Comments on: The Science Ink of Moby Dick

By: tom minor

tom minor — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:57:51 +0000

Just watched Moby Dick again. Am getting a tattoo of him in a few weeks. It seems hard to find and good art work of him. Herman Melville is actually my 5th great uncle. Thus my dads middle name Melville.

By: Regarding Melville

Regarding Melville — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 17:55:17 +0000

If you enjoyed Moby Dick and are curious about tattoos, I recommend that you read (or at the very least browse) Melville’s Omoo.

In this book, Melville continues where his semi-autobiographical Typee left off, with a rescued sailor taking off on a haphazard vessel called The Julia. The ship comes across several inhabited islands of people who have a high regard for tattoo art, and whose culture considers tattoos as an integral component of societal distinctions.

Enjoy!

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:51:35 +0000

Do you know if Melville had tattoos? If he sailed, perhaps that was a rite of passage?

By: matt butcher

matt butcher — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:23:29 +0000

I am just very interested in why you call yourself a “hard-core Moby Dick fan.” I would like to learn more about why you call yourself that.

[CZ: How can anyone not call themselves a fan?]

By: VinceRN

VinceRN — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:39:00 +0000

Don’t forget that Ishameal himself was heavily tattooed. He talks about it only briefly as I recall, when he is talking about the measurements of the whale skeleton found on some Island.

@John – Queequeeg was a Maori, they have been doing tattoos for a very long time. Melville likely saw many people like that on his own travels in the Pacific, especially on his own whaling journey. Tattooing has been around much longer than recorded history. There are mummies with tattoos, frozen stone age bodies have been found with tattoos.

Not a big tattoo fan, don’t have any myself, but a huge Melville fan.

By: @morganucodon

@morganucodon — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 17:54:16 +0000

“a wondrous work in one volume”
Thanks for reminding me of that wonderful passage. Wow would I ever like to see some of the Endeavor crew tattoos – were they illustrated anywhere? Did Captain Cook have one himself??

[CZ-I don't think Cook got one. But Sir Joseph Banks, the ship's naturalist, and others on the crew did.]

By: Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:07:19 +0000

John–European sailors had been getting tattoos for 70 years when Moby Dick came out. It all started when Captain Cook and the crew of the Endeavour stopped off in Tahiti and New Zealand. The Endeavour crew got tattoos, brought them back to Europe, and that was that. (The journals of the voyage also used the word tattoo as skin ornament for the first time in English.)

Melville spent years at sea, so he would have seen plenty of tattoos.

By: John Kubie

John Kubie — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 03:01:22 +0000

Carl, or anybody: How did Melville get the idea to have Queequeg covered in tattoos? Were tattoos common in the 19 century? Was whole-body tattooing heard of? Melville had had remarkable world-wide adventures. Had he seen tattoos in other cultures?