I wanted to start by adding some important context for understanding Ishmael and Queequeg's friendship, which closely resembled a bond that Melville himself experienced in his travels around the South Pacific. This note comes from the Hendricks House edition of the Moby-Dick, probably the most heavily annotated version of the book (and now long out of print). In short, the particular type of friendship has roots not only in the typical pairing between two men on long sailing voyages, but also a Polynesian custom that Melville encountered on the Marquesas Islands during his own whaling voyages. Add to this some inspiration from both ancient and contemporary literary friendships that Melville had read about, and you have Ishmael and Queequeg.

With the added quality of boyish emotion, the relation between the author and Toby in Typee or between the narrator and Harry Bolton in Redburn was the same "chummying among sailors" as that which Melville defined between Taji and Jarl in Mardi, chap. 3, as "a Fidus-Achates-ship, a league of offense and defense." Queequeg and Ishmael were distinguished from these earlier pairs of friends by ceremonial coloring of the relationship which Melville introduced for symbolical purposes. The germ of the idea probably came from the Polynesian custom of "tayos," for Omoo, chap. 39, gave some account of these "extravagant friendships, unsurpassed by the story of Damon and Pythias: in truth, much more wonderful; for, notwithstanding the devotion— even of life in some cases—to which they led, they were frequently entertained at first sight for some stranger from another island." But what Melville said of himself as "Poky's 'tayo karhowree nuee,' or his particular white friend" included no mention of ceremony; indeed, he seems to have received casually Poky's attentions. The idea for the more serious two-sided relation between Queequeg and Ishmael may have been strengthened and given form by some of the books Melville read. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., in Two Years Before the Mast described his adoption by the Sandwich Islander Hope in the hide house in San Diego, chap. 19: "Every Kanaka has one particular friend, whom he considers himself bound to do everything for, and with whom he has a sort of contract,— an alliance offensive and defensive,— and for whom he will often make the greatest sacrifices. This friend they call aikane; and for such did Hope adopt me. I do not believe I could have wanted anything he had, that he would not have given me. In return for this, I was his friend among the Americans, and used to teach him letters and numbers; for he left home before he had learned how to read. Later, in chaps. 28, 29, Dana told of nursing Hope through a severe illness. The similar institution of "brotherhood" among American Indians George H. Colton dealt with in describing the friendship of Moray and the Huron O-wa-o-la in Tecumseh (1842), Cantos 7 and 9. An incident of about 1773 in the life of the famous Indian chief, William L. Stone recounted in Life of Joseph Brant—Thayendanegea, chap. 1: "In compliance with an Indian custom, he selected a bosom friend in the person of a Lieutenant Provost, a half-pay officer residing in the Mohawk Valley. Those unacquainted with Indian usages are not probably aware of the intimacy, or the importance attached to this relationship. The selected friend is in fact, the counterpart of the one who chooses him, and the attachment often becomes romantic; they share each other's secrets, and are participants in each other's joys and sorrows. [...] Thomas Hope's Anastasius, Vol. chap. (Vol. pp. 107-108 of the edition Melville acquired in London 1849—Sealts, No. 282) testified to the survival into modern times the ancient custom in recounting how Anastasius and another young Greek, Anagnosti, incarcerated in the Constantinople Bagnio at the same time, submitted themselves to "the solemn ceremony, which, our church, unites two friends of either sex in the face of the altar solemn vows, gives them the endearing appellation of brothers or sisters, and imposes on them the sacred obligation to stand by each other in life and in death." [...] He enveloped us in the sacred veil, symbol of the holy ties we contracted; and made us swear on our knees, in the face of Heaven, to share together like brothers, while we breathed, both good and adverse fortune." [...] Ishmael was for Queequeg... "a bosom friend," tied to him, as Dana to the Kanaka Hope, in "an alliance offensive and defensive," but the interracial amity was further the symbol of what Hawthorne called in Ethan Brand "the magnetic chain of humanity" in universal extension. For this friendship Melville found further sanction in the book he called on p. 422 "the fine hammered steel of woe"; see Ecclesiastes iv, 9-11: "Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?"

As to the contemporary public perception of their relationship as described in the book, literary critic Harold Bloom emphasized the still very taboo "insistent matrimonial imagery" between two races over the unspeakable sexual connotations between two men, "which his public would not dare interpret as homosexual."

The insistent matrimonial imagery describing Ishmael’s budding friendship with his new bedfellow has drawn much comment, both for its homosexual and its racial overtones. Whatever sexual predilections it may indicate in Melville, he knew he could get away with dramatizing a happy interracial marriage by disguising it as a male comradeship which his public would not dare interpret as homosexual. The crucial fact about Melville’s imagery, after all, is that it elevates the taboo relationship between a white and a nonwhite to the plane of a legal marriage between equals—and a love marriage at that. Except when Ishmael, under the influence of his “unwarrantable prejudices,” worries about having a strange harpooneer “tumble in upon me at midnight” with no way of knowing “from what vile hole he had been coming”, Melville’s jokes about the relationship are never merely bawdy. On the contrary, Ishmael and Queequeg consummate their friendship in the landlord’s own conjugal bed, where their union issues in a “hatchet-faced baby” (Queequeg’s tomahawk-calumet); Queequeg holds Ishmael in a “bridegroom clasp ... as though naught but death should part us twain” (which indeed proves to be the case); Queequeg pronounces himself “married” to Ishmael, according to “his country’s phrase”; Queequeg and Ishmael lie abed chatting in their “hearts’ honeymoon” like “some old couples”; and Ishmael at last sees “how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.”