Meaning of 'recondite' in this passage?

[Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker]

From “Moby Dick,” Chapter 105:

But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

From Merriam-Webster:

1: hidden from sight : concealed

2: difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend : deep

3: of, relating to, or dealing with something little known or obscure

I understand what Melville is saying, but I’m not sure what he means by the ‘recondite’ Nantucketers. The normal definitions seem to imply it referring to concepts, as opposed to people. Except maybe #1, and Melville is using it to describe how remote Nantucket is.

[MikeS]

The OED also lists the meaning: “2c. Retiring; avoiding notice. Now rare.” This seems closer to the meaning in the excerpt.

[Colibri]

I would read it as Melville using it in a sense closest to number 2: The Nantucketers who believe this are the ones who themselves are “deep,” and capable of more abstract thought. (Admittedly the direct sense would be that the Nantucketers themselves are difficult to understand. However, I don’t think it’s too much of an extension for Melville to use it for those who are capable of understanding difficult things.)

[LSLGuy]

“Nantucketers” refers to people who live in Nantucket. Reading between the lines, he’s probably talking about whaling industry folks.

“Recondite” means, among other things, thoughtful or insightful.

Try this: “The more recondite pundits observe that global warming will have significant adverse effects. The totally un-recondite shout ‘drill, baby, drill!’ from their speeding SUVs.”

Melville is making the same sort of statement about whaling. e.g.

“The typical industry booster builds ever bigger and more effective ships and sends them ever farther afield to hunt ever more whales. The more thoughtful observers question how much longer this can go on before we hunt the whales to extinction.”

[tapu]

Good contextual analysis. I’d agree–though I didn’t think of it–that “Nantucketers” here is metonymy for “whalers.” Nice, LSLguy.

[Ignotus]

Wiktionary is a good place to start.

Among other meanings, it suggests: Recondite

(as a general term, somewhat archaic ; as a term in botany and entomology, obscure, rare) **Hidden or removed from view **

Ockam likes this…

[Ignotus]

Actually, what he wants to say is this:

Those back-in -the-woods Nantucketeers, they have this feeling that we’re gonna exterminate those whales. But never mind! There’s gazillions of them…

[bob_2]

After reading the whole passage, and looking here I think that Melville intended to refer to the Nantucketers as profound.

They are predicting the extinction of a species, long before most people concerned themselves with such things. He says “forty men hunting the sperm whale for 48 months consider that they have done well if they bring home the oil of 40 fish [sic]” and cannot believe that they will have the same impact on the whale population that settlers in had on the Buffalo in Illinois and Missouri.

[Nava]

@Ignotus

Wiktionary is a good place to start.

Among other meanings, it suggests: Recondite

(as a general term, somewhat archaic ; as a term in botany and entomology, obscure, rare) **Hidden or removed from view **

Ockam likes this…

Which actually matches m-w’s first definition. My first thought reading the passage jumped to ho people use “backwoods” to combine “someone who lives away from Polite Society and doesn’t much care for it nor it for them” with “backwards”.

[Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker]

Thanks for all the input.

[Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker]

OK, bumping this. . .

Melville uses the word in one other place, in Chapter 94 (“The *Squeeze of the Hand”), where he’s talking about various obscure whale by-products, then invites the reader to journey down to the ‘blubber-room’ where a lot of the harvesting takes place.

But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.

In this case, it could possibly refer to either #1 or #2. Either would work.
*Which contains this juicy line:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. . . .