of the tale, which begins the line: "Call me Ishmael"-the name of Abraham's son who was sent away;
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- Chief Mate Starbuck, a Quaker from Nantucket, for whom the Seattle-based coffee franchise took its name;
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- Harpooneer Tashtego, a native American of the Wampanoag Tribe; and
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- Harpooneer Queequeg, a tattooed Polynesian from a mysterious cannibal island in the South Pacific.
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"Tattoo" originated from "tatau" or "tatu," which were body markings originally associated with
natives, aborigines, cannibals and headhunters of Southeast Asian islands,
such as:
Polynesia, Micronesia, Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, New Zealand, New Guinea, Malagasy, and the Marquesas Islands.
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"Tattoo"
was first mentioned by
naturalist Joseph Banks,
who accompanied
Captain James Cook
on the ship
HMS Endeavour
as he explored the
Pacific, 1768-1771:
"I shall now mention the way they
mark themselves indelibly,
each of them is so marked by their humour or disposition."
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Sailors
brought
tattoos
to port cities around the world, where, for a century, they were associated with
salty sailors, rough working men, slaves, convicts,
and
circus sideshows.
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In the 1956 film
Moby Dick,
actor
Gregory Peck
played
Captain Ahab.
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Ahab
finally caught up with
Moby Dick
in the Pacific Ocean.
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As fate would have it, when the harpoon struck
Moby Dick,
the rope flew out so fast it snagged
Ahab,
pulling him out of the boat.
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Entangled in the harpoon ropes on the side of the great whale, the revenge-filled
Captain Ahab
was pull underwater to his death.
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The angered
Moby Dick
then sinks the
Pequod.
The only survivor was
Ismael,
who spoke a line from the
Book of Job,
“And
I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
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Melville
drew inspiration for his novel from the real life fate of a whaling ship from Nantuket, the
Essex.
In 1820, under the command of
Captain George Pollard, Jr.
, the
Essex
chased an enormous
sperm whale thousands of miles west of South America.
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The
whale destroyed the ship,
and
killed most of the sailors.
The remaining sailors, enduring gruesome starvation, attempted to sail their whaleboat thousands of miles to land.
Only eight survived.
The story of the
Essex
was written down by its first mate, Owen Chase, and the cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson.
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Nathaniel Philbrick
retold the account in his award-winning book,
In the Heart of the Sea
(Viking Press, 2000), which was turned into a movie in 2015, directed by
Ron Howard.
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Whales
were hunted primarily for their
blubber,
which was boiled down into
whale oil.
This was the main source of
oil
throughout the early 1800s.
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Whales
were being hunted to the
verge of extinction.
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This suddenly changed when "Colonel" Edwin Drake drilled
"The Drake Oil Well"
on his
Pennsylvania
farm in 1859.
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Soon the
petroleum industry
in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma developed which
extracted oil from the earth,
thus
"saving the whale."
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Decades later,
Winston Churchill
switched the British Navy from burning
coal to oil.
Britain
only had
one small oil field,
located in the Sherwood Forest.
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Oil
was discovered in the Middle East, and in 1908, the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
was formed, which later changed its name to
British Petroleum (BP).
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In the early 1900s, an
Ottoman-German Alliance
was formed in the to build a
Berlin-Baghdad Railway.
Competition over access to
oil
in the Middle East,
Britain-Iran
versus
Germany-Turkey,
was a factor leading up to
World War I.
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In 1807, the American whaling ship
Triumph
left
Hawaii
for
New England.
Two Hawaiian boys
had stowed away aboard the ship,
Henry Opukahai'a
and
Thomas Hopu.
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In
New England,
they heard the Gospel and
converted to Christianity.
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Their stories inspired
Hiram and Sybil Bingham
to begin a missionary movement to the
Pacific islands
in 1820.
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In 1822, African-American
Betsey Stockton
went to
Hawaii
on the
second ship of Christian missionaries,
being the
first single female missionary sent out from America.
Betsey
was the teacher at
the very first mission school in Hawaii
for common people.
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In 1840, the whaling ship
Acushnet
left New England.
On board with the crew was the young
Herman Melville
on
his first whaling voyage.
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Herman Melville,
born AUGUST 1, 1819, was the
grandson of a Boston Tea Party "Indian."
At the age of 12, his father died.
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His mother raised him, inspiring his imagination with
biblical stories.
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The
Acushnet
,
after a year and a half at sea, visited the
Marquesas Islands
in the Southern Pacific.
The
Marquesas Islands
are considered by some as
the remotest place in the world.
They were first visited by
American Maritime Fur Trader Joseph Ingraham
in 1791, who named them
Washington Islands.
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In 1813,
Commodore David Porter
claimed the islands for the United States, but
Congress never ratified it.
France
began claiming the
islands
in 1842.
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At the
Marquesas Islands, Herman Melville
and his friend,
Toby,
jumped ship from the
Acushnet
,
and deserted.
They climbed up high into the
island mountains
to avoid being arrested and carried back to the ship.
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His friend,
Toby,
injured his leg in a fall.
They unfortunately fell among cannibals, where
Melville
and his friend were given
sumptuous food
and were befriended by a beautiful tribal maiden.
Tribesman adamantly
forbade
them from trying to
leave the village.
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Just before a big native feast,
Melville's friend, Toby, suspiciously disappeared.
Melville
was not allowed to be at the feast.
Afterwards, when
Melville
inquired about
his friend's whereabouts,
the tribesmen quickly changed the subject, leading
Melville
to suspect
he was eaten.
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When a small boat piloted by a passing native providentially came close to shore,
Melville
fought his way into the water and climbed into it, barely escaping with his life.
He wrote of the experience in his first book,
Typee
(1846), concluding:
"These disclosures will ... lead to ... ultimate benefit to
the cause of Christianity
in the
Sandwich Islands."
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The film,
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
(2006), has a scene of escaping cannibals on a South Pacific island.
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In 1853,
a native Hawaiian, Samuel Kauwealoha,
sailed as
a Christian missionary
from
Hawaii
to the
Marquesas Islands
where he
planted churches and started schools.
Titus Coan,
the son-in-law of missionary to Hawaii
Hiram Bingham,
wrote in his 1882 account
Life in Hawaii
(ch. 13, The Marquesas Islands ... Hawaiians Send a Mission to Them):
"The missionary at this station was the
Rev. Samuel Kauwealoha,
a native of Hilo ... Pupils recited the Lord's prayer and the Ten Commandments, with some other lessons, in tones and inflections of voice which were soft and melodious."
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Another missionary from
Hawaii
to the
Marquesas Islands
was
James Kekela.
In 1864,
James Kekela
rescued an
American seaman
from death at the hands of angry cannibals in the
Marquesas Islands.
In gratitude,
Abraham Lincoln
sent
James Kekela
an inscribed gold watch.
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Robert Louis Stevenson
related the story in his book,
In The South Seas
when he visited the
Marquesas Islands
in 1888-89:
"During my stay at Tai-o-hae ... a whole fleet of whale-boats came from Ua-pu ...
On board of these was
Samuel Kauwealoha,
one of the
pastors,
a fine, rugged old gentleman, of that leonine type so common in
Hawaii.
He ... entertained me with a tale of one of his colleagues,
James Kekela,
a missionary
in the
great cannibal isle of Hiva-oa.
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... It appears that shortly after a kidnapping visit from a Peruvian slaver, the boats of
an American whaler
put into a bay upon that island, were attacked, and made their escape with difficulty, leaving their mate, a
Mr. Jonathan Whalon
, in the hands of the natives.
The
captive,
with his
arms bound behind his back,
was cast into a house; and the chief announced the capture to
James Kekela ..."
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Robert Louis Stevenson
continued relating the story of
Mr. Whalon's rescue
from the
cannibals:
"In return for his act of gallant charity,
James Kekela
was presented by the
American Government
with a sum of money, and by
President Lincoln
personally with
a gold watch.
From his letter of thanks, written in his own tongue, I give the following extract. I do not envy the man who can read it without emotion.
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... 'When I saw one of
your countrymen,
a citizen of your great nation, ill-treated, and
about to be baked and eaten, as a pig is eaten,
I ran to save him, full of pity and grief at the evil deed of these benighted people.
I gave my boat for the stranger's life
...
It became the
ransom
of this countryman of yours,
that he might not be eaten by the savages
who knew not Jehovah."
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The New York Times
published the article
"Lincoln and the 'Cannibals'"
by Jeffrey Allen Smith, Feb. 25, 2014:
"The American whaling ship
Congress
from New Bedford, Mass ... dropped anchor ...
Sailors
lowered two longboats loaded with trade goods, and a small detachment of men led by the first officer,
Jonathan Whalon,
rowed toward the beach in Puamau Bay ...
Foolishly,
Whalon
went ashore alone with the
Marquesans
... Once well inside the tree line, the Paumau men seized
Whalon,
stripped him of his clothes and bound him ...
Tribal members reportedly
pinched him, tweaked his nose, bent his fingers back
over his hands, menacingly swung hatchets at him and eventually began
building a fire with which to cook him.
A Hawaiian missionary
improbably named
Alexander Kaukau
(Kaukau is Hawaiian pidgin for "food" or "to eat") and
Bartholomen Negal,
a local German carpenter, tried and failed to dissuade Mato, the Paumau chief,
from killing Whalon
...
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... Fate interceded with the arrival of another
Hawaiian missionary, James Kekela,
the
first Hawaiian ordained as a Christian missionary
and Kaukau's senior. He had fortuitously just returned from a neighboring island to reports of
a 'white man is about to be roasted
...'"
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The New York Times
article continued:
"... Kekela
donned his
black preacher's jacket
and, with
only his Bible in hand,
set off for Mato's village.
The
negotiations were tense,
and at one point
Kekela
declared
he would trade 'anything and everything he possessed' for the sailor's release
...
Ultimately
Kekela
purchased
Whalon's
freedom with much less: his
black preacher's jacket
and
prized whaleboat
...
Kekela
returned
Whalon
to the waiting
Congress,
which sailed to Honolulu, where tales of
'cannibals' capturing an American sailor
and
Kekela's
heroics prompted the American minister to Hawaii, James McBride, to write a note to
Secretary of State William H. Seward.
McBride's letter, dated Feb. 26, 1864, detailed the harrowing events in the
Marquesas
and requested that
Seward
'show to the world ... we have tender regard for each one of our number, and that we highly, very highly, appreciate such favors.'
Taking almost a month to make its way across the Pacific, the letter arrived on
Seward's
desk by April 18, 1864.
Three days later
Seward
replied that he had submitted McBride's account of the rescue to
Lincoln
and that the
President
had 'instructions' for the diplomat.
McBride was directed to 'draw on this department for five hundred dollars in gold' to purchase presents for
Whalon's rescuers ...
On Feb. 14, 1865, McBride ... sent gifts to the
Hawaiian missionary Kaukau,
the German carpenter Negal and even
the young Marquesan girl
who warned the sailors in the two long boats ...
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... He gave
Kekela
two new suits and
a gold Cartier pocket watch with the inscription,
'From the
President of the United States
to
Rev. J. Kekela
For His Noble Conduct in
Rescuing An American Citizen from Death
on the Island of Hiva Oa, January 14, 1864' ...
Kekela
wrote a seven-page letter of thanks in
Hawaiian
... retelling of how he saved
'a citizen of your great nation,
ill-treated, and
about to be baked and eaten, as a pig is eaten
...'
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... The heartfelt prose in
Kekela's
letter to
Lincoln
moved many, including
Robert Louis Stevenson,
who wrote in his book
In the South Seas:
'I do not envy the man who can read it without emotion.'"
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Robert Louis Stevenson
recorded the words of
James Kekela:
"(The Gospel)
was planted in
Hawaii,
and I brought it to plant in this land and in these dark regions, that they might receive the root of all that is good and true, which is
love
..."
James Kekela
concluded:
"Great is my debt to Americans,
who have taught me all things pertaining to this life and to that which is to come. How shall I repay your great kindness to me?
Thus
David asked of Jehovah,
and thus
I ask of you, the President of the United States.
This is my only payment -
that which I have received of the Lord, love-(aloha).'"
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Herman Melville
opened his classic novel,
Moby Dick
(1851), with a reference to the Bible story:
"With this sin of disobedience ...
Jonah flouts at God
...
He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into countries where
God
does not reign."
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In 1983, The U.S. District Court stated in
Crockett v. Sorenson:
"Better known works which rely on allusions from the Bible include Milton's Paradise Lost ... Shakespeare ... and
Melville's
Moby Dick ...
Secular education ... demands that the student have a good knowledge of the
Bible."
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Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924
wjfederer@gmail.com
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.
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