#rokovoko

With this chapter, we briefly move back into one of Melville’s more comfortable, more popular subjects: The south seas, which is to say the islands of the southern Pacific ocean.

As I mentioned before, this chapter isn’t an exact transcript of what Queequeg told Ishmael that night, but rather a sort of reconstructed narrative based on that, information later gleaned from Queequeg, and from other miscellaneous individuals who knew of the story.

il post qua sotto con il disegno del pinguino è di quattro anni fa.

nel frattempo ho fatto altri due dischi con jingle django, ho messo su un altro gruppo che si chiama ataca paca e ho fatto due dischi anche con loro, continuo a vivere a madrid, ho cambiato casa due tre volte, mi sono sposato e ho iniziato a fare musica elettronica per i fatti miei a nome rokovoko.

Previously on Call Me Moby:

Our narrator, Ishmael, is spending the weekend in New Bedford, MA, where he awaits a ship to take him to Nantucket Island. There he plans to find a whaling voyage to sign up on as a petty sailor.

In the meantime, Ishmael has struck up a fast friendship with Queequeg, a so-called "savage" with whom he shares a bedroom. The two men have just spent all night in their room, chatting with each other like pre-teen boys at summer camp.

Ishmael now begins to relate Queequeg's backstory to us.

Today's Installment:

Chapter 12. Biographical, Page 56:

Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.

A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.

In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage—this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin. They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."

What a fantastic line. Of the numberless gems Melville has strewn throughout his novel so far, this is one of my favorites. It's pithy and profound, straightforward and enigmatic all at once. Like the best poetry, it is a mystical expression of the inexpressible.

So let's ruin all that by applying the rules of mathematical logic to it, shan't we?

Ishmael's statement can be written as a simple if-then proposition:

If a place is true, then it's not on any map.

If we represent the proposition "a place is true" with the letter T, and the proposition "a place is on a map" with the letter M, then we can boil that down to:

T -> ~M

From logic, we know that if a statement is true, then the contrapositive is true:

M -> ~T

In other words: according to Ishmael, if a place is on a map, then it's not true. Which is awfully distressing, to say the least. I mean, what have we been paying all these cartographers to do for the past few millennia? They can't get a single true place properly down on paper? Yeesh.[1]

Needless to say, I'm kidding. Of course there are true places on maps. For example, the Peet's Coffee I'm sitting in right now. It's totally a true place, because I'm sitting here, and I'm truly here. And this Peet's is definitely on Google Maps. Here, I'll look it up for you right now:

Oh. That's, um, weird.

Phantom islands and other fun stuff

That said, Ishmael's not entirely wrong about maps not having true places on them. Even at the most stubbornly literal level, not every place on a map is a true place.

You might think I'm gonna start talking about crazy old-timey maps, the ones with swollen representations of an imagined Terra Australis on them, or Atlantises and El Dorados and other what-have-yous. But I'm not. That's bush-league trivia. No---I'm talking about places that made their onto published maps well into the age of the Internet and satellite imagery, despite the fact that these so-called places straight-up do not exist.

For example: Sandy Island, which you may have heard about in 2012, when it was "undiscovered" by an Australian surveyor ship and taken off of Google Maps. According to Wikipedia, the "island" was charted by James Cook in 1774, and, after getting reported again by a whaling vessel in the 19th century, found its way onto standard naval charts. (It's possible the whalers saw floating pumice in the area and mistook it for an island.)

There are several other phantom islands out there, which you're free to read about on Wikipedia.[2] Cartographical untruths aren't limited to sincere mistakes like the case of Sandy Island, though. There are also plenty of little white lies publishers deliberately introduce into their maps for the purposes of copyright protection.

That's right: Rand McNally has been lying to you.

Here's the thing: when it comes to maps, it can be hard to prove copyright infringement. An infringer can just say their map is based on reality, and so of course it's gonna look similar to another map based on reality. To counter this, publishers will introduce minor discrepancies into their maps: for instance, they might invent a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, or a nonexistent street in a city. These so-called paper towns[4] and trap streets are intended to help publishers catch copyright violators in the act; anyone who accidentally copies a fictitious town or street onto their own map will have a hard time explaining to the law how it got there.

And then there are paper streets, which aren't necessarily copyright traps, but are instead accidental holdovers from city planning documents representing streets that were once planned, but never actually laid down.

The moral of the story: maps are terrible, terrible lies, and you should never trust a single one of them.

Some recommendations

If you're at all interested in geographical oddities and places that resist conventional definition, I'd highly recommend checking out the book Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett. It is, essentially, a book of short essays, each one exploring a spot on the earth that somehow stretches or defies our traditional notion of place. It's a fascinating survey, and one of my favorite nonfiction books in recent memory.

And if any of that sounds at all interesting to you, definitely check out Atlas Obscura if you haven't already.

What about the rest of the chapter?

Oh, yeah. I guess we've only really talked about the first two sentences so far.

Oh well. I'll get to the Queequeg stuff in the next post. (I assume.)

Word of the Day: ignominy (try using it in an email!)

Ishmael's Current Mood: paper thin 📃

[1]: You too, geographers! Don't think you're off the hook!

[2]: And don't forget vanishing islands, caused by tidal phenomena (or, if you're a medieval sailor, cyptozoological beasts like the aspidochelone).[3]:

[3]: Before you click any of these links, however, make sure you don't have any important appointments coming up, because it make for one hell of a Wiki rathole, believe you me.

Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.