I’ll have a new research topic next Sunday, but just to keep things lively around here this is the first bonus “Extracts” post, following up with some additional research and tangents that I cut for space but which nevertheless I found interesting.
Last week’s post explored why Starbucks, a Seattle-based coffee chain started by three guys who admitted to having no particular interest in Moby-Dick, chose to name itself after the first mate of the Pequod. Today, I consider why Melville chose the name for Starbuck in the first place, and discovered a surprising connection that may point to a petty rivalry.
From the great flood-gates of the wonder-world
Before we shove off, let’s first consider where this unusual name even comes from. To my surprise, the name Starbuck itself is thought to have its etymological origins in the watery party of the world. According to one line of thought, Starbuck is a variant of the name Tarbuck, in reference to the village of Tarbock, just east of Liverpool. Tarbuck, in turn, is thought to derive from the Old Norse name Thor plus the Old English brōc for brook or stream.
Other sources suggest a different origin, though one that still associates it with water. This theory states that the name comes from “the Norse word stor, meaning big or large, and bekkr, a stream or brook,” or possibly bokki for “river.” Yet another tells us that stor means “great” while bokki means (redundantly) “great man,” giving common a number of variations over time:
The spelling variations for this surname include "Starbocki", "Starbock", "Stirbock," "Stalbrook", "Sturbock", "Styrbuck", just to name a few. One family historian suggested that "Starbuck" was finally settled upon because it was easier to pronounce: "Stah'buck"
Whichever origin story is true, you can’t deny that the pronunciation “Stah’buck” certainly sounds more like Massachusetts than Seattle.
Three cheers for Nantucket
It goes without saying that names are of utmost importance in Moby-Dick. The book’s most famous line, of course, is the three-word opening sentence “Call me Ishmael,” which in English reads as a kind of soft imperative but in most other languages is simply how one says “my name is…” (Me llamo Ishmael. Je m’appelle Ishmael.) More to the point, the names Ishmael and Ahab in themselves provide thousands of years of meaning and context for the Biblically literate, or those willing to read the footnotes. The 1952 Hendricks House edition of the book, for example, provides five pages of notes just on the name Ishmael, and sixteen on Ahab.
We can assume that Melville was equally as intentional in choosing the name Starbuck for his first mate. As he’s introduced, Starbuck is “a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent,” which is a historical statement as much as it is a literary one. The Starbuck family was indeed one of the oldest and most prominent on Nantucket from the time of its very first European settlers in the mid-17th century, beginning with Edward Starbuck. Edward was among a small group of “investors” of the island, which was established as a corporation, moving his family there in 1660.
Edward’s son Nathaniel Starbuck married Mary Coffin (another surname used in Moby-Dick), who became a successful businesswoman and Quaker church leader, establishing a meeting house on the island in 1708. Though Mary would become a Starbuck in name, her role as a central matriarch in Nantucket history appears to derive from her Coffin roots, as recounted in Lisa Norling’s Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870.
Mary Coffin Starbuck (1645-1717) was the youngest daughter of perhaps the most prominent of the original English proprietors, the “patriarch of Nantucket” Tristram Coffin and his wife Dionis.’* In 1662, in the first English marriage performed on the island, the 17-year-old Mary wed Nathaniel Starbuck, son of another first-purchaser and brother of her brother’s wife. A year later Mary gave birth to the first English child born on Nantucket, a daughter. In part due to her family’s status and connections, in part certainly due to her own remarkable abilities, Mary Starbuck came to wield considerable influence in Nantucket society—more even, apparently, than her husband. John Richardson, the Quaker missionary who succeeded in converting Mary, remarked of the couple: “He appeared not a Man of mean Parts, but she so far exceeded him in soundness of Judgment, clearness of Understanding, and an elegant way of expressing herself, and that not in an affected Strain, but very natural to her, that it tended to lesson the Qualifications of her Husband.” *
Thus even the origins of Quakerism on the island stem in large part from the Starbuck family, which in turn contributed among other things “the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom” used by Moby-Dick’s Quaker characters like Peleg, Bildad, Starbuck, and Ahab — sometimes mimicked by Ishmael in his more excited exhortations.
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
William Starbuck Mayo
Even if there was good reason for a Nantucket whaler to be named Starbuck, that still doesn’t necessarily tell us why Melville chose that specific name among many other options. To be sure, Melville name-dropped many notable whaling families in Moby-Dick — not just the Starbucks. There’s also Spouter Inn proprietor Peter Coffin, his cousin Hosea Hussey, and the (real-life) Nantucket historian Obed Macy. But none of these characters or surnames occupy more than a few pages at most.
In fact, Starbuck stands alone as the one main character who is given a realistic name. As Mansfield and Vincent noted in their Hendricks House annotations, the names Ishmael and Ahab were “seldom if ever used by the early New Englanders.” In fact, vital records from Nantucket and New Bedford in the mid-19th century recorded no Ahabs or Ishmaels at all, and though there were many people with the surname “Stubbs,” none were named simply “Stubb.” There was just one man with the surname Flask in all of Massachusetts during the 1850 census.
So why single out one character among all the top brass of the Pequod? Could it have been meant not as a tribute to one of the founding families of Nantucket but as an insult? Allow me, for a moment, some reckless speculation.
In addition to Edward and Mary Coffin Starbuck, there was another descendant of the Starbuck family who may have been on Melville’s mind right as he began conceiving of Moby Dick. William Starbuck Mayo was a physician and author born in New York but descended from the Nantucket line through his mother, Elizabeth Starbuck. In 1849, two years before Moby-Dick, Mayo published a novel called Kaloolah; or, Journeyings to the Djébel Kumri, which, like Moby-Dick. is presented as an autobiographical account of the exotic adventures of its fictional narrator, though here in Africa and the Middle East. And like Melville, Mayo based the narrative of the book on his own travels in these regions.
Kaloolah was published in the summer of 1849, between Melville’s third and fourth novels Mardi and Redburn. Whereas Melville’s quickly tossed off books both continued a downward trend in book sales since the success of his debut Typee, Kaloolah was a smash hit. The Democratic Review proclaimed Kaloolah “decidedly the book of the season,” while Washington Irving called it “one of the most admirable pictures ever produced in this country.” In contrast to the waning interest in Melville’s travelogues, Kaloolah went through four reprints before the end of the year.
Although it’s not clear whether Melville actually read Kaloolah, it’s exceedingly likely that he would have at least been aware of it given how often his name was dropped in conversations about it, often disparagingly. The Democratic Review, for example, went on to call Kaloolah “inferior to none” of Melville’s novels and “superior to all in truthfulness of delineation, and in the power of successfully interweaving the wonderful with the probable.” In August 1849, Blackwood’s Magazine praised Kaloolah while commenting that Mardi was “closed with a yawn, a day or two after it’s publication.”
In fact, reviews so often compared Kaloolah to Melville’s work that even Mayo seems to have taken offense. In one of the later editions of Kaloolah, Mayo actually added in this paragraph to the book’s preface:
It has frequently been the case among the numerous flattering notices, particularly those from the English press, with which Kaloolah has been received, that allusions have been made to the works of a distinguished American writer, and the suggestion thrown out that it was intended to be of the class and character of Typee. The author himself can perceive no very close resemblance in the matter or manner; but whether there is a likeness or not, certain it is that Kaloolah was written before Typee issued from the press.
But there’s one more connection to Moby-Dick that makes it worth exploring this story. While Kaloolah, on the whole, has nothing to do with whaling or Nantucket, there are a few pages early in the very first chapter in which Mayo, writing as his protagonist Jonathan Romer, states that a life of adventure was “may justly be considered my birthright,” having been descended from the whaling families of Nantucket — including the Starbucks and the Folgers.
A life of adventure may be justly considered my birthright. Descended, on both sides of the house, from some of the earliest settlers of Nantucket, and more or less intimately related to the Coffins, the Folgers, the Macys, and the Starbucks of that adventurous population, it would seem that I have had a natural right to a roving disposition…. Nearly all the male members of my family, for several generations, have been "followers of the sea'": some of them in the calm and peaceful employment of the merchant-service; others, and by far the greater number, in the more dangerous pursuit of the ocean monster.
Mayo then goes to tell the story of the wreck of the Essex as experienced by his own relatives:
One relative was wrecked upon a desert island of the Pacific, and supported life for months upon the eggs of the penguin. Another--a Macy--was found floating upon a spar three days after his ship had foundered with all her crew. Still another was an officer of a ship which was struck and destroyed by an infuriated cachelot, whether by accident or design remains a disputed point amongst whalers.
The boats of the ship were out in pursuit of a "school" of whales, when the officer in charge of the deck perceived an enormous animal coming down, in the direction on which the vessel was standing, with fearful rapidity…. the steersman was directed to put the helm up… but it was too late…. The whale struck her, "head on," with tremendous force.
Recovering from their astonishment, the crew proceeded to examine into the injury which the ship had suffered. It was soon ascertained that no very serious damage had been sustained, when one of the look-outs appalled them with the shout " Here she comes again!" and down came the whale with renewed fury,-a broad-sheet of white foam attesting the rapidity of her progress. Again she struck the ill-fated vessel in nearly the same place- just forward of the fore chains. It was now evident that the ship was materially injured…. In a few hours she went down, and her crew in three boats were left in the middle of the vast Pacific. Only one of the three, after tossing months upon the ocean, and enduring the extremes of hunger and thirst, succeeded in reaching land.
Curiously, later in the novel, Romer is even introduced to the sons of Sheikh Ali ben Hammadow as “Ishmael the marksman.”
Our greetings over, Sheikh Ali ben Hammadow conducted me to the douah, where I was introduced to his sons, and half a dozen other men, by the name of Ishmael El Drebbah, or Ishmael the marksman.
Of course, the sinking of the Essex had happened nearly 30 years earlier, made famous by Owen Chase’s book published in 1821 — it’s not as if either one of them were exactly breaking the story. And several Melville scholars have dismissed Mayo’s use of the name Ishmael as coincidence, noting that Melville himself had used the name in Redburn which he’d completed by the time Kaloolah was published.
Yet it’s intriguing to think that Melville could have enviously read Mayo’s book just as he began conceiving Moby-Dick, or at least read the glowing reviews. Did he seethe at the thought of Mayo’s stolen valor to have been descended from a whaling family, having never risked his life on whaleboat himself?
To be clear, there’s no evidence to support the theory, and none even showing that Melville even read Mayo’s book, much less had an opinion on it or writing in the shadow of his rising star. There’s probably also no way to avoid the name Starbuck if you’re telling a story about the 19th century whaling industry, just as there was no way to avoid the names Coffin, Hussey, and Macy.
But we do know that around January 1850, Melville began writing Moby-Dick. And when it came time to find a name for the character who shrinks from multiple opportunities to save his own life and the lives of his crew; the character blamed for having “morally enfeebled” the crew with his “incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness;” a character too cowardly to face the white whale himself and who is left behind on the Pequod with Pip; the character who begs “ye sweet powers of air” to sweep him away during the final attack so as not to die “in a woman’s fainting fit” — Melville reserved this honor for a character named Starbuck, an out-of-character humiliation of one of the founding fathers of Nantucket and the American whale fishery.
References
In addition to the linksin the post, here are some additional sources which I relied on heavily in my research:
Cecil D. Eby, “William Starbuck Mayo and Herman Melville.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, 1962, pp. 515–20.
Robert W. Lebling, "In Melville's Shadow," Aramco World, Volume 62, Number 5, September/October 2011
Owen Chase, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex, of Nantucket, 1821
William Starbuck Mayo, Kaloolah, or, Journeyings to the Djébel Kumri: an autobiography of Jonathan Romer, 1849
Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery From Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876, 1878