"A Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo": The Strange Saga of Steelkilt in Moby-Dick

Abstract:This article foregrounds and explores the character of Steelkilt, a lake mariner from Buffalo, New York. Steelkilt takes center stage in Herman Melville's "The Town-Ho's Story," a stand-alone narrative that later appeared as the fifty-fourth chapter of Moby-Dick (1851). Though he has rarely been discussed in depth by critics or scholars, Steelkilt is many important things at once: a representative of a Great Lakes region that was still considered semi-wild at the time of Moby-Dick's publication, a bizarre vessel of violence and brutality, and a troubling symbol of nineteenth-century empire-building and global capital. Through textual analysis and a series of detailed examinations of the character's cultural and geographical milieus, this article sheds light on an obscure but vital corner of Melville's corpus.