In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

When the American writer Herman Melville shipped out on a whale-hunting ship named the Acushnet in 1841, there was a black man aboard named John Backus who was famous for having once leapt out of a chase boat in panic. His fellow crew members had to suspend the hunt to save him. Acushnet means “peaceful resting place by the water” in Wampanoag, but in reality, each whale ship was its own brutal world. The industry killed men by the score, captains were often deranged sadists, and crew members would jump overboard at the first sight of land. Melville himself abandoned ship in the Marquesas Islands and was captured by cannibals, who held him for four months before giving him up to an Australian whaler. John Backus is thought to be the basis for a character named Pippin in Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick. Pip, as he is called, is a young black man who serves as cabin boy on the fictional whaleship the Pequod. One day, Pip is pressed into service on a chase boat, but as soon as a whale has been harpooned, Pip panics and jumps overboard. The harpooner, a man named Stubb, is forced to cut the line—and lose the whale—so that Pip won’t die. He warns Pip, however, that next time he will choose the whale.