One of the lesser-known Philippine references in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) appears in Chapter CXI, “The Pacific.” As the Pequod leaves the waters of East Asia, Melville writes: “When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea.” The “Bashee Isles” are the present-day Batanes Islands of the northern Philippines, whose name derives from basi (or bashee), the traditional sugarcane wine of the Ivatan people that early European visitors associated with the islands.

Melville mentions the Bashee Islands a second time near the end of the novel. Describing Captain Ahab aboard the Pequod, he writes that Ahab “unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles” while consciously breathing “the salt breath of the new found sea.” The passage uses the Bashee Islands as the final point of reference before the ship enters the open Pacific and approaches the Japanese whaling grounds.

These references show that by the mid-nineteenth century the Bashee Islands were sufficiently familiar to English-language readers through maritime navigation and whaling routes to serve as recognizable geographic markers in one of the most important works of American literature.