Dive Deeper by Cotkin George;

Author:Cotkin, George;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2012-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 81

The Pequod Meets the Virgin

THE VIRGIN OFFERS SOMETHING TO THE PEQUOD

In his wildest fantasies, Melville would have been unable to conjure up that his character Starbuck would achieve worldwide renown as the name for an immensely successful chain of coffee shops.

It is an odd name for the store. Starbuck is steady and moral, but he is unable to summon up a sufficiently strong brew of will to defy Ahab’s mad plan. All we know about Starbuck is that he risks danger in pursuit of his profession, that he has a wife and family back on Nantucket, that his last name is common on the island, that he is a fine first mate, and that he does not—at least within the confines of the novel—drink a single cup of coffee.

The only connection between Starbuck and coffee occurs in this chapter. The mates of the Pequod wonder what the captain of the Virgin is waving in his hands. “[It’s] a lamp-feeder,” opines Starbuck. No, replies Stubb, “it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he’s coming off to make us our coffee.” Flask finally resolves the question in Starbuck’s favor. He carries no coffee pot, but forever will Starbuck and coffee be intimately associated in the public mind.

Certainly more than this mere drip is responsible for Starbuck’s name coming to grace coffee shops around the world. Accounts differ, but the first Starbucks opened in 1971 in the Pike Place Market in Seattle. It was the brainchild of Jerry Baldwin, an English teacher, Zev Siegl, a history teacher, and a writer named Gordon Bowker. Apparently, Bowker wanted to name the shop Pequods, after the ship. An odd choice, in its own right, since the Pequot was an Eastern Indian tribe nearly wiped out in battles between 1634 and 1638; many of those not killed were sold into slavery in the Bahamas Islands (see chapter 16). Terry Heckler, a creative partner, thought it a poor choice, less for historical than for linguistic reasons: “No one’s going to drink a cup of Pee-quod.” Probably right.

Bowker and Heckler went back to the drawing board. Might they name it after a mining camp that had been on Mount Rainier in the early twentieth century, called Starbo? The result, an amalgamation, became Starbucks. Howard Schultz, who came aboard the Starbucks company ship in 1982 and oversaw its expansion to over 16,000 shops in 49 countries, maintains that the original name is drawn from the novel, perhaps because he thinks it bequeaths the brew a more literary pedigree.

Why not, then, have called the first café The Gam, a place where persons or ships, passing alongside one another, share a cup of coffee? Or would the order, a “double gam,” sound strange? There are many seafood restaurants known as Moby Dick’s, as well as the gay bar in San Francisco that goes by that name. Would getting a double espresso at Moby Dick’s have sounded better than one at Starbucks?

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