Ceci fait suite à "Open questions about a journalistic enigma" mis en ligne le 26 mars dernier.
http://europe-tigre.over-blog.com/2021/03/open-questions-about-a-journalistic-enigma.html
Malgré les efforts et la précieuse diligence de collaboratrices régulières du Chicago Tribune (Nancy Moreland) et du Detroit Free Press (Ellen Creager) avec lesquelles j'ai pu échanger à la fin du mois d'août dernier, il n'a pas été possible de tirer des conclusions claires et définitives sur l'étrange article publié le même jour (3 avril 1892) par les 2 journaux, sous des titres différents.
Constatons que les 7 navires baleiniers dont les noms sont mentionnés, ainsi que les 2 innommés, sont manifestement tous fictifs, ce qu'avait indiqué Wilson Heflin dans sa thèse de 1952 : « Wilson Heflin, in his Ph. D. dissertation « Herman Melville's whaling years » (Vanderbilt 1952, pages 201-206), brands the story as fiction because ALL the ships mentioned in it (7 named + 2 unnamed) were fictitious." Et ce que m'a confirmé Mark Procknik, responsable des archives de la bibliothèque du New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Notons aussi que l'article est publié quelques mois après le décès d'Herman Melville (28 septembre 1891), et que son roman "Moby-Dick", après la destruction des exemplaires existants dans l'incendie de 1853, n'a pas été seulement réimprimé à dose très homéopatique à l'occasion de la mort de l'auteur, puis plus largement à partir de la fin des années 1910 ...
https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0728-melville-baltimore-20190726-7o4yuxnmujg4zmotjrawwkxmny-story.html?fbclid=IwAR2fhg-jguQwrp3l7j2Z71qnY0OoHysv9w748VHRB9JSpmp2et3gR3oDRH8
... mais dès 1871, comme indiqué dans la Revue de la collection des oeuvres picturales du New Bedford Whaling Museum :
Title: “Moby Dick swam swiftly round and round the wrecked crew.” Artist: Isaac Walton Taber (1857-1933). American (New Bedford and New York) Signed / Dated: Signed I.W. Taber. 1899.
Original for the frontispiece of the Scribners’ edition of Moby Dick (New York, 1899 and 1902), illustrating the passage quoted. Isaac W. Taber, a native of New Bedford, had been trained at Cooper Union and a year or two earlier had done the illustrations for the first American editions of Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous and Frank C. Bullen’s whaling narrative, The Cruise of the Cachalot. The mere existence of the twice-printed Scribners’ edition (and especially that there even was a second printing), and the fact that the publishers commissioned one of the leading illustrators of his generation to do the pictures, constitutes compelling proof that the common contention is erroneous that Moby Dick had fallen into dark obscurity during Melville’s lifetime and did not have any appreciable sales or readership until the groundswell of interest occasioned by the Melville centenary in 1919. Harper’s had already published a new printing in 1871 (from the original plates of 1851), and it may have been the recent popularity of Bullen’s Cruise of the Cachalot (1897) that influenced Scribners’ to produce a new edition of Moby Dick.
https://www.whalingmuseum.org/sites/default/files/KWM-NB%20Paintings%202013.pdf
L'auteur de l'article a donc pu largement s'inspirer du roman, contrairement à mon hypothèse initiale. Celui- ci est peut-être Marcus Wilson Jernegan, professeur d'Université à Chicago, historien de l'activité baleinière américaine, dont l'enfance avait été bercée par les récits légendaires de son père baleinier, et qui peut avoir "commis" cette fiction à l'âge de 20 ans, sous la forme, comme évoqué le 26 mars dernier, d'une "Untitled note", qui aurait ensuite été détournée radicalement dans son orientation fondamentale (peut -être à la demande d'un patron de presse lié à l'industrie de la chasse à la baleine franche arctique) par l'ajout d'un titre, d'une introduction et d'une conclusion à visée très "politique"... Marcus Wilson Jernegan (1872–1949) was an American historian and a professor at the University of Chicago. In 2017, a scholar from Harvard (Donald Yacovone) referred to him as one of the leading historians of his time who influenced textbooks of his era and noted the tainted and bigoted sources he relied on. He was from Edgartown, Massachusetts, and graduated as valedictorian of Edgartown High School. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1906. His father was a whaler and his brother, Prescott Jernegan, became infamous as the promoter of the fraudulent Jernegan Process for extracting gold from seawater.
Books :
A Child’s Diary Aboard a Whale-ship (edited version of his sister's diaries)
The History of the Whaling Industry
Il échangera en 1937 avec Amos Smalley, qui avait harponné un grand cachalot blanc au larges des Açores en 1902, ce qui fut une révélation pour ce dernier...
Page 170, in : The Weight of all Flesh : on the Subject-matter of Political Economy. Eric L. Santner, with commentaries of Bonnie Honig, Peter Eli Gordon, Hent de Vries. Edited by Kevis Goodman. The Berkeley Tanner Lectures. Oxford University Press. 2016. Chapter written by Bonnie Honig, 131-182 : « Charged : Debt, Power and the Politics of the Flesh in Shakespeare's Merchant, Melville's Moby-Dick, and Eric Santner's The Weight of all Flesh »
« In 1902, [Amos] Smalley, a Native American born in Gayhead, Massachussets, and working out of New Bedford, killed a white whale. From Paintings in NB Museum : Title: Bark Platina of Westport. Artist: George M. Hathaway (1852-1903). American (Portland, Maine) Signed / Dated: Signed Hathaway. Undated. The artist, a native of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, had his studio at Portland, Maine, and is known for marine paintings and scenes of the Maine coast.
Amos Smalley only found out 35 years later, when he was interviewed by a history professor named Marcus Jernegan, about « the story that whalers used to tell some fifty years before my time, of a white sperm whale that raged around the Pacific ocean and was more ferocious than anything ever met on land or sea »...
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