Explain thyself, Ishmael.

[Terrance]

  CHAPTER 102
  A Bower in the Arsacides


Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can
you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook
dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you
hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of
Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams;
the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the
frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms,
butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.
  I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed
with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I
belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the
deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the
harpoons, and for the heads of the lances. Think you I let the
chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and
breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that young cub?
  And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am
indebted to my late royal friend Tranque, king of Tranque, one of
the Arsacides. For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the
trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the
Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm
villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far distant from what our
sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.

Confusing Melville with Ishmael (claiming that Ishmael's philosophy or
POV equals or is very close to Melville's ) or any other narrator of his
fiction or poetry is a big mistake, in my opinion. After Typee, Melville
distanced himself from his narrators with increasing complexity.