ahab as luddite (Quakerism)

[Terrance]

The Great Quail wrote:
> 
> Terrance writes,
> 
> >It's quite important that these men are Quakers who kill Leviathan. They
> >are Quakers with a Vengeance. Melville, like Pynchon, does not stress
> >this fact just because it is historical.
> 
> I think it's interesting, but I don't place as much a value on it as
> you do. It's a well-known irony that the Nantucket "Society of
> Friends" were some of the most successful Leviathan butchers in the
> area. They were also generally clannish and Xenophobic, like many
> island folks. With the exception of Ahab (and to a lesser extent,
> Flask) I wouldn't ascribe "Vengeance" to their actions. They made
> quite a living in the whale fishery, and their communal fortunes rode
> high on the hump.

You wouldn't, but the narrator of M-D does. And it this strange mixture
of Quakerism and Calvinism and other religions  (and  by its mixing-Ahab
has no christian harpooners-- the corruption of its dogma, I think
Thomas has hit the nail on the head, it is Father Mapple we should look
to first, and to Melville's Mosses) that the text calls our attention
to. It is significant, very significant, I think. In fact, when we read
Chapter 16, The Ship, there can be no doubt that Meville is not simply
padding the text with historical facts. 



  Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a
Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to
this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure
peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified
by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same
Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They
are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
  So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with
Scripture names- a singularly common fashion on the island- and in
childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the
Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these
unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And
when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force,
with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the
stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest
waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north,
been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all
nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin
voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some
help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty
language- that man makes one in a whole nation's census- a mighty
pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all
detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other
circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling
morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great
are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young
ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not
to do with such an one....