In that same New Bedford stood a small church known as the Whaleman’s Chapel. Almost every troubled sailor who was about to leave for the Indian Ocean or the Pacific came there on Sunday.
I certainly did.
After returning from my morning walk, I went out again, this time to visit the chapel.
The weather had changed completely. The clear, bright cold had disappeared, replaced by freezing rain and thick mist.
I pulled my heavy bearskin jacket tightly around me and pushed through the miserable storm.
When I entered the chapel, I found a small group of sailors, along with the wives and widows of sailors.
The room was almost completely silent.
Only the occasional scream of the wind outside broke the stillness.
Everyone seemed to sit by themselves, separated from the others. It was as if each person carried a private grief that no one else could possibly understand.
The chaplain had not arrived yet.
Instead, the people sat quietly, staring at several marble memorial tablets set into the wall on both sides of the pulpit.
Three of them told stories like these:
In Memory of John Talbot
He was only eighteen years old when he was swept overboard near Patagonia on November 1, 1836.
This memorial was placed here by his sister.
In Memory of Robert Long, Willis Ellery, Nathan Coleman, Walter Canny, Seth Macy, and Samuel Gleig
They were members of the crew of the ship Eliza.
While hunting whales in the Pacific on December 31, 1839, their boat was pulled away by a whale and disappeared from sight.
Their fellow sailors placed this memorial in their honor.
In Memory of Captain Ezekiel Hardy
He was killed by a sperm whale while standing in the bow of his boat off the coast of Japan on August 3, 1833.
This memorial was placed here by his widow.
I shook the freezing rain from my hat and jacket and took a seat near the door.
When I turned my head, I was surprised to see Queequeg sitting nearby.
Even he seemed deeply affected by the solemn atmosphere.
He stared around the chapel with a strange mixture of curiosity and disbelief.
There was something almost childlike in his expression.
I soon realized that Queequeg was the only person in the room who had noticed me entering.
There was a simple reason.
He was the only person there who could not read.
While everyone else was studying the names and dates carved into the cold marble, Queequeg could only sit and look at them.
I didn’t know whether any relatives of the dead sailors were among us.
But there were so many unrecorded deaths in the whale fishery, and several of the women in that room carried such obvious signs of lasting sorrow, that I could not help thinking some of them must have lost someone whose name was written on those walls.
For them, those memorials must have reopened wounds that had never truly healed.
Those of you who have buried someone you love beneath green grass can never fully understand this kind of grief.
You can stand among flowers and point to a grave and say, “There. There is where my beloved lies.”
These people had no such comfort.
The men they loved had vanished somewhere in the vast ocean.
There was no grave.
No body.
No place they could visit.
Those dark-bordered marble tablets covered nothing but empty ground.
The names carved into them offered no comfort. Instead, they seemed to announce a terrible certainty: these men had disappeared, and no one knew exactly where their bodies had gone.
Such memorials might have seemed just as appropriate in some ancient tomb as in this chapel.
And yet these stones raise questions that go far beyond the sailors themselves.
Where do we place the dead when we count all living creatures?
Why do we say that the dead “tell no tales,” even though they may have taken more secrets with them than the most dangerous waters?
Why do we speak of someone who has died as having gone to “the other world,” while we never use such language for a man who simply sails to the farthest corner of the living world?
Why do insurance companies pay money when a person dies, as though death were the final end of everything?
What really happened to Adam, who died thousands of years ago?
Why do we mourn the dead if we also believe they have gone to a place of perfect happiness?
Why do the living seem so determined to silence the dead?
And why can the mere sound of knocking from inside a grave terrify an entire city?
There must be some meaning behind all these things.
Yet faith has a strange way of surviving among the tombs.
Like a jackal feeding among the dead, faith can take even our darkest doubts and somehow turn them into hope.
As I looked at those marble tablets on the eve of my own voyage to Nantucket, I could not help thinking about the men whose fate was recorded there.
They had gone before me.
And now I was preparing to follow the same path.
Ishmael, I thought, the same thing could happen to you.
You could disappear into the ocean just as they did.
But somehow, instead of frightening me, the thought began to make me laugh.
Wonderful reasons to go whaling, aren’t they?
A fine opportunity for adventure and promotion!
And if my boat gets smashed by a whale, why, perhaps I’ll receive an instant promotion into immortality.
There was no denying it.
Whaling was a dangerous business.
A man could be thrown into eternity in a matter of seconds, without warning, without order, and without even leaving a grave behind.
But so what?
Perhaps we have misunderstood the whole question of life and death.
Perhaps what we call my body here on earth is only a temporary shadow, while the part of me that truly matters lies somewhere deeper.
When we try to understand spiritual things, perhaps we are like oysters beneath the sea, looking up at the sun through the water and imagining that the thick water above us is actually the thinnest possible air.
Maybe my body is only the leftover part of my existence.
Take my body if you want.
Destroy it, bury it, or throw it into the sea.
It isn’t really me.
And if that’s true, then three cheers for Nantucket!
Let the boat break apart.
Let my body be broken with it.
If that day comes, my soul will still belong to me—and not even the power of heaven itself could destroy it.