Last week I compiled a spreadsheet of every recorded question asked on Jeopardy about Herman Melville, and from the data pulled out trends and insights into what’s asked of contestants and how the show subtly teaches viewers about Melville’s life and work.
Today’s bonus post rounds out what I learned about Melville’s regular appearances on the show, looking at two more topics that stood out while going through all 400+ Melville clues: some curiously difficult questions and the handful of questions that got the facts plain wrong.
Brain Busters
As I alluded to in the previous post, the trick to Jeopardy is that between the category and the clue, there are usually several hints in each question from which contestants can triangulate the answer. Among the set of Melville clues, however, I was surprised to find many which the average contestant (or at least the above-average viewer) had little chance of answering unless they were exceptionally familiar with Moby-Dick. Some are certainly trickier than others, but at the very least the phrasing on some is apt to throw people off long enough to miss a chance to buzz in.
March 3, 2022 [BOOK CHARACTERS]: Hunting a whale, Starbuck orders this character, "There, there, give it to him!" meaning to throw a harpoon
(Need to remember not only Queequeg’s name, but that he was specifically the harpooner on Starbuck’s boat.)
December 2, 2020 [NOVEL CHARACTERS]: This character from an 1851 novel "was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge"
(1851 revenge novel ought to do it, but no other hint at it being at sea, and in fact this was a triple Final Jeopardy stumper)
March 17, 2020 [CHARACTERS IN MOBY-DICK]: Tashtego & Daggoo have this specific whaling job
(Tashtego and Daggoo are somewhat minor characters, what could you do but guess that they were harpooners?)
February 4, 2016 [STARBUCK’S ORDERS]: Seeing this 10-armed creature, Starbuck says he almost would have rather "seen Moby Dick and fought him"
(“Giant squid” would be a good guess, and correct, though no normal person associates squid with Moby-Dick. Also, giant squid have 8 arms and 10 tentacles.)
October 24, 2018 [NAME GAME]: The name of this character in "Moby Dick" is Hebrew for "father's brother"
(Really more of a Hebrew question than a Moby-Dick question, but there’s nothing at all in the novel that would help with this one)
October 2, 2022 [19th CENTURY NOVELS]: This 1851 novel mentions New Zealand Tom & Don Miguel, 2 famous contemporaries of the title sea creature
(Sure, 1851/sea creature, but by the time you stop scratching your head at the names New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, time’s up)
February 13, 2015 [LITERARY TITLE CHARACTERS]: This Melville sailor said he was "found in a pretty silk-lined basket hanging" from "a good man's door in Bristol"
(The number of named sailors in Melville’s work must exceed 100, so either you remember this specific quote or you don’t…)
November 16, 2005 [QUICK MOBY-DICK]: The biblical prophet who's the subject of chapter 83
(An instance where knowing less about Moby-Dick might be better. You’d be forgiven for associating Jonah more with Ch. 9: The Sermon than Ch. 83, which is nearby the Jeroboam’s Story, Gabriel, etc.)
November 4, 1987 [MELVILLE]: Melville 1st went to sea after failing to become a surveyor on this N.Y. state transportation project
(Look, I know a lot about Herman Melville but even I could not come up with the name of the transportation project he didn’t work on)
Fact-checking Jeopardy!
Believe it or not, Jeopardy has gotten the facts wrong about Melville and Moby-Dick on a handful of occasions, sometimes in surprisingly dumb ways. Easily the most bone-headed come in this pair of clues which mistakenly identify the port that the Pequod sails from as New Bedford rather than Nantucket.
February 18, 1985: Real Massachusetts city that was home port to fictional ship the "Pequod"
October 6, 1999: In "Moby Dick", the Pequod sails from this "New" Massachusetts seaport
In the first instance, the clue was a triple-stumper — no one rang in even with an incorrect guess — but Alex Trebek gave the answer as “New Bedford.” In 1999, two-day champion Leslie rang in with New Bedford and was awarded the $400 dollars. Interestingly, her lead going into Final Jeopardy was only $800 more than the second place opponent, and she ended up winning the game.
Another set of clues, both from 2007, mistakenly indicate that the events of the book took place in 1851, the year it was published, rather than in 1841 (or thereabout).
March 30, 2007: A harpoon rope around his neck took this 1851 seafarer from us too soon
September 13, 2007: Had a whale of a time in 1851; Pequod problems; call him this narrator
While I don’t deny that this is nitpicking, that the book is being narrated by Ishmael “some years” later than the actual voyage is a significant framing device in the book, allowing for his older and wiser perspective and the more-than-occasional slippage from first-person to omniscient narration. What’s more, in Chapter 85: The Fountain, the older Ishmael specifically calls attention to the older Ishmael writing the very words you’re reading at “fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851.”
Next we have my own personal quibble with the way that Etymology and Extracts are routinely ignored when talking about the famous “opening line” of Moby-Dick. Here, a category in October 2003 asked for the third word in books, poems, and quotes.
October 17, 2003: [Category: THE THIRD WORD] In "Moby Dick"
If you ask me, the third word of Moby-Dick is “Usher,” but I’ll accept “a” if you want to start counting from Etymology’s subtitle.
Arguably the most confusing factually incorrect question for its specificity is a clue from 1996 in the LITERATURE category:
May 31, 1996: Of the 135 chapters in this 1851 novel, 12 are devoted to whales & whaling with no narrative
I admit there’s some wiggle room in how you define a chapter with no narrative, but in a quick survey of the table of contents I counted 39 chapters about whales and whaling and which contribute nothing or virtually nothing to the “narrative.” (If you must know, these are: 32, 33, 35, 45, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95, 98, 101, 103, 104, and 105). Be my guest and cross out 5, 10, or even 15 of these. But where did the writers come up with 12? There are 3 chapters on bad drawings of whales alone.
Next we have a personal bugbear of mine about a certain musician who has made a specious hereditary claim for over 30 years:
May 12, 1998: Electronic music master Moby is a descendant of this creator of Moby Dick
I won’t get into the details here (because I did in a three-part podcast series), though suffice it to say: No, Moby is not a descendant of Herman Melville, no matter how often he’s said it in public, in interviews, on social media, in memoirs, in teeth, mountains, and stars.
There was also this strange phrasing of a clue in a category called “IS SAID.”
February 6, 2002: Herman Melville has been quoted as saying, "Life's a voyage that's homeward"
This clue isn’t “wrong” per se, but the way it’s written suggests that it’s unverified as something Melville really said, or that it’s possibly apocryphal altogether. In fact, the quote is no mystery but the very last line in Melville’s novel White-Jacket, part of a rhyming couplet celebrating the end of his five years at sea:
For what it’s worth, I can find nothing in the literature or annotations that identifies an earlier source for the quote or suggests he was, for example, repeating a traditional song sung at sea. So why Jeopardy! writers phrased it this way remains a puzzle. My best guess is that someone saw the quote out of context and, in 2002, simply didn’t have an easy way to find it right in one of his books.
Finally, we have this factoid about Melville’s own adventurous life at sea, which deserves its own film as much as any of his novels:
June 29, 1994: After jumping ship in Tahiti in 1842, this "Moby Dick" author worked there as a field laborer
Another quibble, perhaps, but in one short sentence this clue actually manages to conflate three distinct incidents during Melville’s years at sea and in turn get it all wrong.
First, Melville did “jump ship” from the Acushnet whaler at the island of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, comprising what would become the basic story of his first novel, Typee. That is to say, he literally fled from the oversight of the officers of the ship into the jungle of Nuku Hiva, hiding there until the ship left. But Nuku Hiva is nearly 900 miles from Tahiti.
After living for about a month on the island, Melville signed onto an Australian whaler the Lucy Ann, which had come into port looking for extra hands. The voyage, however, got off to an inauspicious start almost immediately. The crew was still undermanned and lacked a full complement of officers, a situation which grew worse when the captain fell ill too. When the first mate steered the ship toward Tahiti to seek medical attention for the captain, a faction of the restless crew seized the opportunity to formally mutiny, refusing to go on with the voyage under the direction of the mate. For lack of a better option, when the ship arrived at Tahiti the mate had the mutineers “jailed” on the island — Melville included. The men were confined at night, but during the day were allowed relative freedom to roam the island.
After three weeks of imprisonment, Melville escaped to the neighboring island of Moorea (then known as Eimeo), where he worked as a field laborer for two American brothers, hoeing potatoes and carrying them to the beach. Melville soon took off yet again, living as a beachcomber for some time before signing onto the Charles and Henry whaler of Nantucket and slowly making his way back home.
In other words, Melville did jump ship, did spend time in Tahiti, and did work as a field laborer, just not in one sequence and on three distinct islands.
All that said, however, there have been no factually questionable Jeopardy questions since September 2007 — an impressive 16+ year streak.
I’ll end with one last question from July 23, 1993 in the category AGELESS QUOTES. The actual answer is obvious just from the first two words, but I challenge even the lifelong Melville scholars to name the source of this quote, which must rank as one of the deepest of all deep cuts from any author featured on the show:
“Whale tale author who wrote, "Youth is immortal; 'tis the elderly only grow old!"
Answer HERE.