Hobbes, Locke, and Jefferson opted for a social contract to avoid the savagery of nature.  (Post Eleven – PRO CHOICE).  The whaling men of the 19th century opted for their own social contract to survive at sea.

To fulfill a class requirement in university, I wrote an un-insightful paper on the gams in Moby-Dick.  “You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word.”  (Melville 260). A gam is a “a social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.” (Melville 260). The purpose of a gam is friendly exchanges.

The whaling business in the nineteenth century was vicious and lawless– a life that was nasty, brutish, and short– and gams were one of few examples of cooperation among otherwise adverse, competitive, commercial interests.  The whaling men entered a social contract to deliver mail, trade supplies, and learn the location of pods of whales, peaceably.

I chose the topic because it was manageable (nine gams) in an otherwise unmanageable novel (600 pages). I had no idea of a gam until I read Moby-Dick— chapter 53. (Melville 258).

Herman Meville published Moby-Dick in 1851.  It is an epic about a whaling quest, led by a monomaniacal Captain Ahab to kill the white whale, Moby-Dick.  Ahab has lost a leg in a previous encounter with Moby-Dick, and he seeks revenge at all cost.

Ahab commands the whaler Pequod and a crew, including Stubb (Second Mate), Queequeg (harpooneer), and Ishmael (oarsman).  Ishmael is the narrator of the novel and famous for the first line: “CALL ME ISHMAEL.”  (Melville 21).

The novel addresses everything from the details of seamanship, cetology, whale hunting and butchery, as well as broad philosophical and religious themes.  One can deconstruct the text variously, including by parsing its choice architecture.

This perspective might seem odd since a sailor enlisting for a whaling voyage cedes all agency to the captain, and Ahab does not allow any deviance from his monomaniacal quest.  But eliminating options is still a form of choice architecture.

“Choice architect” and “choice architecture” are terms coined by professors Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein in Nudge, and “[a] choice architect has the responsibility of organizing the context in which people make decisions”.  (Thaler and Sunstein 3).

Like the term “gam”, I did not know the term “monkey-rope” until I read Moby-Dick— Chapter 72– and I certainly did not think of it as choice architecture.  (Melville 340). 

A monkey-rope is a safety rope secured around a sailor’s waist when he is working over the side of a ship, and it eliminates options, or as Ishmael says:

. . . from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his waist.

     It was a humorously perilous business for both of us.  For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one.  (Melville 340).

Whaling requires finding a whale, killing it, butchering it, and hauling its products back to port.  All activities are dangerous, and the monkey-rope is essential to the “tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale” and occurs with the dead whale fastened alongside the ship.  (Melville 340).  In many cases:

. . . circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing and stripping operation is concluded.  The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon.  So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him.  (Melville 340).

During this entire process:

. . . the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow from the carcase—the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.  (Melville 341).

All whaling crews use the monkey-rope, but Stubb on the Pequod is a choice architect, improving its design:

The “monkey-rope” is found in all whalers; but it is only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together.  This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford the imperiled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.  (Melville 341).

Ishmael succumbs to Stubb’s choice architecture:

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.  (Melville 341).

Because he relinqhishes his free will for the good of the mission, Ishmael is forced to make the right decision– protecting Queequeg from harm.  If Queequeg falls or if sharks attack him, Ishmael will suffer:

So that for better or worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake.”  (Melville 341).

Stubb’s design has the elements of choice architecture: a default position that Ishmael has to adopt (Thaler and Sunstein 83), feedback that tells Ishmael immediately when he has to act to save Queequeg (Thaler and Sunstein 90), and a strong incentive to stay alive. (Thaler and Sunstein 97).

Ishmael and Queequeg do not negotiate the terms of their relationship in a usual contractual way– at “arms length”, as equals, with full knowledge– they are forced into an architecture that allows no outcome other than mission success; they are lashed to it. They can opt out, in the sense that one could cut the rope, refuse the work, quit the ship, but the cost of opting out is immediate, social, and possibly fatal.  It preserves agency in theory while making cooperation the only sane path in practice.

We pretend agreements begin with signatures and end with remedies, but on the Pequod, the agreement is based on the design of the task.

I. Librarian

Works Cited:

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Introduction by Larzer Ziff, Everyman’s Library, 1988.

Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press, 2008.

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Post Eleven – PRO CHOICE