The Battery (Manhattan)

The Battery is the park and seawall at the southern tip of Manhattan in New York City. In Moby-Dick it is where Ishmael opens his case that everyone is drawn to the sea, pointing at the crowds of water-gazers on the waterfront.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Moby-Dick	Herman Melville	subject	Ishmael’s opening image: crowds of landsmen at the Battery and along the Manhattan wharves, all gazing out to sea.

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Moby-Dick — Herman Melville (1851)

Source: Exploration of Moby Dick · Moby Dick · Original · Readwise highlight

Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.

• Role: subject
• In the book: In Chapter 1 Ishmael describes the ‘insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves’, with the battery at its extreme downtown and ‘crowds of water-gazers there’. He has the reader walk on a Sabbath afternoon from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip and by Whitehall northward, past thousands of landsmen fixed in ocean reveries on the piers, spiles and rigging. He uses the scene to explain his own urge to go whaling.
• Why it matters: It is the book’s opening argument that water draws every mind, and the point Ishmael leaves from for New Bedford. Any port city would serve the logic, but the Manhattan crowd gives it its concrete, everyday form.