Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of "Moby-Dick"

Description

Although Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the “best book ever written about nature,” and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael’s sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville’s novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow’s nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab’s and Ishmael’s worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab’s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees. Contents Introduction 1 | Herman Melville: Whaleman, Author, Natural Philosopher 2 | Numerous Fish Documents 3 | Cetology and Evolution 4 | White Whales and Natural Theology 5 | Whale Migration 6 | Wind 7 | Gulls, Sea-Ravens,and Albatrosses 8 | Small Harmless Fish 9 | Phosphorescence 10 | Sword-Fish and Lively Grounds 11 | Brit and Baleen 12 | Giant Squid 13 | Sharks 14 | Fresh Fare 15 | Barnacles and Sea Candies 16 | Practical Cetology: Spout, Senses, and the Dissection of Heads 17 | Whale and Human Intelligence 18 | Ambergris 19 | Coral Insects 20 | Grandissimus 21 | Whale Skeletons and Fossils 22 | Does the Whale Diminish? 23 | Mother Carey’s Chickens 24 | Typhoons and Corpusants 25 | Navigation 26 | Seals 27 | The Feminine Air 28 | Noiseless Nautilus 29 | Sperm Whale Behavior 30 | Sky-Hawk 31 | Ishmael: Blue Environmentalist and Climate Refugee Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Figure Credits and Notes Index