Extraction in the Blue Humanities: Moby-Dick
As stated in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word extraction originates from the Latin
root “extrahere” which means “to draw out”. The prefix“ex-” means “out” while “-trahere”
means “to draw”. Initially the term carried connotations of physical removal, such as pulling an
object from its source. Over time, the meaning of “extract” or “extraction” has expanded to
include broader applications like the removal of substances, people, or abstract elements from
their contexts. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “extraction” had also come to signify
genealogical descent, linking it to ideas of origin and identity, as well as the often violent
extraction and dislocation of peoples through colonialism and slavery.
Another definition of extraction or extractivist, can be found in Christopher D. Foley’s
article, “From Culture Hero to Emissions Zero: Critiquing Maui’s Extractivist Mindset in
Disney’s Moana” and can be defined as the act of mining or taking something for personal gain
while causing harm to the originating source or bodies (166). This can be seen in the film Moana
as overfishing, soil nutrient depletion, and the character “Maui” taking the heart of Tefiti, a
mineral-like gem. Similarly, in our own world we can see the same issues along with fracking,
labor, gases, water, and much more for the industries surrounding oil, food, technology, and
petroleum/gas based products.
Extraction in literature can refer to the act of drawing out meanings, themes, or elements
from a text, which highlights the oceanic interplay between surface readings and deeper, often
hidden layers of significance. It can also refer to analyzing how texts “extract” and
recontextualize cultural, historical, or personal experiences to create new narratives or
perspectives. Extracts in literature also apply to the critical practice of uncovering and
interpreting marginalized voices and ideas embedded within dominant narratives; the process
similar to mining the text for overlooked or suppressed elements. Metaphorically, “extraction”
helps reflect how literature might echo broader societal processes, such as the exploitation of
resources or the removal of individuals or communities from their origins, linking textual
analysis with real-world implications of displacement, appropriation, or transformation.
In the context of the Blue Humanities and its literature, “extraction” pertains to the
human relationship with the ocean and its resources. It can signify the removal of marine
resources like fish, minerals, and fossil fuels from the ocean, reflecting themes of ecological
exploitation and environmental degradation. Moving beyond its physical implications, extraction
also explores the cultural and narrative processes of taking stories, knowledge, and meanings
from the sea. This includes the way literature and art draw from oceanic motifs to shape identity,
memory, and connection to the natural world. Extraction in this area can also highlight the
violence of colonial and capitalist systems that commodify the ocean and its inhabitants,
disrupting ecosystems and communities that depend on marine environments. In the Blue
Humanities, the concept of “extraction” encourages critical reflection on how human practices of
taking from the sea are mirrored in the ways we construct, consume, and interpret oceanic
narratives.
For reference, “The emergence of the blue humanities is a belated recognition of the close
relationship between modern western culture and the sea” as stated in John R. Gillis’ article “The
Blue Humanities” (4). It also “…produced a vast expansion of scientific and humanistic
knowledge of the sea as a three-dimensional living thing with a history, geography, and a life all
its own” (Gillis 5). This is important to understand when looking at the novel Moby-Dick by
Herman Melville as it was one of the first maritime novels that was produced and reflected an
ecological perspective. Looking back in time to the novel, we are now able to assert that not only
does Moby-Dick reflect an ecological approach, but it also demonstrates a sea narrative. A sea
narrative conducts itself across a wide “…variety of modes of cultural production, and explores
both the diverse ways in which the sea has been narrated, and the ways in which the sea has, in
turn, had a demonstrable effect upon- shaped, challenged, reinvented- those narrative modes too”
as stated in Charlotte Matthieson’s chapter “Introduction: The Literature, History and Culture of
the Sea, 1600-Present” in the collection Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–
Present.
Moby-Dick demonstrates itself as a sea narrative through its content which focuses on the
sea and its effects on the characters throughout the novel, but also through the literal from of its
chapters. In “Plunging Into the Atlantic: The Oceanic Order of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick”
by James Weldon Long, he explores how
Throughout Moby-Dick, Melville employs a fluid perspective that approaches
environments from an ocean-based world view, but never collapses them into a totalized
whole. The novel preserves the ocean’s diverse nature by acknowledging- on a textual
level- the environment’s actual fluidity. (71)
Melville exemplifies this in the structure of his novel by starting with the chapters “Etymology”,
“Extracts”, and “Chapter 1: Loomings” which signifies a convoluted and layered start to the
novel, much like that of ocean currents. A current of the ocean doesn’t start in any particular
place but is built from the body of the ocean itself through its different temperatures and
pathways. The word “loomings” is described in Melville’s footnotes as, “Dimly seen land or
ships ahead or even beyond the horizon” which gives an even greater painting to how the novel
departs from a land-based point of view and embraces and negotiates a new spatial oceanic
environment that allows country borders to cross via its citizens on the ship and create an
interwoven spherical web of relationships, community, and identity that reflects the
semiospheres of the ocean (Melville 16) (Long 72). Its critical to establish Moby-Dick as part of
the Blue Humanities because then we deepen our exploration of extraction taking place in the
novel through its semiospheres and how it can serve as a mirror to the colonial capitalistic
violence happening on land against Indigenous peoples; through the extraction of bodies, the
extraction of ecosystems, and the extraction of cultures.
The meanings of the word “extraction” as both physical and metaphorical acts are seen in
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The true first words of the novel are “Etymology”, and
embedded within this chapter is the discussion of the word “Whale” that focuses on the
extraction of the letter “h”. Melville writes, “While you take in hand to school others, and to
teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through
ignorance, the letter H, which is almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you
deliver that which is not true” (6). Here, Melville recognizes the effects and implications of
extraction that eventually lead to the transformation or fragmentation of the originating source or
body. The second chapter, “Extracts” speaks further to his understanding of extraction as it
contains extracted quotes from a range of different novels, biblical texts, and narratives. These
quotes also speak to the acts of removal, collection, and repurposing in the novel’s story. There
are multiple ways to explore this term in the novel, included but not limited to: the
commodification of whales, the exploitation of the ocean, and the colonization of natural and
cultural spaces. These themes echo the violent histories of resource extraction in, from, and
around the ocean.
The concept of extracting bodies is obvious as the novel itself revolves around the
whaling industry and exemplifies extraction in its most literal form. Whalers sail across oceans to
hunt whales, killing them to harvest oil, bone, and other resources for industrial and commercial
purposes. Whale oil lighted lamps in homes, streetlamps, was used for lubrication for
instruments, explosives, soaps, and in different textiles. Whalebone, or baleen, were used to
stiffen corsets for Western style dresses and for many other pieces of fashion and tools. These
commodities primarily benefitted white European and American consumers, highlighting the
racialized and hierarchal dynamics of the capitalistic industry at the time. The whale was reduced
to an object, its body dismantled and repurposed to fuel the capitalistic desires of the nineteenth
century.
The pursuit of knowledge at the expense of a living creature is also thoroughly
exemplified throughout Moby-Dick, especially by the Cetology chapters and by “Chapter 74: The
Sperm Whale’s Head- Contrasted View”. In this chapter, Melville (or Ishmael) writes,
Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay
together our own. Of the grand order of folio of Leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the
Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted
by man… As the external difference between them is mainly observable in their heads;
and as each is this moment hanging from the Pequod’s side; and as we may freely go
from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:-where, I should like to know,
will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here? (250)
Ishmael is greatly impassioned by gathering knowledge of the Whale throughout the novel and
this excerpt, or extraction of the text if you will, demonstrates his Western scientific mode of
conceptualizing, evaluating, and taking that knowledge from the act of extracting the whales’
bodies from the ocean, dismembering their bodies, and then studying them as separate parts of a
inseparable whole.
Moving to the extraction of ecosystems, the ocean itself has become a site of conquest,
mirroring the colonial practices of land-based extraction. Much like the colonization of the
Americas, whaling reflects the American notion of Manifest Destiny, where natural resources
and environments are seen as boundless frontiers for exploration, claiming, and also “…used to
validate continental acquisitions…” (Heidler, Heidler). Gillis states, “The sea gravitated to the
center of western collective consciousness….For Joseph Conrad, who despised what had
happened to land in the industrial age, the sea was the only viable alternative” (9). The
consumption and decomposition of land on the American continent through Manifest Destiny
ultimately lead to the unsustainable commodification of it and pointed towards the only frontier
left largely undiscovered which were the oceans.
Just as the U.S stripped the North American continent of many of its natural resources
and commodified them like the buffalo, which was, “…much more than an important historical
source of food to the Northern Plains Native Nations. Tribal histories, cultures, traditions, and
spiritual lives all connected deeply to the buffalo in a reciprocal relationship” according to the
article “Taking Informed Action: Inter Tribal Buffalo Council” from the Smithsonian: National
Museum of the American Indian- Native Knowledge 360. Similar to this, the whaling industry at
the time of the nineteenth century, stripped the ocean of the whale as a resource without any
regard for the ecological consequences and embodied a utilitarian mindset that prioritizes profit
over preservation. Even Ishmael compares the whale to the buffalo in “Chapter 105: Does the
Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?” and says that man hunted the buffalo to
extinction and the same could be said about the whale (338). However, after his lengthy
argument and counterarguments in the chapter, he comes to the conclusion after comparing the
whale to elephants in the East and says,
And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted
for thousands of years…if they still survive there in great numbers, much more may the
great whale outlast all hunting…Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale
immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. (Melville 339)
After mentioning hunting the buffalo for its uses and its American wildness and after talking
about the elephants that have been hunted (and are presently an endangered species), he comes to
the conclusion that the whale will not be endangered or go extinct because he uses of the
vastness of the ocean as an excuse for hiding their boundless population.
Gillis again states that “The sea became a mirror that landlubbers used to reflect on their
own condition…. ‘We have a fine sea’, declared Charles Dickens, ‘wholesome for all people;
profitable for the body, profitable for the mind’” (9). In Moby-Dick, the ocean represents a new
frontier for Manifest Destiny, like the North American continent was. Just as the westward
expansion was seen as a never-ending opportunity-filled journey, the ocean is framed as an
inexhaustible resource whose vastness and mysteriousness justifies the relentless pursuit of
profit. This ideology persists in contemporary practices such as deep-sea mining and offshore
drilling, where the ocean continues to be exploited for oil, minerals, food, and other resources.
These practices echo the extractavist mindset in Moby-Dick, where the consequences of
extraction are largely ignored in favor of commercial success.
The extraction of cultures is also apparent throughout the novel. There are two central
indigenous characters in this novel, Tashtego and Queequeg. Tashtego is “…an unmixed Indian
from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the
last remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of
Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers” (Melville 100). Tashtego is one of the
most skilled harpooneers on the ship and at the time of the Pequod sinking, he is the one to climb
the masthead and nail the flag as it sinks rapidly. Tashtego doesn’t stop hammering in the flag
until he disappears beneath the ocean. Ishmael says,
…while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan
harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea…But as the last whelmings
intermixingly poured themselves over the suncken head of the Indian at the mainmast… –
at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in
the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. (Melville 409)
To have an Indigenous character who’s home area neighbors the Pequot tribe, that which the ship
is named after, is reminiscent of a kind of defiance in the face of an overwhelming force. Not
defiance of death itself, but defiance by existence for one more moment. Tashtego doesn’t stop
hammering in the flag until he disappears beneath the ocean.
Queequeg is an Indigenous character from the fictional island of Kokovoko who has
many elements mixed into his character. He reflects African and Polynesian elements as well as
Maori-like tattooing. From this mix of strands of indigeneity, we are able to interpret his death,
and Ishmael’s survival, in a deeper way that signifies the American colonialist relationship with
Native Americans. Queequeg starts to create his coffin in “Chapter 110: Queequeg in His Coffin”
after a he fights a fever. It is this coffin that Ishmael says,
Many hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and
drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the
twisted tattooing on his body…by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body
a complete theory of the heavens and the earth… (Melville 351)
This is the very coffin that emerged from the sea and saved Ishamel, “…the coffin-buoy shot
lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Bouyed up by that coffin, for almost
one whole day and night…” (Melville 410). The extraction of the coffin from the ocean, an
Indigenous work, used to save Ishmael further develops the theme of extraction in the novel.
The very name of the ship is the “Pequod” which is the name of an Indigenous group of
peoples from the Massachusetts/Connecticut area of the United States. Like many Indigenous
communities in the face of violent colonialism, “…European diseases decimated the Pequot
population. And a series of raids culminating in the Pequot War (1636-1638) pushed the Pequots
to the brink of near extinction” as stated on the “Our History” webpage of the Mashantucket
Pequot Tribal Nation official website. This is similar to the history of the whale in Moby-Dick,
and works as a form of foreshadowing the demise of the ship. However, there were two survivors
of the shipwreck; Ishmael and the white whale, Moby-Dick.
Amid the backdrop of extraction, the white whale, Moby-Dick, emerges as a powerful
symbol of resistance. He is the only whale that actively fights back against the sailors and in
turn, the whaling practice which disrupts the whalers’ attempts to commodify him. On page 147-
148, Ishmael talks about the counter-attacks of Moby-Dick, he writes,
For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of
alarm, he had several times been known to turn around suddenly, and, bearing down upon
them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their
ship…such seemed the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every
dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted
by an unintelligent agent.
Moby-Dick’s defiance challenges the logic of extraction, offering a counter narrative to the
assumption of Manifest Destiny and the complacency of nature for human use. From this view,
the novel can be read as an allegory for the resistance of colonized peoples and exploited
ecosystems. Just as Indigenous peoples resist the colonization of their lands, languages, and
epistemologies, Moby-Dick resists the invasion of his oceanic home and the killing of his
community. The whale’s survival becomes a form of rebellion by existence, a refusal to be
consumed and in turn, erased, by the forces of exploitation.
By tracing the word “extraction” to its Latin root, seeing how its defined in other works,
defined in the Blue Humanities, and exploring its theme in Moby-Dick we are able to see the
connection between colonial capitalist systems and resource extraction in the form of bodies,
ecosystems, and cultures. However, we are also able to see a resistance to the commodification
of extracted bodies and resources by the white whale, Moby-Dick. His survival and defiance
disrupts the whalers enterprise, challenging the notion of complacency in consumption. This
resistance parallels the struggles that Indigenous communities still fight against the colonization
and exploitation of their lands, resources, languages, and cultures. Both the white whale, Moby-
Dick, and Indigenous peoples embody resilience through survival, confronting systems of
extraction and exploitation. Understanding the concept of extraction is crucial for recognizing
the interconnectedness of historical exploitation, environmental degradation, and the ongoing
struggles for justice that reminds the importance of challenging the destructive systems that seek
to commodify, consume, and erase natural resources and peoples.
