Call me Starbucks.
; or, the real history of the planet's most ubiquitous Melville reference
Whether or not the general public is even aware, American culture is still awash — drowning, even — in subtle references to Moby-Dick. Nearly 200 years after its publication, there are few other works of American literature that have comparably worked their way into every corner of our unconscious consumption, from the high-brow to the low, from academia to commerce, from award winning films to Saturday morning cartoons. Whether it’s characters in Star Trek liberally weaving in Ahab’s soliloquies, a Pomeranian named Queequeg in The X-Files, filmmakers and musicians borrowing their stage names, and not-one-but-two Oscar nominated films at the 2023 Academy Awards alone, Moby-Dick is, as Ishmael suggests, “not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time).”
But there’s one reference to the book that has become so ingrained in our daily experience and vocabulary that it’s as invisible as it is omnipresent. I’m talking, of course, about Starbucks Coffee, which famously took its name from Starbuck, first mate of the Pequod, and bolstered its maritime credentials with vaguely nautical branding and iconography. And yet, the company has never really explained why it used this name; not to my satisfaction, and certainly not commensurate to the degree which they’ve co-opted the world’s foremost association with the name Starbuck. For this week’s investigation, I determined to avenge the second death of Starbuck, once dragged to the bottom of the sea and now to the bottom of the search results.
To be clear, Starbucks has never shied from confirming that their name is a reference to Moby-Dick. It’s just that they just as readily concede there’s no particular significance to the name much beyond it just kind of sounding right. The corporate explanations never go on to explain, for example, that one of the company’s founders was a Melville fanatic; its branding certainly has no other apparent connection to Moby-Dick; there’s no replica scrimshaw on the counters nor whaling scenes on the wallpaper; nor do they sell a Queequeg Frappuccino — which, for what it’s worth, also sounds right to my ears.
The way that Starbucks has always shrugged off its association to Moby-Dick has never sat right with me. Could it really be that the world’s most pervasive allusion to Moby-Dick is “mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing?” I wasn’t buying it. I know the kind of person who names their company (or pet) after Moby-Dick — it takes one to know one — so I decided to take a deep dive into its history and find the drizzly November soul on whom we could pin this naming feat.
A Starbucks is Born
Starbucks doesn’t need much introduction as a company, and more importantly they also aren’t sponsoring or even subscribing to my Substack, so I’ll keep this brief: the first Starbucks opened in 1971 at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, founded by business partners Gordon Bowker, Jerry Baldwin, and Zev Siegl. In the first decade or so, stores only sold roasted beans, tea, and brewing equipment, not yet serving cups of coffee.
In any case, its corporate “About Us” page indeed confirms that their name is a reference to the book, though provides little else by way of explanation:
Our name was inspired by the classic tale, “Moby-Dick,” evoking the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.
The connection it draws between Moby-Dick and coffee, however, raises more questions than it answers. For one, it’s hard to imagine that in order to evoke the “early coffee traders” the founders chose a 19th-century American book about the whaling industry. Depending how “early” of a period they had in mind, the coffee trade begin in ancient coffee forests on the Ethiopian plateau, or it began on the Arabian peninsula, or in Hungary after the Turks invaded in 1596. Even the phrasing, that the name ‘evokes’ the seafaring tradition, is sneakily passive. Did the founders mean to evoke the tradition, or does it just simply… evoke?
Even more strangely, while there is indeed a connection between the early settlers of Nantucket and the coffee trade, it’s not through Moby-Dick and not one Starbucks likely wants to emphasize. One of the prominent early settlers of Nantucket in the mid-17th century, along with Edward Starbuck and family, was Peter Folger, a surveyor and interpreter of Native American languages. Two hundred years later, Folger’s distant descendant J.A. Folger left Nantucket for California during the gold rush and, long story short, eventually founded what became Folgers Coffee Company in San Francisco.
The Folgers had other famous folks in their family tree, too. Melville briefly mentions the family in Chapter 24, noting as evidence of the noble lineage of whalers that Peter Folger and his wife Mary were the maternal grandparents of Benjamin Franklin. Ironically, J.A. Folger was also an uncle to Henry Clay Folger, president and later chairman of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company. Standard Oil, of course, was one of the earliest oil refiners to manufacture kerosene beginning in the 1870s, driving down oil prices and all but destroying the last remnants of the 19th century whaling industry.
But back to Starbucks. The incoherence in the corporate blurb about the “seafaring tradition” and so on suggested to me that what was once a more layered history had over the years been boiled down in the try-pots of corporate branding consultants. Thus, I thought it would be useful to collect explanations of the name from various stages of its history and learn more about its origins.
Mountains of Coffee
Per a source used on the company’s Wikipedia page, founder Gordon Bowker recalled that the name Starbucks came from a brainstorming session with his colleague and marketing consultant Terry Heckler, who suggested that they choose a word beginning with “ST.” With this suggestion in mind, Bowker and Heckler then came upon an old map of Cascade Range mining towns and spotted the name “Starbo,” recalling the character of Starbuck from Moby-Dick.
Bowker recalls that a business partner of his, Terry Heckler, thought words beginning with the letters "st" were powerful, leading the founders to create a list of words beginning with "st", hoping to find a brand name. They chose "Starbo", a mining town in the Cascade Range and from there, the group remembered "Starbuck", the name of the chief mate in the book Moby-Dick. Bowker said, "Moby-Dick didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense."
The citation for this convoluted story is a 2012 post by Amy Rolph on a Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog, which itself is quoting a March 2008 interview with Gordon Bowker in the Seattle Times. In the original, Bowker gives a slightly fuller version of the story:
BOWKER: My recollection is this: We were thinking of all kinds of names and came desperately close to calling it Cargo House, which would have been a terrible, terrible mistake. Terry Heckler [with whom Bowker owned an advertising agency] mentioned in an offhand way that he thought words that begin with "st" were powerful words. I thought about that and I said, yeah, that's right, so I did a list of "st" words.
Somebody somehow came up with an old mining map of the Cascades and Mount Rainier, and there was an old mining town called Starbo. As soon as I saw Starbo, I, of course, jumped to Melville's first mate [named Starbuck] in Moby-Dick. But Moby-Dick didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense.
As we’ll see, this basic sequence of events is repeated in most versions of the story. The founders start with the letters “ST,” find the name Starbo on an old map, and suddenly connect it to Starbuck of Moby-Dick.
Bowker also admits that the name had nothing really to do with Moby-Dick beyond a kind of word association game. But he also suggested the Seattle Times that the truth of the story is possibly lost to history, comparing it to “writing the Council of Nicaea [and] choosing which Gospels to include in the New Testament. Some are apocryphal and some are factual.” This odd Biblical analogy aside, it’s not the only reason to doubt Bowker’s recollection; shortly after, he makes a connection between Moby-Dick (the film, if not the book) and coffee, hinting that it might have played a role in choosing the name.
BOWKER: A lot of times you'll see references to the coffee-loving first mate of the Pequod. And then somebody said to me, well no, it wasn't that he loved coffee in the book, it was that he loved coffee in the movie…. Moby-Dick has nothing to do with coffee as far as I know.
Bowker is right that Starbuck does not express an affinity for coffee in the book; in fact, he doesn’t say anything about it at all. There are only two brief mentions of coffee in the book: in Chapter 2, Ishmael comments that the Spouter Inn looks like “the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.” And in Chapter 5, we learn that Queequeg “eschewed” coffee. As for the movie — and presumably he meant the 1956 John Huston film — again, no one mentions coffee at all. (Just to be sure, I also checked the 1930 version featuring John Barrymore as Ahab, and the 1926 silent film The Sea Beast, but neither film shows anyone drinking coffee, talking about coffee, or even freely giving coffee to the waves.)
I then found a page in Starbucks’ website archives which mirrors Bowker’s version but with an important detail changed: prior to the suggestion that they find a name starting with ST-, Bowker actually first suggested naming the company Pequod Coffee. Heckler objected, understandably suggesting that no one would want to order a cup of “Pee-quod.”
In 1971, our founders got together with artist Terry Heckler to define their new brand. They wanted the company’s name to suggest a sense of adventure, a connection to the Northwest and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders. Co-founder Gordon Bowker, a writer, initially proposed calling the company “Pequod,” after the ship in Herman Melville‘s classic novel “Moby-Dick.” But Terry objected – would a cup of “Pee-kwod” appeal to anyone?
Ignoring the detail that Starbucks wouldn’t serve brewed cups of coffee for another decade, this version implies that the connection to Moby-Dick actually preceded the phonetic connection to the Starbo mine — yet it goes on to tell the same sequence of events (ST- → Starbo → Starbuck). We’re therefore supposed to understand that the founders started with Pequod Coffee but abandoned the idea, only to find their way back to Starbuck and Moby-Dick. At the very least, it points to a certain monomaniacal obsession with Moby-Dick, which the founders have always denied. Why would they otherwise be so intent on a Moby-Dick related name?
Howard Schultz, who bought Starbucks in 1986 and became its CEO for the next 14 years, tells a similar version of the story in a book he wrote about the company but changes two pertinent, if contradictory, details. Although he wasn’t there himself, he writes that 1) the founders wanted a name that was “distinctive and tied to the Northwest,” and 2) that it was partner Jerry Baldwin who made the connection back to Moby-Dick — not Bowker.
The partners agreed that they wanted something distinctive and tied to the Northwest. Terry researched names of turn-of-the-century mining camps on Mt. Rainier and came up with Starbo. In a brainstorming session, that turned into Starbucks. Ever the literature lover, Jerry made the connection back to Moby Dick. The first mate on the Pequod was, as it happened, named Starbuck. The name evoked the romance of the high seas and the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.
It’s true that Baldwin was an English major, as articles occasionally point out, and that he even taught English for two years. What they don’t typically mention, however, is that he was teaching English at a Salinas, California army base during the Vietnam War — not exactly AP American Literature. Like so many other versions, though it’s still a bit of a non-sequitur. The founders wanted a name that would tie the company to the Northwest… and so chose a name indelibly associated with the northeast, and specifically to the island of Nantucket?
I wanted an explanation closer to the source, and found an Associated Press article from March 1979, back when the company was still just a small chain in Seattle. Bowker repeats the claim about the Starbo mining town and, with the same characteristic illogic that seems to define these interviews, that they wanted “a name that would be relatively free of association.”
"We wanted a name that would be relatively free of association and that would come to mean coffee and tea in Seattle," he [Bowker] said.
Running through a list of words beginning with the letters ST, on the theory that they pack punch, Bowker lit on Starbo, an old mining town near Mount Rainier.
"I immediately thought of the Melville character, the first mate on the Pequod in 'Moby Dick,'" he said.
It’s remarkable that not only has the story changed very little since the 1970s, this version introduces even more confusion. Bowker reclaims credit for the connection to Moby-Dick rather than Baldwin, and again we have this idea that they wanted a name “relatively free of association,” and so chose the name of a character distinctively used in one of the most famous novels of all time.
What I found so interesting about all of these conflicting stories is that none of them even attempt to explain the significance of Moby-Dick, or suggest that the founders had even read the book — much less enjoyed it so much that they wanted to name their company for it. Nor is there a convincing reason for why they chose Starbuck from among the dozens of eligible characters. For instance, why not STubb? Yet as I dove deeper into the history of the company, the sheen of the corporate narrative was stripped off, you might say, “as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it.”
Things really started to unravel after I found an article in the Tacoma News Tribune from November 2003, which provided more information about the “Starbo” mining town for which the company is sort of named. Starbo, I learned, was not a mining town at all but simply a camp. And the camp wasn’t even named Starbo; it was named Storbo. Camp Storbo, sometimes mistakenly referred to as Starbo on old maps and signs, was named after Peter Storbo who founded one of the early mining companies on Mount Rainier, creatively named the Mount Rainier Mining Company.
As if this weren’t convoluted enough, the Tacoma News Tribune article threw one more wrench into the story: not only was Starbo actually Storbo, Peter Storbo’s name wasn’t even Storbo. When Peter Pederson came to America from Norway in 1881, there were so many Pedersons and Petersons where he ended up in Minnesota that he changed it to Storbo, taken from a village in Sweden across the border from where he grew up.
While this tangent doesn’t help explain the central mystery here, it’s nevertheless fascinating that—putting aside all the uncertainties of why the founders of Starbucks chose to name the company after Moby-Dick—so many of the individual elements of the various stories are themselves based on misunderstandings and erroneous information. But “to any monomaniac man,” as they say, “the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.”
Nevertheless, at this point my working theory was that maybe it was the founders complete lack of familiarity with the book led them to the name. Maybe there really was no more thought given to the decision beyond whaling → water → coffee trade. It’s worth bearing in mind that Bowker, Baldwin, and Siegl were all born in the early 1940s and grew up in a time where Moby-Dick had only somewhat recently claimed its place in the canon of American literature, eventually trickling down to become assigned reading in high schools and colleges. John Huston’s film would have hit theaters when they were in their early teens. In other words, maybe it’s not surprising that they would have had a passing familiarity with the book’s major characters, but hadn’t actually read and/or loved it.
But then I found one last article that turned the whole thing upside down.
Enter Leimbacher; to Him, the Pequod
In May 2020, Baldwin and Bowker gave an interview to the magazine of the University of San Francisco, where they had first met as students in the 1960s. The article repeats much of the same history about the name, but includes this startling detail: the name Starbucks “was a nod to Baldwin and Bowker’s film company, which they called Pequod.” They had a film company before there ever was a coffee company? And that company was also named after Moby-Dick? This felt like the end of the line for the idea that the founders had no particular affinity for the book, or that it came from just sounds and associations.
With this clue in mind, I was able to narrow my search and dug up a 2017 article on Historylink.org, written by former Seattle Times arts critic Sheila Farr. Farr went even further, offering additional detail about the film company and another venture that Baldwin and Bowker had schemed up before landing on coffee.
In various partnerships together, they tried writing screenplays for KING-TV's production company and making prerecorded classical-music broadcasts for radio. Baldwin and Bowker, with another pal, had a scheme to make documentary films about American music: jazz, blues, folk. They called their company Pequod, after the ship in Moby Dick. And — as they liked to point out — that venture, like the Pequod, sank without a trace.
Needless to say, the Pequod film company is left out of virtually every retelling of how Starbucks got its name, perhaps because it so clearly contradicts everything the founders have otherwise said. Maybe there’s a feeble argument that the name Starbucks evokes the ‘seafaring tradition’ of the early coffee trade, but documentary film is not exactly known for such watery origins. Was everything they said about the name a lie from the very beginning?
I searched the Washington Secretary of State’s corporation registration records for anything named Pequod, but only came up with a Pequod Inc. crab fishing business registered in 1977. Nor were there mentions of it in contemporary Seattle newspapers. In fact, I wasn’t able to find any leads at all that the business ever existed.
But Farr mentioned that there was “another pal” involved in the idea. We might assume that this person was Terry Heckler, Bowker’s business partner in the marketing and branding firm, but Heckler is mentioned by name later in the article. And yet, through the magic of the internet, I found a blog post on blogspot.com (still a thing!) by that very pal, a man named Ed Leimbacher who met Bowker while they were both freelance writers for Seattle Magazine.
In his post, Leimbacher outed himself not only as the friend involved with the film idea, but as the one who named it Pequod.
Around 1969 I teamed up with friends named Gordon Bowker (another Seattle Mag early regular) and Jerry Baldwin to create a brief, season-of-dreams film company intending to write and produce—for the networks, we foolishly thought, in the era before Public Television–a series of films that would document the Music (and musicians!) of the South. Our pilot project, for which I wrote a quasi-script, introduced the richly varied styles of music to be found across Louisiana—blues, jazz, zydeco, Cajun, gospel, and more.
Anyway, I quixotically named our supposed film company Pequod Productions—a bit of whimsy indicating that the company expected to sink without a trace, as had its namesake, one of the ships in Moby Dick. Our documentary proposals were ignored in New York and L.A., and our Pequod thus sank. I continued on freelancing, and the other guys moved on too, to co-found a fledgling coffee company soon named Starbucks, complete with ship’s-figurehead mermaid as logo and a name also taken from Moby Dick, that of Ahab's First Mate. (Melville's whale novel sure did get around. Forget Howard Schultz's version of history; I know that the lost Pequod helped trigger that coffee company's soon-to-be-famous name.)
Ed clearly was the key to the story, finally supplying at least some substance to the many flimsy stories that have been told over the last 50 years. And Ed, as I raced to discover, was still around to tell his story.
A Gam with Ed Leimbacher
For better or worse, Ed wasn’t involved with the coffee company that Gordon, Jerry, and Zev had brewing shortly after giving up on their half-baked film company. Among whatever financial implications this might have had for him, it also meant that he was relatively easy to find, still living in the Seattle area after a long career as a music critic in magazines such as Rolling Stone, writing books, and selling books and records at Mister E. Books in Pike Place Market.
When Ed and I connected over the phone he spoke in a breathy whisper, having lived for many years with Parkinson’s. But the history of his various business ventures and relationships with the Starbucks founders quickly came into sharp focus, as did the influence he felt after studying Moby-Dick in graduate school just before all the above took place.
“In the late 1960s, I was in grad school at the University of Washington, which involved studying American Literature. We’d been studying Moby-Dick and I was taken not only by the novel and the author but also what other possibilities lay within. I had read Moby-Dick prior to that so I was well acquainted with all the folderol that goes on; the good and the peculiar and so on. But I didn’t know much about Melville, just that he was this crazy guy who had written this brilliant book.”
It was around the end of his grad program that Leimbacher met Gordon Bowker through their work writing for Seattle Magazine. Ed told me that he and his wife became close to Bowker, despite an underlying awareness that they were in a friendly competition for article commissions.
“Gordon and I were both working as freelance writers trying to score big in Seattle Magazine. Gordon and I were rivals, I suppose you'd say, but nobody had anything against anybody else. My wife and Gordon were friends and she used to cook for him when he wanted to celebrate a birthday or something. But we both filed stories with Seattle Mag. Gordon was a slow and or cautious writer, and I was just a busy freelancer trying to make enough money to survive. That's how we met through the interim, Seattle Magazine.”
Bowker also introduced Ed to his friends Jerry Baldwin and Zeg Siegl, pitching an ambitious plan to produce films that would document traditional American folk music around the country, not unlike the films of documentarians and ethnomusicologists like Les Blank working around the same period.
“We were going to go around the country, starting with the music of Louisiana, because it seemed so culturally rich and with different roots. I just saw the possibility that it could be really interesting. The music of America has lots of nooks and crannies to explore, if you only had the money to do it. And I had relatives in the south.”
Ed recalled that he mostly worked on the project with Jerry Baldwin, with Gordon more on the sidelines potentially as a producer or someone who could finance the project. But the idea, as he recalled it, was mostly his own pet project.
“Gordon was more of a businessman. He was really the only one who had any money. I was a starving grad student. But I wrote the screenplay and picked everything else. The name Pequod came from me. That was just my little joke as a grad student with pretensions to be a writer. I liked the fact that the Pequod ‘sank without a trace.’ I figured that was a good name for something so mysterious.”
In the end, the company only existed only on paper—and hardly even that. Ed never even officially registered the business, which explains why indeed I found no trace. The major networks passed on his written proposals for Pequod Films and everybody moved on to their next projects. But Ed still seemed to regret that he perhaps lacked the monomaniacal drive to make it happen.
“There was nothing but a cover sheet for the documentary film that didn’t get made. We approached people with letters of interest to NBC and CBS, but neither one jumped at the chance to do the decent thing of covering the US music scene. Didn’t happen. They had no interest in the music of Louisiana or in American music at the time. I’ve been interested in music since I was a kid but my one shot at it, going to NY to try to convince some tape documentary unit didn’t go anywhere and I didn’t follow up with stubborn righteousness.
In 1970, Bowker partnered with Terry Heckler in a communications design firm, creating marketing campaigns for local Washington companies such as K2 Skis and JanSport. The flourishing agency soon needed another writer and Bowker suggested that they hire Leimbacher, which allowed Bowker to spend more time on his new coffee company venture with Baldwin and Siegl. Even without Ed’s influence, the trio decided to honor the film company that brought them together and call it Starbucks.
Ed said he felt no need to be credited for the name, but still couldn’t help believing that it was his own admiration for Moby-Dick and choice of “Pequod” for the film company which indirectly led the coffee team toward choosing Starbuck.
“If Gordon initially tried to use Pequod, it was because of my interest in Moby-Dick. He wasn't reading it or studying it in any capacity. He must have decided that he likes the word, if nothing else. I don't recall any of the three having a particular interest in literature. But it wasn’t anything I had claimed. It's a good word.”
Meanwhile, Ed worked with Heckler for the next twelve years, creating among other campaigns a series of legendarily goofy (and highly successful) commercials and ads for Rainier Beer, which he called his “other claim to fame.”
Way back in the late 1960s, Rainier Beer went away from being a ‘straight’ beer company to being a source of crackpot ideas and fun. I got hired to work for Terry Heckler and ultimately Rainier Beer and we became known in the industry as a source for strange approaches to selling beer.
So there you have it. Adding Ed’s recollections to what Bowker and Baldwin have said over the years (Siegl has been largely silent on the matter), I do feel as if I’m walking away with a clearer understanding of the Starbucks name. And just as importantly, I feel vindicated in my suspicion that somewhere in the depths of this story I would find the kind of Moby-Dick fanatic whose fascination with the book would compel them to name their own creative work after it.
Whether Heckler and Bowker really pored over old mining maps and spotted the Storbo/Starbo camp, or whether Bowker and Baldwin also read and admired Moby-Dick, we’ll probably never know. They’ve all but given up trying to remember the details, but it’s clear that Ed’s love for the book rubbed off on them enough to at least unconsciously perceive its depth of meaning. Somehow they understood that the name Starbuck, all by itself, would bestow a sense of history, grandeur, adventure, and American world dominance, without customers necessarily realizing how or why.
Great research! I had always heard that the Starbuck's company name came from Moby Dick, but you've shared some cool insight.