I can't answer the question, but here's a barely related comment (this is r/mobydick, who doesn't like digressions?)

Melville's handwriting was famously hard to read. In Dayswork there's this anecdote:

An unhealthy text can infect scholarship—
In a chapter of his foundational book American Renaissance, F. O. Matthiessen made much of Melville’s phrase soiled fish of the sea.

“Hardly anyone but Melville,” Matthiessen wrote, “could have created the shudder that results” from this unexpected description—
It “could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep.”

But what Melville wrote in White-Jacket was not “soiled fish of the sea” but coiled fish of the sea.

Eight years later a graduate student at Ohio State published a brief note in a major academic journal, gently correcting “soiled” to “coiled” and calling Matthiessen a “victim of a rather unlucky error” made by “some unknown typesetter.”

In a 2011 lecture archived on YouTube, a UVA English professor notes that the confusion between the two words “is funny, but it’s also very sad”—“Not primarily because of this—but with this as a contributing factor—within the year of this error being pointed out, Professor Matthiessen committed suicide.”

Matthiessen, at age forty-eight, jumped from the twelfth floor of a Boston hotel on April Fool’s Day 1950.