{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03453169347209082, 'fraction_numerical': 0.008514664143803218, 'mean_word_length': 4.941011235955056, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 1, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
"Thickly Studded Oriental Archipelagoes": Figuring the Indian and Pacific Oceans in Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick is often associated with the Pacific Ocean. Rob Wilson’s recent statement that “Moby-Dick represented Melville’s self-dividing national quest . . . as an erratic, self-dividing encounter with the Pacific island peoples and the ocean itself” (Wilson 84) exemplifies how routine and essential this association is. Recent scholarship from very different perspectives—ranging from Yunte Huang’s East Asia-situated analysis to the Australasia and Polynesian approaches of Jonathan Lamb and Paul Giles, as well as earlier work by T. Walter Herbert—has ramified the Pacific context of the novel. This scholarship has transmuted the text’s Pacific connections from a singularized association with Manifest Destiny and US westward movement to a more pluralistic encounter with Pacific archipelagoes and littorals. This Pacific orientation in Melville studies is only fitting. One of Melville’s major sources, Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s 1839 article “Mocha Dick,” is subtitled “The White Whale of the Pacific,” and Melville retained the setting, staging the climactic chase of the whale in the Pacific Ocean. Moby-Dick plays an undeniable key role in the canon of Pacific literature. But, in fact, most of the voyage of the Pequod takes place in the Indian Ocean, not the Pacific. For that matter, the novel’s chase occurs in the North Pacific, near Japan. Unlike the classic whaling-ship trajectory (undertaken, for instance, in 1820 by the doomed Essex, long seen as the chief nautical inspiration for Melville’s text, or in 1841 by the Acushnet, Melville’s first whaler), the fictional Pequod does not go west around Cape Horn. This last point is the crux: readers in Melville’s day and ours would no doubt assume the ship would go around Cape Horn as part of its voyage, thus travelling exclusively in oceans—the Atlantic and the Pacific—abutted by at some point by the United States as it existed in 1851. A westward journey may indeed have been part of Melville’s original plan. As George R. Stewart points out in his