#despatch box

barrowhepburngale Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II photographed at work with her daily red despatch boxes #queenelizabeth #despatchbox #redbox #hmq 

An incredulous grasp of what the nation expects - as Theresa attempts to put a bit more icing onto a cake that needed a bit more than 22 hours in the hot kitchen!

There are always challenges in organisations where the person theoretically in charge of events or policies is assumed to be getting heavily involved in every element of the tasks. I have spent nearly 15 years working with a local police force as an Independent Advisor and because of the way in which that role works, I have met a significant number of senior officers. Their knowledge of the…

The Commander-in-Chief’s Despatch Box (circa 1811)

Previously, on Call Me Moby:

Ishmael and Queequeg, having just arrived on Nantucket island, have made their way to the Try Pots hotel, an establishment owned and operated by one Mr. Hosea Hussey. Ishmael is lost in a reverie, as per usual, staring up at the sign hanging above the doorway of the hotel.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 15. Chowder. Pages 63–4:

I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.

"Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"

"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."

And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said—"Clam or Cod?"

"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.

"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.

"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?" says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"

But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.

"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for us both on one clam?"

However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word "cod" with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.

Ishmael: a little slow?

Mrs. Hussey is clearly asking Ishmael what kind of chowder he wants for dinner: Clam or cod? Yet all Ishmael can do is (pretend to?) be confused at the prospect of having a single clam for dinner. He even makes a dumb pun about it.

"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?" says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"

When Mrs. Hussey shouts down "clam for two!" to the kitchen, Ishmael reaffirms his misinterpretion, and seems convinced that she's going to send up a single clam for him and Queequeg to share for dinner.

I can't tell if Ishmael is being willfully stupid here, or what. He knows the Try Pots is famed for its chowder. Is it really such a huge leap to infer that simply saying "clam" is a shorthand for the type of chowder being ordered up?

I can come up with three possibilities for what's going on:

Ishmael, being but a simple working man, doesn't eat out on the reg, and is therefore unfamiliar with how servers will sometimes shout orders down the line using some kind of slang or shorthand.

Ishmael is super out of it. Maybe he's exhausted, maybe his mind is on other things; but whatever the case, Mrs. Hussey has just caught him way off guard.

Ishmael just ain't too bright.

Possibility #1 is clearly impossible: Ishmael is a sailor, and sailors are the grandmasters of weird and impenetrable argot. I'm really supposed to believe that Ishmael can't intuit that clam is a shortening of clam chowder, but that he has no problem shortening forecastle to friggin' fo'c's'le? Like hell I will.

I also don't believe in possibility #3. I mean, have you read the rest of this book? Ishmael's a lot of things, but a dummy isn't one of them.

So I guess we're left with possibility #2: Ishmael's zonked. Not very satisfying, but there you go.

Purple Shirt Man

Who's this guy Mrs. Hussey is talking to? Why is he in a purple shirt? Are we going to run into him again? Were purple shirts a thing in early 19th-century Nantucket? Why was Mrs. Hussey yelling at him?

Did he look like this?:

Or more like this?:

Clearly, I'm not the only person who wants to know: a search for purple shirt man moby-dick produces nearly half a million hits on Google.

Purple Shirt Man: massive literary mystery---or the greatest mystery in all of American literature? Stay tuned to this blog find out.

"despatched it with great expedition"

When Ishmael says that he despatched his chowder "with great expedition", he's using an alternate spelling of the word dispatch. This spelling doesn't seem to be very much in favor anymore. Except, that is, for one particular context which may be familiar to any Anglophiles or Australophiles in the audience:

A despatch box, as per Wikipedia is:

a wooden box used as a lectern from which frontbench members of Parliament deliver speeches to their parliamentary chamber.

Apparently they "were first used in 17th century Britain, to transport parliamentary documents to the chamber." My guess, then, is that the tradition of using the despatch box as a lectern originated with one singularly lazy MP, who figured he'd be better off bring his whole friggin' suitcase up with him while addressing parliament, rather than simply preparing his damn papers ahead of time.

Ah---how much less rich and intricate this world would be but for incompetent legislators!

The British despatch boxes are modeled on the Australian ones, and were a gift from New Zealand after WWII. They're made from puriri wood, which Wikipedia describes as "the strongest wood in New Zealand". Alas, this was apparently not strong enough to stand up against the furious pen-stabbing of former British PM Gordon Brown, who managed to damage the government's despatch box so profoundly that not even teams of French polishers were able to restore it.[1]

And that's everything you ever wanted to know about despatch boxes!

Pounded ship biscuit

Ishmael gives us a little recipe for chowder:

It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.[2]

"Ship biscuit" is another name for what you might better know as hardtack, a long-lasting food used for sustenance on long journeys. I was a little surprised to discover that you can still buy hardtack, though it's mostly sold under the marginally less unappealing name of pilot bread or pilot crackers. I guess I always sort of thought that hardtack had been more or less replaced by MREs and other advanced shelf-stable foodstuffs.

While casting about for info on hardtack, I also came across the book Sailors' Language by William Clark Russell. I have not yet had a chance to dive into it, but the book looks like a pretty amazing resource. There's one page in particular, noted by the British Library, that

looks at a range of slang terms for the terrible food that sailors were forced to endure. These include lobscouse, dandy-funk, dogsbody, seapie, choke-dog, twice-laid, and hishee-hashee. [emphasis mine]

Dandy-funk! Choke-dog! Twice-laid!

Hishee-hashee!!

I could keep going on and on about this stuff. Like, I found one recipe for seapie that calls for a dozen pigeons. And then there's this ship's bill of fare from 1845, right around the time Melville was writing and Ishmael was sailing, for the whaleship Tiger. It reads like something out of a Monty Python sketch:

Sunday ... duff, meat, bread, molasses Monday ... beans, meat, bread Tuesday ... meat, bread Wednesday ... beans, beef, pork, bread Thursday ... duff, meat, bread, molasses Friday ... rice, meat, bread, molasses Saturday ... hasty pudding, meat, bread, molasses

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Ishmael and Queequeg haven't stepped foot aboard a whaling ship yet, and we're still on land, enjoying our chowder at the Try Pots.

Word of the Day: despatched

Ishmael's Current Mood: satisfied 🍲😋🍲

[1]: The money quote from that article:

An official explained: “Of course we can’t say anything. But if he goes on doing it, it is going to be harder and harder to get off.”

Now imagine a French polisher in a beret and wax moustache saying that, and it's immediately like eight times better.