Ahab's Leg Dilemma: Part 1

; or, how artists confront the enduring mystery of Ahab's ivory leg

Captain Ahab’s ivory leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, stands as one of the most iconic pieces of imagery in all of literature. Draw a man with a peg leg next to whale and he’s instantly recognizable as Ahab, as is the general idea of what happened to the leg and the less than amicable relationship he has with that whale. It’s all in the leg; and the leg tells the whole story.

Which is why it’s so maddening, so confounding, that although Melville provides the minutest details about every last person, animal, and object in Moby-Dick, he fails to tell us which leg Ahab is missing. At no point in the novel is it stated, or even hinted at, whether that infamous prosthesis fits onto his right or his left limb. Not when we’re told of how it was “devoured, chewed up, crunched” by Moby Dick; not when Stubb dreams that Ahab kicks him (and then turns oddly into a pyramid); and not even when the carpenter takes measurements of Ahab’s stump in order to make him a replacement leg when the first one splinters. We know up to where and when he lost the leg (off the coast of Japan, on his last voyage) and how much of the limb was taken off (just below the knee), but not whether it was the left or the right.

Melville scholars have given this question some thought since at least the 1950s, attempting to deduce which leg is missing based on clues in the novel. Although it’s never been a particular focus of critical analysis of the book, there has been curiosity on occasion about whether there’s anything we can learn from how Ahab is described performing different activities that might suggest a side, or how whaling ships and tools were constructed that could provide insight. But it seems that the consensus for some years now has been to leave the mystery alone as, despite these efforts, there’s frustratingly scant hard evidence and even the best efforts have fallen short of convincing.

Of course, this oversight doesn’t pose a problem for the average reader who is free to imagine Ahab missing whichever limb they please, if they maintain a consistent vision of him at all. Ultimately it has no bearing on the novel whatsoever, and Melville may even have intended for there to be ambiguity for some reason — though what that reason is we can only speculate. After all, it almost seems improbable that he simply forgot to mention it.

But it does present a vexing problem for a small subset of those engaging with the book in a more practical sense, i.e., illustrators, artists, film directors, and anyone else who’s been tasked with adapting Moby-Dick to a visual medium. Melville is generous with details of what the Pequod looked like, the kind of clothes they wore, and of course endless descriptions of whales and whaling tools and processes, but at some point each artist is left to their own imagination to choose a leg: left or right?

Practical Ahabology

Absent any satisfactory answer to the question, I was curious whether we might nevertheless learn something from the innumerable artistic interpretations of Moby-Dick, and of Ahab in particular. Could it be that something is revealed in the staging, so to speak, where bringing the action to life hints at an answer? Do artists fret over this decision or do they simply flip a coin?

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to take this approach. In May 1983, Concordia University English professor David Ketterer submitted an article to the Melville Society Extracts newsletter pondering Ahab’s missing limb. Ketterer included a brief calculation of leg preference based on about two dozen illustrations plus the three Moby-Dick films, relying on a catalog created by Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein museum for a 1976 exhibition about the art of Moby-Dick. Counting each Ahab, he discovered a moderate preference for the left leg, 18 to 12.

Most illustrators appear to favor the left leg; at least such is the conclusion to be drawn from the recent collection Illustrationen zu Melvilles “Moby-Dick.” Of the twenty-seven illustrations and comic strip excerpts included which present decipherable full-length portraits, seventeen depict Ahab with a left ivory leg while only ten show him with a right one. As for the three film versions, John Barrymore, in both The Sea Beast (1926) and the talkie remake Moby-Dick (1930), sports a right artificial leg, but Gregory Peck opts for the left in John Huston’s 1956 adaptation.

Thirty depictions isn’t a bad start, but in the forty years since Ketterer’s article, we have not only many more illustrations to survey but also much greater ease in collecting them beyond a single German catalog, most notably Elizabeth Schultz’s compendium Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-century American Art, published in 1995, and several other catalogs specifically recording every known illustrated edition of the book.

I wanted to update Ketterer’s study, and set a goal of 100 Ahabs to find whether the same results held after all this time. I also wanted to expand on the kinds of depictions collected for this project, including not just book illustrations and films but a wide variety of visual adaptations — any time an artist was faced with that same decision.

The first illustrated edition of Moby-Dick was published in 1896, just five years after Melville’s death, featuring four full-page images by artist Augustus Barnham Shute. Unfortunately for our purposes, though, Shute actually never shows Ahab’s lower half, appearing only once but obscured behind the side of a whale boat. (Nor is this all that surprising given that he’s hardly present for a majority of the 135 chapters, and doesn’t speak a line until 20 percent of the way into the book.) So, beginning with an 1899 edition illustrated by I.W. Taber, I created yet another spreadsheet (an unexpected theme for a blog about literature) and started flipping through the two dozen or so illustrated copies of Moby-Dick on my shelf.

Along with Schultz’s book, I also referred to a list of illustrated editions created by the University of Kansas’ Kenneth Spencer Research Library, and digitized and photographed copies I found around the internet (archive.org, eBay, and Etsy were surprisingly good sources). And when these efforts stalled at about 75% of the way to the goal, I turned to direct correspondence, enlisting the help of Bill Pettit, whose collection of Moby-Dick editions dwarfs my own and rivals even the most extensive institutional collections. In the final stretch, reference librarian Shelby Schellenger at the University of Kansas’ Kenneth Spencer Research Library (which received many of Elizabeth Schultz’s personal copies as a gift) came through with the final batch of photos to get me to 100. So thank you, as always, to the librarians who make this blog possible.

Ahab in Paint, in Ink, in Stone, in Camera Lenses

First, here’s a breakdown of the data I collected. Given how central illustrations are to the history of Moby-Dick, I wanted to weight their representation at about half of the total, with the rest coming from every other visual medium for which I could find a representative Ahab. In all, I collected:

• 48 depictions from book illustrations, including full-text editions, abridged and adapted versions, graphic novels, two “board” books for infants, and two pop-up books for adults;

• 14 cartoons from the New Yorker and Los Angeles Times;

• 12 stand-alone works of art;

• 9 comic book adaptions;

• 6 album covers;

• 4 films, 3 television adaptations, 3 theatrical productions, and 1 opera.

You can check out the spreadsheet here, which has information about the artist, year, publisher or director, and actor, where applicable.

So without further ado, the final tally was…. 🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

52 Ahabs missing a left leg, and 48 Ahabs missing a right leg. A virtual tie, with the slightest of preferences for the left leg. It’s closer than David Ketterer’s study from 1983, but his result narrowly holds. To a surprising degree, in fact, this near-split down the middle held even for individual mediums. Of the 48 book illustrations, exactly 24 took off his left leg and 24 took off the right. Theater productions (including Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick opera) were 2 and 2; cartoons were 8 left and 6 right, and so on.

The only really lopsided result was television productions, which included Victor Jory in a 1954 episode for the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” series, Patrick Stewart in the 1998 mini-series, and William Hurt in 2011. All three put the ivory prosthesis on their right leg. The films followed suit — John Barrymore and Denis Lavant in the French production Captaine Achab wore it on the right, while Gregory Peck wore it on the left.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. I created a photo album with examples from all 100 adaptations where you can see a whole world of Ahabs, including:

• Harry Potter Ahab;

• The Babadook Ahab;

• Conan O’Brien Ahab;

• Sgt. Pepper Ahab;

• Business casual Ahab;

• Santa Ahab; and

• Black-tie Ahab

Ultimately, I think the results of this informal study show that on a large enough scale, illustrators naturally tend to fall into a 50-50 split. There were actually seven illustrated editions for which I was never able to find interior photos (see below for a list) but I fully expect that these would follow the same pattern.

The virtual tie also seems to answer the question of whether we might be able to infer anything about which leg is missing from patterns in the adaptations. Instead, the more glaring trend that I found is that many artists almost seem to avoid drawing lower half. While the advantage of avoiding these angles was obvious for film, television, and theater adaptations (i.e., relieving actors from having to wear a fake prosthesis in every scene), there were even many illustrated editions of the book where Ahab’s leg was obscured by other characters, by the sides of a whaleboat, or simply shown from the waist up. But, again, this is at least partly explained by Ahab barely being present for much of the book. Even Rockwell Kent only drew Ahab’s ivory leg four times.

Two-Legged Ahab

As surprised as I was at how naturally the results ended up almost neck-and-neck, even stranger was discovering that in a few instances artists had their leg and ate it too, sometimes drawing Ahab missing a left leg and sometimes a right. (I excluded these Ahabs from the spreadsheet for the purpose of this study.)

But there was a different kind of anomaly that stood out from the rest, and hiding in plain sight. Kent, whose illustrations for the 1930 Lakeside Press edition are still held to be the definitive illustrations for Moby-Dick, stood alone in having accidentally drawn Ahab in one image with both legs. While I counted him among the “Left Ahabs” overall, I couldn’t help but highlight this rarely-noticed error accompanying a scene in Chapter 133: The Chase—First Day in which Ahab wrestles the whaleboat from the jaws of Moby Dick.

There’s no doubt that Kent intended for this figure to be Ahab, and that both legs are present; it was Kent who first brought it to the attention of Lakeside Press. On May 13, 1930, shortly before the final draft was going to print, Kent wrote a letter to director of design William A. Kittredge saying that he’d just been informed of the error. He added that he could either fix it or “let it go through as a revelation of the stupidity of the artist.”

Someone has discovered a mistake in the last full page drawing for the third volume, the drawing of a man struggling with the jaw of a whale. That is, of course, Captain Ahab, and I knew it; but I have given him two good legs whereas Ahab only had one. I can change the drawing if you consent, but I am perfectly willing to let it go through as a revelation of the stupidity of the artist. 

Kittredge, who unequivocally loved the final illustrations but who had also put up with four years of Kent dodging increasingly impatient check-ins, preferred the latter option. The two-legged Ahab remained.

Next Week — The Leg Dilemma Pt. 2

Despite the best efforts of several scholars before me, I couldn’t help but wonder: isn’t there something in the text that suggests which leg Ahab lost to Moby Dick? Could it really be that there are no clues, or no way to triangulate an answer from the text? I found previous attempts lacking in their commitment to getting an answer to such an inane, useless question, and realized that I might be just the man for the job.

Do I dare try to succeed where others have failed? Stay tuned — I might just have found the answer.

Epilogue: Missing Legs, Missing Data

Let me know if you have one of these editions (illustrator name in bold) — and which leg Ahab is missing!

• Ellis Silas (Oxford University Press "Herbert Strang's Library," 1929)

• Syd Browne (Regents Publishing, 1953)

• Fred R. Exell (Ginn & Co. "Shorter Classics," 1957)

• Bernard Friedman (Laidlaw, 1962)

• Stein ("Macdonald's Illustrated Classics," 1952)

• Tony Tallarico (Keyway Classics, 1977)

• Jose-Luis Macias-Sampedro (Joshua Morris "Wishing Well Adventure Classic,” 1985)